All through the uncertain 1990s when India was coming to terms with the grim realities of fractured mandates and coalition governments at the Centre, a “national government” was frequently suggested as a way out of the mess. Promoted assiduously by former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, one of the few politicians with a cross-party appeal, it implicitly drew on the British experience during World War II when the Conservatives and Labour came together to forge a common front against Hitler.
Since India was not at war and felt no compelling need to shelve its rumbustious democracy the idea never really caught on. On the contrary, after the emergence of the BJP as an alternative pole to the Congress, regional parties and the Lohiaite rump decided that the way forward was link up with either of the two national parties. Initially the BJP was more accommodating towards the regional parties but after three consecutive electoral defeats the Congress too decided that it had to abandon its dream of reemerging as the dominant party. That both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh succeeded in completing full terms propelled politics in the direction of coalitional bipolarity.
The recent buzz around a possible Third Front that will exclude both the national parties is based on some key assumptions. First, it is felt by many that the combined tally of the Congress and BJP, which narrowly crossed the half-way mark in the Lok Sabha in 2004, may well fall below the magic 272 mark on May 16. In short, the 2009 verdict may open the theoretical possibility of all the smaller groups (including those nominally attached to the UPA and NDA) forging a non-Congress, non-BJP government.
Secondly, it is believed that both the Congress and BJP have experienced ideological dissipation in the past 10 years and declined in popularity. The BJP has shed its famed “distinctiveness” and the Congress flits uncomfortably between socialism and market economics. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the relative irrelevance of national parties — first experienced in Tamil Nadu after 1971 — has also become a feature of Uttar Pradesh which accounts for 80 MPs in the Lok Sabha.
Despite these opportunities, the Third Front hasn’t quite taken off. The many photo-ops have not been able to conceal the absence of a pre-eminent party and a coherent idea of the third way. With constant entries and departures, the Third Front has been ridiculed as a railway waiting room, a hallucination and worse.
The charge of incoherence is warranted. There appears to be two parallel versions of the third alternative jostling for prominence. The first is based on the assumption that the grouping of diverse groups from different backgrounds is a confederal partnership of equals.
For the Left, a confederal arrangement has involved an unhappy blend of two different ways of doing business with “bourgeois” parties — the United Front and the Popular Front, both dating back to the 1930s. The United Front approach involves Communists leading the fight with non-Communists in tow. The Popular Front involves Communists accepting the leadership of other classes.
In the forthcoming Lok Sabha election, the CPI(M) and CPI, despite having pretensions of being national parties, are confined to West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. Having peaked in 2004, the Left parties are also aware that their parliamentary representation will see a sharp decline in 2009. Under the circumstances, the Communists are in no position to insist on a United Front approach. At the same time, the Popular Front approach involves ideological convulsions and a loss of ideological rigour. As a way out, the Left has attempted to forge a Third Front that is confederal in character but also bound together by a Left-dictated Common Minimum Programme that prioritises “secularism” and an “independent foreign policy”. It’s an attempt to preserve purity in a sea of contamination.
An alternative view of the Third Front is posited by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati. Unlike the others who attended her house-warming dinner last Sunday, Mayawati is not content to limit her influence to Uttar Pradesh. She perceives the BSP as third pole in a multipolar polity and believes that her projection as a prime ministerial candidate will electrify the Dalits and some backward castes.
On the shape of a Third Front, Mayawati’s most visible differences are with the Left. While professing equidistant opposition to the Congress and the BJP, the Left believes that the BJP is its Enemy Number One. Its hostility to the Congress is confined to the Indo-US nuclear agreement and some facets of economic policy. Like the CPI during the tenures of Jawaharlal Nehru and the early Indira Gandhi, a large section of the CPI(M) believes that the Congress has a “progressive” face. Even CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat, widely perceived to be the unreconstructed face of his party, singled out Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram for the so-called aberrations of the UPA government, notably its pro-US and pro-free market tilt. At the same time, when push comes to shove, the CPI(M) is clear that the Congress, despite all its imperfections, is a better bet than the “fascist” BJP. After the rise of the BJP as the second national party, its view of the Congress is not fundamentally dissimilar to that of the CPI which traditionally had one foot in the “progressive” Congress camp.
Mayawati draws no such distinctions. She is willing to do business with either the Congress or the BJP as long as it promotes her larger objective of making the BSP a force throughout India. She is undeterred by the fact that the national ambitions may lead to the BSP first eating into the Congress’ Dalit votebank outside UP and thereby benefiting the BJP.
The Third Front is shaped by these sharply contradictory impulses. It is an inchoate cluster that pretends to act nationally but thinks locally. In opposition the Third Front enriches the mosaic of pluralism; in government at the Centre it provokes a nightmare.
No comments:
Post a Comment