The two-force polity

True, the BJP is at the helm of affairs in Delhi while it was in the Opposition in 1993. But that, given the anti-incumbency factor, is probably as much of a handicap as anything.

The BJP still has the single most popular leader in India at its head in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. It has a hard core of voters who stood by it despite the atrocious rise in prices. And theparty still has the largest and most dedicated cadre of any party in India. Given ruthless discipline acirc;euro;ldquo; and a smidgen of luck acirc;euro;ldquo; the BJP shall rebound sooner than anyone believes.

Truth be told, the BJP8217;s current situation isn8217;t anywhere as bad as that of the Congress 12 months ago this day. The BJP leadership may be bickering publicly more often than necessary, but nobody is leaving the party as they were from the Congress. And look how India8217;s oldest party has been revived!If I may sum up the results of the assembly polls: the Congress is on the upswing and the BJP is down but not out. So who are the big losers? To my mind, it is the remains of what was once loosely described as the Third Front. The pretensions of the old United front have been brutally punctured.

In the sole byelection from Uttar Pradesh, to name but one instance, Mulayam Singh Yadav8217;s man actually lost his deposit, while the Congress managed to come second.

When the results of the General Election came in, I remember saying that theprocess of polarisation appeared to have begun. That is now in full swing. However, the situation on the ground probably won8217;t be reflected in Parliament for quite some time. This, paradoxically, is the result of that very process.

Some of them are pro-BJP, others are pro-Congress, but all of them are agreed on one fundamental point: no General Election. The fact that neither of the two national parties can put together a coherent programme of government is secondary to these groups. The who-le point about polarisation is that it leaves no space for any third force.

If a General Election is held tomorrow, the BJP shall be hard put to hold its own, it may even slip a bit. The Congress, according to its strategists, shall cross the 200 mark. But one thing is certain, whenever the next polls are held, there won8217;t be anywhere close to 220 members flaunting non-BJP, non-Congress credentials.

The power of these men and women flows from the weakness of the two big parties. They fear that they shall beabandoned the moment that either the Congress or the BJP reaches the magic number of 272.

Some look back wistfully to the 11th Lok Sabha, when neither the BJP nor the Congress was in position to form a ministry. The Congress, as Indrajit Gupta cheerfully announced in a famous speech in Chennai, was forced to support the United Front. And the BJP, though growing in leaps and bounds, couldn8217;t enhance its position fast enough to match the Congress8217;s decline. This opened up a window of opportunity, and there was no dearth of opportunists in the United Front.

It was, I think, Winston Churchill who described politics as the art of getting money from the rich and votes from the poor through promising protection to one from the other. Politics, in the United Front8217;s heyday, consisted of getting votes from the Congress by threatening it with the spectre of the BJP. Of course, judging by what some Congressmen say, India8217;s oldest national party also relished the opportunity to play tit-for-tat with the BJP whichhad employed the same tactics in 1990 by propping up V.P. Singh to keep the Congress out of power.

But the Congress is not in decline any longer. It has come a long way since the days of Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri. I sincerely doubt that the party led by Sonia Gandhi shall experiment with 8220;support from outside8221; any longer. Nor will it try to form a ministry with the aid of dubious allies such as the CPIM, leave alone with help from those identified as potential foes such as the Samajwadi Party.

In a post-poll analysis programme on television, Digvijay Singh of the Congress and the BJP8217;s Sushma Swaraj bickered amicably enough over several issues. But both cordially agreed that India is witnessing the birth-pangs of a two-party system. More to the point, strategists in both the BJP and the Congress privately admit that this is quite a healthy development.

But such a system cannot develop unless the Congress makes a serious attempt at reestablishing itself in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, andTamil Nadu. These four states account for 220 members of the Lok Sabha; the Congress currently has a grand total of just six of them. There is clearly room for improvement, and even more clearly it means the Congress has to battle the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and so on.

The rejuvenation of the Congress as shown in the Assembly polls might just be the electric shock required to awaken a BJP that seemed to be sleeping on the job. But the revival of Sonia Gandhi8217;s party holds no good news whatsoever for the remains of the United Front.

8220;When elephants battle,8221; President Julius Nyerere once told a Non-Aligned Movement summit, 8220;it is the grass beneath the titans8217; feet that gets crushed.8221; The non-BJP, non-Congress parties in this Lok Sabha are ruefully acknowledging the truth of that African proverb.