Building a Strong Opposition in India

Building a strong Opposition in India, after the main Opposition, the BJP, has started to fall apart for lack of an ideology or strategy and the ruling party seems wedded to globalisation of the economy, has become imperative to underpin a strong democracy. The BJP has run out of steam after its emotive Hindutva programme itself has run out of steam and development has become the core issue for the electorate. With the tight ethos of discipline in the Congress party and a lack of culture of dissent it is very unlikely that a party will be born out of the womb of the Congress as had happened in the past. The Communist Parties are too disunited and given to a belief in a controlled democracy. They seem more on the way out than a national alternative. The Janata experiment is in splinters. What do we do and which way do we turn?

Rajinder Puri, the eminent political thinker, has expressed certain views (The Statesman, January 8/9) on redesigning the Opposition which is falling apart by drawing lessons from the Janata experiment and prescribed the realign-ment of parties according to their centrepetal and centrifugal tendencies. The views are cogent and have an element of truth as far as they go but do not go far enough and call for deeper reflection.

JP’s strategy to build a Janata Party by merging all Opposition parties was only an electoral compulsion to face Mrs Gandhi at short notice not out of love for a two-party system but teach Mrs Gandhi a lesson in accountability. He also had a more distant aim of cross-fertilisation with more progressive ideas curing the sectarianism of communal politics. But this was not to be without a charismatic leader of the stature of JP who was gravely ill with a fatal disease. Under less farseeing leaders the experiment fell apart.

Puri is right that he could only give the Janata Party a body without a soul in haste. A power corrupted soul in a new body could only hasten an early death of the body which it did. JP had borrowed the strategy from Lohia in the election in 1967. But unlike Lohia who was a perpetual election fighter building and rebuilding his party and drawing new men, the best in the political arena, JP gave primacy to reforms which his own party did not act on.

JP trusted to more radical reform of the polity, out of anxiety over how the country had started to slip in character and consensus in its lure for power and corruption was getting institutionalised in the power holders. Indian democracy has been the fastest to go to seed but for the fact that the plurality of its society kept throwing up new contenders for power which put a check on the caprice of the old power holders. Plurality has been both a cause for its survival and its acceptability and a cure for its ills. JP thought of voters’ councils for being guided or guiding democracy by political education and choice of candidates by consensus and a pyramidal structure of power bottom upwards, a refined version of what Gandhi worried—that each caste must not become a political party and narrow impulses should be nipped by power sharing with large numbers.

Gandhi’s prescription was to tie up the political model of change with the economic model so that no room for exploitation was left. Without going as far but impact the world he was living in, JP, though a patron of khadi and village industry, did not explicitly include decentrali-sation of production into his core ideology. His more inclusive ideology related to social and political reform but emphasised a more employ-ment oriented economic model and mode of production.

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There is undoubtedly a hiatus between Indian culture riven by great disparities of wealth and poverty, caste, faith and traditions, and democracy. Indian culture had built round consensus to ward off change that got out of hand. Its rulership, though under scrutiny of well chosen ministers like the present day civil service, was arbitrary, cruel and patriarchal and culturally beyond the subject’s control. The cultural tradition towards the poor was of com-passion but not of struggling against its cause.

Democracy seeks to correct it. But this basic purpose is defeated by the leadership going astray from ideology by stitching varied support from the vote-market out and inside Parliament or Assembly. A more cohesive party or two parties would be ideal for a cohesive society than ours. A plural party structure will suit our variety and make it more durable. A two-party model has the further danger of ideological convergence by each trying to maximise its votes by appeasing all sections as has happened in the USA and UK.

A two- or one-party democracy can become strong only at the crest of a revolution or reaction. It has happened twice in our country in 1977 and in 1980. But coalitions after them have not been such a bad thing except when power is blindly chased and further corrupted No party structure is immune to corruption or decay sooner or later. We must therefore be perpetually on guard by voters and the elite who are not in the power game. The recent rebuke by voters has made the governments more attentive to voters’ needs or farmers’ problems, but has not focused attention back to eradication of poverty except by doubtful means of growth. While social equality has gathered speed by the pressure of the votes of weaker sections, economic inequality has also gone apace by the glamour of globalisation.

Apart from free market economy in preference to a bureaucratic run planned economy, there is strong need to evolve a model in which more assets are created for the poor by land reforms and part social, or deprived asset owners and workers’ ownership in progressing the industrial process and thereby make industrialisation and modernisation more consent based. Parties should divide on the basis of the economic model they will follow. Two of the largest parties will tilt towards globalisation but a third party, more concerned with people’s empowerment, should get together on a federal basis as an alternative to help the poor get out of their cycle of poverty by sharper policies, better implemen-tation and greater vigilance. What good is democracy if it does not feed hungry mouths and what is wrong with autho-ritarianism if it does on the scale of the right to live? This is their legitimate question to us.

In the meantime support for empowerment of the existing grassroot institutions both in quantity and quality must continue and so should the struggle against corruption by a broader front of political and non-political forces and it should also target allurement to consumerism by crafty ads or false statistical blinkering of our people.

The author is the Convener, Lok Paksh,
Patna / Delhi. He can be contacted at e-mail: shankarsharan77@gmail.com