Whose party is it anyway?

On the issue of 8220;tainted8221; ministers, do take the road to Uttar Pradesh.

Take just three stories that most recently failed to make national headlines from India8217;s top news-maker state. On July 16, Raja Bhaiyya was taken back into the council of ministers. Not mentioning POTA given the known misuse of that draconian law, Raghuraj Pratap Singh has toted up a distinctive CV. Thirty-two criminal cases, including murder, attempted murder and abduction, pending. Palatial estates yielded an AK-56 with three magazines, a telescopic rifle, explosives, revolvers and human skull and bones to police investigations in 2002. Barred by the Election Commission in 1998 from entering Pratapgarh constituency until elections were over following complaints of intimidation and violence for the record, the Allahabad HC later gave him the go-ahead on a technicality. In the era of downsizing ministries, UP got 8220;Kunda ka goonda8221; as minister No. 60.

Let8217;s talk chief ministers. On August 7, former chief minister Mayawati held a press conference in Lucknow. The purpose of that rare summons by BSP8217;s queen was to share her conviction that the present chief minister was conspiring to eliminate her, physically. They want to kill me, said Mayawati, and she wasn8217;t yet done. She demanded the UP police withdraw charges against two senior BSP leaders accused of paying supari to contract killers to wipe out a section of the SP leadership.

On a less apocalyptic note now. On July 18, Mayawati nominated Gandhi Azad to coordinate between her and BSP cadres if she were to be jailed in the Taj Corridor Scam. Some read it as the anointment of a Number Two, unprecedented for a party accustomed to having only one chief, not counting Kanshi Ram. At the very least, it means that Mayawati, who trusts nobody but her own instincts, trusts Gandhi Azad and is saying it.

But who is Gandhi Azad? That8217;s a good question. Those who are still looking for more information than is offered in the Rajya Sabha MP8217;s biographical sketch on the Net will tell you how hard it is to get any thing at all on the innards of the BSP. Behenji leads a famously tight-lipped flock of MPs. They rarely speak to the media or in public or even in Parliament. As far as party organisations go, the Bahujan Samaj Party is an area of inky darkness and BSP men and women make an effort to keep it that way. A visit to the BSP office near you is highly unlikely to yield even the basic party office bearers list, much less the party constitution.

Is the only Dalit party to join the rarefied league of national parties a political party as we define it? Or is it some kind of an informal network? Is it a platform, where an 8220;ethnic head count8221; is carried out, as a recent scholarly work suggests, by strategically-minded voters, individually casting about for the best deal, in a 8220;patronage democracy8221;? Nobody outside the BSP really knows how the BSP functions, how it arrives at policy decisions and just who is Gandhi Azad under that terrifically fictitious sounding name.

The anonymity of Gandhi Azad could well be the defining shorthand of our politics. It can be expanded into the syndrome that runs through them all 8212; UPA8217;s 8220;tainted8221; ministers, UP8217;s minister No. 60, its life and death politics.

Certainly, the BSP is an extreme case and given its tortured trek to the national arclights, it is also a special case. Yet it is still a good example. All our political parties are run in mostly unpredictable and discretionary ways. Be it the Congress or BJP, elections are always 8220;unanimous8221; when they are held at all, mostly to satisfy the EC8217;s rule. There is no institutionalised process of incremental and competitive advancement within the party, no paces leaders must necessarily go through to get the ticket or lead the party. There are no genuine leadership contests. The party platform is what one, or a handful of leaders, say it is. It is never put up for serious contestation within the party.

Parties select candidates, mobilise the electorate, formulate agendas, pass legislation 8212; yet we have a curiously undemanding relationship with them. We never really ask, they don8217;t truly tell, how they structure access to power and opportunity.

While we weren8217;t looking, parties made a pact with those with muscle and money power to help them get the vote without doing the hard work that ground-level political mobilisation usually involves. We may even have looked on unseeingly when a party that was once a movement like the Congress, and the younger, more rooted outfits like the RJD, began filling up their nomination lists with individuals with long criminal records. Now when the pillow fight on corruption has broken out and the fur is flying, we blame it on the slowness of the criminal justice system. There is a culprit in that, alright, but the buck stops with our own undemanding relationship with our political parties. We don8217;t know who Gandhi Azad is and don8217;t want to take the trouble to find out. It8217;s okay with us that the BSP supremo should dip into her hat and pull out his name.

The silence on Gandhi Azad and the furore over the UPA8217;s 8220;tainted8221; ministers both point to the same empty space in the national conversation. There is so much talk of economic reform, and despite the noisy show of hostilities, there is an articulate and largely consensual agenda that informs it. Now, with the new PMO prodding us, we are also talking administrative reform. On political reform, however, the silence holds and the apathy. There, we continue to take the handy shortcut and pretend we have arrived somewhere.