Back to the middle

Now that one has the advantage of hindsight, what a brilliant decision it was for the Congress to have allowed a BJP government to be formed in March this year. Some of us had seen it differently then. We were wrong. If the BJP, in power during the earlier spell for barely 13 days, had been thwarted in March as well, the party would have carried a halo of martyrdom on its head. Having been given achance, it carries the burden of misgovernance on its back.

The Sangh saffron, some of us had thought, would spread on the social fabric with greater tenacity. The color is running with one electoral wash.The danger for the Congress is to misread the election results. When the party said 8220;No8221; to alliances at its Pachmarhi session in September, it was a tactical line which was to apply to the states where elections have just been held.

Digvijay Singh was very confident when he told me in Pachmarhi that the Congress could win on its own. He has turned out to be true. The single most important task the party faces now is to draw accurate conclusions from the results. The ground situation in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan was conducive for the success of a 8220;no-alliance8221; line. But are these conclusions to be applied mechanically on a completely different social turf of U.P. and Bihar?

The by-election results in Bihar seem to suggest the fodder scam has not debilitated Laloo Prasad Yadav. TheCongress in the state is an extinct force. I suspect the CWC will be heavily tilted against an alliance with Laloo. Whom will the party use as a crutch to lean against? The left or a combination of the left and Laloo? A conversation with some Muslim leaders from Bihar convinces me that the minorities are with the RJD only for want of another option. Should the Congress become a visible force, they would resume the old habit.

What has to be studied even more closely is the sociology of U.P. where, in spite of Sonia Gandhi8217;s campaigning, the party could not win even a single seat in the last general elections.

Minorities had started drifting away from the Congress after the shilanyas but they abandoned the party en masse after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Mulayam Singh Yadav, with his aggressive protection of the mosque, became the rallying figure for the minorities.

Since Mulayam was also the perceived beneficiary of Mandalised, anti-upper caste politics, the upper castes abandoned the tatteredCongress shamiana for the relatively more secure looking BJP verandah. The upper castes defected to the BJP not because they had become more saffronised but because they sought refuge from excessive Mandalisation.

There was gradual disappointment in store for them. The party they had defected to was itself accommodating Mandalisation for its own political survival. Thus, Kalyan Singh, a backward caste Lodh was preferred to, say, Kalraj Mishra. Then followed the saga of unspeakable misgovernance, accommodation for confirmed criminals in a jumbo-sized cabinet, encouragement to defectors, unprecedented violence in the Vidhan Sabha, chaotic handling of the floods.

All this was tolerated because there still loomed on the horizon the possibility of Atal Behari Vajpayee providing good government from New Delhi. Vajpayee stepped out of his car at the Red Fort on August 15 with one shoe on. That one image in front of TV cameras affected all subsequent perceptions of the Prime Minister. No Prime Minister sinceNehru had started his innings with greater fund of goodwill. How swiftly the graph came down!It is my belief that since the Congress has so far steered clear of any adjustments with Mulayam, perceived by the upper castes as the very essence of Mandalisation, the upper castes have got their skates on to roll back into the Congress fold with one big proviso: provided the Congress looks like a winning force.

The recent election results will enable the Congress to wear the appearance of a winner. But this appearance will carry conviction only when the minorities too trek back to the Congress.

This too is beginning to happen. The message the minorities get from the forces the two Yadavs represent is this: 8220;be grateful that your lives and property are protected8221;. This comes across as a rather stultified, warped view of secularism.

Traditionally, the Brahmin, and the upper castes in general, understand the Muslim, his social and cultural aspirations. The irony is that he who was, at least, conversant withthe Muslim ethos shifted to the BJP. The OBC8217;s, who have had very little to do with the Muslims, have by a peculiar quirk of politics, become the political protectors of the minorities. This dilemma of the Muslims can be resolved too if the Congress in the state begins to look like a winner.

An important fact the Congress leaders must remember. The Muslim was angry with P. V. Narasimha Rao8217;s Congress. The party8217;s acceptability to the minorities will depend on the extent to which the party has moved away from a leader whom L. K. Advani described as the best Prime Minister since Lal Bahadur Shastri.

The moral of the story is that the Muslims and the upper castes have begun to realise that neither casteism nor communalism is a panacea for their problems. Indian politics is reverting to the middle ground.