Two big problems

In a political scenario completely transformed by the Maya quake, the country8217;s two main parties find themselves amidst the ruins, faced with a similar quandary. This verdict has put in some doubt their political relevance as pivotal players on the national stage. It is a quandary that can only grow as General Elections 2009 get uncomfortably closer with every passing day.

The BJP can only look back to the 221 seats it harvested in 1991, riding the crest of the Ayodhya movement. Since then it has been a fairly consistent decline: it lost almost half its seats between 1996 and 2002, and has almost repeated that feat. From the 88 seats in the last election, it barely touched 50 this time. The Congress heyday in the state is now of course only material for history books, but Friday8217;s verdict has cruelly put paid to any modest hopes it may have had of being able to stage a recovery in the state. If all that the tireless campaigning of its two most feted leaders, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, could do was to make its modest tally a little more modest, and if their party colleagues then proceed to argue that without these campaigns the party would have done even worse, something is truly wrong somewhere.

Neither party appears to be in any mood for serious introspection, preferring to ghoulishly draw consolation from each other8217;s predicament. But such immediate gratification is no substitute for the rigorous and clear-headed assessments and strategies that both parties require to evolve urgently. This is an agenda that, in fact, goes beyond the self-interest of both the Congress and the BJP. If 2009 is to throw up a stable government at the Centre, if the country is to be spared the nightmare of being ruled by hodge-podge coalitions and ragtag clusters of political interests, it would need to be anchored by one of these two parties.