States 038; Centre

Buoyed by its almost-majority in the Karnataka assembly, the BJP is believed to be hastening the selection of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections due by next summer. The Congress, shocked by its performance in the Karnataka elections, has constituted a panel to suggest ways to revitalise the party. Its report is due within a fortnight. In different ways, the state election has ostensibly injected a purposefulness these past days at the Congress Working Committee meeting and the BJP National Executive. Karnataka became a somewhat unique battleground. It is a state where the two national parties have together wrested political space from regional challengers. And as these columns have underlined, the BJP gained an advantage over the Congress by allowing its local unit to take leadership of the campaign and the electoral agenda. In a way, Karnataka showed that regional party or national, that old American one-liner is coming true for India8217;s electoral landscape 8212; all politics is local.

How the Congress and BJP act upon these indicators regionally, the structural changes they undertake in internal decision-making 8212; especially in a state like Uttar Pradesh 8212; will be one of the most interesting stories of the next year. It is equally important, however, what lessons they take in making policy at the Centre, whether in government or in opposition. Even before this localisation of Indian politics started to be internalised or at least taken note of by the national parties, state-level elections had been something of an alibi for the party at the Centre. It even led to some demand a few years ago that it be made mandatory for national and state elections to be held simultaneously. The logic being that then the party/coalition ruling at the Centre need not live election to state election, with every result seen as a referendum on its policies, and thereby inhibiting difficult decisions.

The result has been waywardness and lethargy in economic and foreign policies. Fareed Zakaria points to this consequence of regional assertiveness in his new book, The Post-American World, an examination of the rise of India and China: 8220;They these constraints make it difficult for New Delhi to define a national interest, mobilise the country behind it, and then execute a set of policies to achieve its goals, whether in economic reform or foreign policy.8221; Perhaps the Indian voter will sort this out too, just as she has of late shown a distaste for the non-serious actor using electoral tools for narrow self-gain, the Janata Dal S in Karnataka or the Telengana Rashtriya Samiti in Andhra Pradesh.