Desperately yours

But after all that, and despite the immediate preoccupations of Congress and CPI(M) leaders, the event turned out to be what Nehru’s memorialists probably always intended it to be: a celebration of the liberal spirit. And a very Indian liberal spirit it was.

Where else would one find a communist party quite like the one Jyoti Basu leads, popular in its own bailiwicks and influential among those who live outside history? Where else in the modern world would one expect to find a national party like the Congress, led for the better part of the last 50 years by a single dynasty?

Both the existence of such parties and their search for common ground affirm India’s vast capacityto make sense of political contradictions. One way the system does this is by taming extreme political tendencies.

So, it is rather natural for the Congress and the CPI(M) to come together to combat what they see as the most extreme political tendency today. According to Jyoti Basu, India needs urgently to be saved from the BJP’s divisive concept of nationalism and Sonia Gandhi would protect the country from the BJP’s assault on pluralism. Not that the Congress and the CPI(M) find each other politically correct.

Basu, for instance, still thinks it fit to remind the Congress of its authoritarian past, its failure to combat communalism and the exclusion of the poor from its economic liberalisation programmes in the 1990s. On other occasions the Congress has had much to say about the CPI(M)’s regressive policies, its capitulation to organised labour and neglect of other sectors.

But today these differences pale beside the `threat’ posed by the BJP’s attempts to propagate its ideas. Desperation repudiatesideology, however redundant it may be, and breeds opportunism.

Six months ago, many in the Congress and the CPI(M) thought as Mani Shankar Aiyar did, that Gulliver would be tied down by the Lilliputians, that the BJP’s small allies would be able to hold its hardliners in check. Had that been so the Congress would have had more time to put its own house in order and the Third Front to figure out whether it could form a front at all.

But the BJP caught everyone, including its own allies, off guard on issues central to its thinking such as its nuclear bangs and new education policy. Nor does it show much inclination to check the anti-minority activities of members of the Sangh Parivar like the VHP.

Whatever the eventual outcome of efforts to bridge the political divide between centre and left, there is a message the BJP should heed. Something is wrong. Otherwise, the Congress and the CPI(M) would not be sharing a platform, saying nice things about each other and thinking the unthinkable.