It is an interesting and instructive disclosure to be made during the ongoing elections. At the height of what is billed as a no-holds-barred prize fight between the political camps headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress, it is sobering to recapitulate an instance of electoral shadow-boxing between the two parties.The revelation in a biography of late K.G. Marar, a BJP leader of Kerala, about a clandestine deal between the parties during the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections of 1991 may have made more than a ripple, had the matter related to a state with more parliamentary seats. The skeleton tumbling out of the cupboards of parties claiming to be such staunch crusaders against each other should, however, still rattle those concerned with questions of political morality.The book provides the details of the deal, which was widely suspected even at that time, and lends considerable credence to allegations of a similar compact being concluded behind the voters' back during the currentelections. Predictably, and plausibly, the principal architect of the unholy alliance on both the occasions is said to be wily state Congress veteran K. Karunakaran. With him and his son K. Muralidharan, state BJP stalwart O. Rajagopal is slated to be a beneficiary of the arrangement arrived at this time in disregard of the fact that the past experiment bore no fruit.It may be argued that the national-level polarisation has no relevance in the Kerala context. That the Congress and the BJP are, indeed, even natural allies against their common enemy, the CPI(M), and the Left Democratic Front led by it. This, however, did not warrant the BJP entering into a pact with the Congress-headed United Democratic Front - particularly its constituent, the Indian Union Muslim League.Such a deal with the Muslim League as documented in the book should have been unthinkable for the BJP. Has not the same party so very often accused the Congress of a ``pseudo-secularism'' that let it cohabit shamelessly with the MuslimLeague in Kerala? This does not, of course, make the alleged Congress opportunism, which found no inner-party opposition even from A.K. Antony, a model of political conduct.This is not the first time, or place, the Congress has omitted to stick to its secularist criteria in critical political situations. The party, after all, went through a `soft Hindutva' phase, that began under Rajiv Gandhi around the time of the Karunakaran-BJP-League compact and culminated in the Babri demolition. Nor is this the single exception to a strictly principled approach on the BJP's part to alliances.Its partnership and power-sharing with the Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh after the slanging match over `Manuvad' was only a particularly striking evidence to the contrary. It may be too much to expect contestants in elections to adhere to exacting standards of ideological purity and commitment. But political polarisation will hardly help to make our democracy more dynamic and meaningful, if deals of short-term andcynical advantage matter to the two main parties more than their deemed policy differences.
