The Fortune Cookie School of Political Analysis
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested
Bonfire of the Vanities ~Tom Wolfe (1988).
It’s incredible how many there are and how full of it. It, being what the Americans call baloney and the Irish blarney and others certain stronger epithets. The elated adherents of the Congress Party post-election can’t seem to gush enough about their dazzling wisdom in the fray with a comic genuflection to the leader of the party, the prime minister, and the youth icon, in that order, at the beginning and end of each of their pronouncements, in a parody of an invocation of the Catholic Holy Trinity.
Likewise we are treated to the pathetic spectacle of the BJP backers, back-pedalling away from all the hard right-wing edges to their rhetoric as they contemplate 10 or 15 years without the rejuvenating balm of power.
Its shibboleth time from every tired hack and time-serving loyalist with unctuous calls for centrist, moderate politics, implying the electorate fights shy of any kind of stridency and would like to sacrifice whatever it takes, including its self respect, on the altar of stability.
All well and good, but perspective, let alone vision, is not evident amongst all this righteous, or is it relieved, babble. It represents the kind of weakness that extremists of every hue exploit. It lets them strengthen their sleeper cells and tentacles and emboldens them to strike. And it turns our law enforcement and security agencies into right-siding politicians.
But that, as they say, will turn out to be the story of another day. A day when India is stripped of its dignity and shown up for the soft state it is, having to content itself with platitudinous expressions of sympathy from the world when attacked, from within and without, and not a jot more.
But, in the meantime, there is much smug I-told-you-so crowing after the fact of the elections, when all is hind-sight, including the saw that nothing succeeds like success; at least till the wind turns…
It stands to reason, say a majority of these Fortune Cookie analysts, that the Congress Party is fixing to secure a majority for itself, on its own, in 2014. And the architect of this resurgence is the scion of the Gandhi family, the heretofore young man modestly hiding his light under a bushel, transformed with the win of 20 odd seats in Uttar Pradesh.
He is now reborn as the blindingly prescient and long-term player. He is the youth icon Mr. Rahul Gandhi with a back-to-the-villagism first conceived by the shrewd operator in one other Gandhi, out to upstage all the three-piece suits.
But of course, first the Congress Party might just need to deliver the kind of performance their own analysis demands. And verily, if that is what they end up doing, this country will certainly not be complaining.
But the problems might well lie in the very model of moderation and vote bank appeasement that is seen to be the winning formula. It tends to leave very little room to manoeuvre, particularly when confronted with crisis situations that call for action without partisan and sometimes cynical political calculation.
Nobody today in the first flush euphoria of victory thinks anything of so much ambition built around a 2 per cent increase in vote share for Congress over 2004 in the verdict of 2009. But sometimes it really isn’t about how good or popular one is. It is about how badly disorganised the opposition might be.
At present there is no percentage being apportioned, no consideration whatsoever being given to being the beneficiary of the misfortunes that have befallen an arrogant and cocksure Left. Nor is any tear being shed for the punishment meted out to a sometimes corrupt, grandiose, much posture and little work, set of regional parties. It should be remembered however, that they too have seen far grander days even if they are all but decimated today.
But much is being read, in a decidedly triumphalist manner, into the failure of the “communal” and “divisive” BJP to wrest the advantage from Congress in this election and indeed in failing to improve its seat tally over 2004.
It is further assumed that the BJP can only hope to return to power someday if it drops its core agenda, inclusive of Article 370, the Uniform Civil Code, its philosophy of Hindutva and the promise to build a grand temple at Ayodhya.
It does not trouble the Fortune Cookie Analysts that perhaps it is not these issues, and not even the strident denunciation of Islamic terrorism by Mr. Varun Gandhi , the introduction of Mr. Narendra Modi as a star campaigner, or the hooliganism of the Ram Sene; that has led to the decline in BJP fortunes.
Perhaps it is the just desserts of a party riddled with infighting and multiple centres of power, its leadership at various levels at loggerheads with each other. This should actually be clear to the Congress because it was this precise dispiriting scenario that kept it out of power between 1996 and 2004 also.
A party divided against itself is not credible to the voter. A party president from the provincial diaspora unable to make an impact on the national stage, and a supreme leader hamstrung by battling jealous colleagues and jostling generation next contenders, cannot win. Neither is the disintegration of the cadre based support of the RSS, torn between factionalised narrow focus assertion and non-interference, and peculiarly antiquated in its world view. After all, why should Hindu Nationalism have to be obscurantist?
But, at the same time, it is facile to call for a jettisoning of core values in order to become a sort of B team of the Congress. This will not suffice, unless the Congress Party disappoints the electorate so thoroughly that it invites an anti-incumbency backlash of the kind that has reduced some of the once influential regional parties to their present state of rout.
History shows us that an electoral defeat is a call to arms as much as a victory. The essence lies in reorganising to fight another day, modernised certainly, but without abandoning one’s principles. And it calls for strong and clear-headed leadership that is not undercut by factionalism. In this, the Trinity in the Congress clearly has an upper hand, and will be a hard act to follow.
(1,056 words)
28th May 2009
Gautam Mukherjee
Published as "Misplaced triumphalism" in The Pioneer on June 1st, 2009. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and archived there under Columnists.
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