So many ways to Raisina Hill

Both the Dravidian parties were opposed to the BJP in the past. The BJP (and earlier the Jan Sangh) was seen by the Dravidian politicians as a manifestation of “Aryan” politics of the Hindi belt. The imposition of Hindi as a national language was resented and Hindi DD news broadcasts virtually banned. In the early ’60s, there were anti-Hindi riots.

All that was forgotten by both parties. Jayalalithaa’s party joined the government in 1998 and, in 1999, when she withdrew support, Karunanidhi’s party extended a helping hand. Indeed, the BJP-led NDA could not have survived up to 2004 without the off and on support of former “secularists” like George Fernandes, Ram Vilas Paswan, Farooq Abdullah, Chandrababu Naidu and Mamata Banerjee. Despite the ideological differences, they had one thing in common: anti-Congressism.

Anti-Congressism had emerged since 1967 as an ideological position of sorts. Its theory and practice were elaborately worked out by Ram Manohar Lohia. In that year the Congress was thrown out of power in as many as 10 states, and the fronts that came to power had only anti-Nehru-Gandhism as a common factor. From 1998, Sonia Gandhi’s leadership of the Congress united them. To them she did not merely represent the “dynasty” but she was also a foreigner, a Christian, a woman and totally alien to Indian politics. In fact, it is anti-Sonia vitriol that had brought them together. Looking back, one wonders what else could have united those diverse parties. Just two years back, in 1996, the BJP had failed to get support from most of these regional and secular parties. Consequently the first Vajpayee government collapsed after 13 days. The difference between 1996 and 1998 was the arrival of Sonia on the political scene in the latter year.

Now we also learn from L.K. Advani’s autobiography that he and Mulayam Singh Yadav conspired to keep Sonia away from prime ministership in 1999. Neither of them has mentioned Sharad Pawar’s role. Pawar had revolted in the Congress on the same issue and tried to unite the anti-Sonia Congressmen with the other parties of the same refrain. Apparently, their campaign proved to be politically useful to them. The anti-Sonia (anti-Congress) parties formed the NDA governments in 1998 and 1999.

All those references have become broadly redundant now. Sonia’s refusal to accept the prime ministership totally shocked them. Their one-point agenda proved to be absolutely worthless. Even the harsh critics of Narendra Modi now agree that he won on the issue of performance and governance, though he had consolidated his constituency on Hindutva initially. There is a big debate within the BJP (inspired by the RSS) whether to highlight Hindutva or governance. Many in the RSS now feel that governance, character of the leadership and credibility are more important in the campaign than militant Hinduism, which has lost its appeal. Advani is visibly keen to show his “liberal” and even “secular” face to attract the neutral vote bank. In this case, “neutral” means those who are neither with the Congress nor with the BJP and are not impressed by Left rhetoric.

This neutral constituency, surely the largest, is also being wooed by the Left. Their call for the third front means nothing more than that. The third front to them means anti-Congressism coupled with anti-BJPism. However, in the past five years, the Left’s version of anti-Congressism has considerably changed. In 1977, in the JP and the Janata days, the Left did not mind having “floor management” with the saffrons. In 1989, when the Left and the BJP supported the V.P. Singh government, it was a further extension of that line. Then there was a time when they used to describe the BJP and the Congress as two sides of the same coin (or two branches of the same capitalist-imperialist tree). But after the BJP-led NDA came to power, the Left began to adopt what was known in the ’60s as the “Dange Line”. Comrade Dange, the then chairman of the Communist Party of India, used to say that the Congress is a bourgeois-nationalist party and not a reactionary-communal-fascist outfit. He was of the view that the Congress had a mass base and should be supported to keep it away from communal and right-wing association. The CPM was sharply critical of this view, but since 2004 has been practising the Dange line of realpolitik.

It is against this backdrop of ideological predilections and deviations that the elections in 2009 will be fought. In the early ’90s the BJP and the Left had opposed economic liberalisation. They were opposed to GATT and later the WTO. Now the BJP champions the liberal cause. The so-called “shining India” campaign was a celebration of liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG). The Left, willy-nilly, has also joined the bandwagon, with Jyoti Basu declaring that socialism is not the immediate agenda.

Thus with the BJP slowing down on Hindutva and the Left calming down on liberalisation, there is far more common political space than one could have anticipated a decade ago. Thus the alliances that will be formed before the Lok Sabha election and those after the results may not be the same. Everybody will “realign” to suit the need of the hour. Numbers and not ideology will decide the alliances. All the parties now have only one aim — to somehow come to power. All of them appear to agree with the late Deng Xiaoping that it does not matter what the colour of the cat is as long as it catches mice.

The writer is editor, ‘Loksatta’ kumar.ketkar@expressindia.com