Prashant Kishor will contest a bypoll in Bihar, in a bid to claim political space, months after his new party failed to wrest a foothold in the assembly election. In West Bengal, following its electoral drubbing, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC is coming apart at the seams. In UP, where the countdown has begun for next year’s election, the ruling BJP’s internal wrangles make more news than the Samajwadi Party, which remains frozen in public perception since it lost power in the state circa 2017. Chandrababu Naidu’s son and working president of TDP, Nara Lokesh, describes “Namo” in Andhra Pradesh as Naidu plus Modi, the once larger-than-state regional player unresistingly subsumed in Modi’s cult of personality.
These images are of recent vintage — regional parties/leaders with long careers laid low, even Jan Suraaj, the newcomer with a clean slate. They are part of a larger phenomenon of our time. The regional party seems to be crumpling in the face of the BJP’s predatory politics, backed by its “one nation” thesis, drive towards uniformity and use of fear and favour to skew the playing field.
But regional parties have also conspired in their own weakening and in a larger undoing of the gains made on federalism for nearly two decades from the mid 1980s. The Congress was in decline, even as the 1984 mandate in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination briefly masked it, and the BJP was a long way away from becoming the dominant party. Several regional parties climbed on to the national stage when the Centre was not “strong” through the 1990s. The processes of economic liberalisation were also, arguably, encouraging a decentralisation of the polity.
The ungainly reversal of that process in a diverse polity, which is now framed in the implosion of regional parties, has been long in the making. At one level, it has been made possible by the steady hollowing out of political parties organisationally.
As political scientist KK Kailash has underlined, the “mass party model”, which meant the primacy of one face of the party over the other — the “party on the ground” over the “party in public office” — has become outdated. It was a product of its time, when, before Independence and immediately after it, parties were seen as “vehicles of movements attempting to extend the franchise to a broader section of society”. Subsequently, the “party in public office” took command, the “party on the ground” became subservient to it.
This has meant “a high degree of centralisation, which revolves around a single leader or a leadership elite; a focus on holding public office and winning elections, where voters matter more than supporters…” It has also meant a growing reliance on government and bureaucracy to push its agenda on one end, and on the other, dependence on professional agencies for designing campaign strategy.
This inattention to organisational strengthening led to the TMC ceding vital decision-making space to IPAC, the political consultancy. It is contributing, in turn, to the stream of TMC old-timers abandoning the party.
The national parties are also affected by this corrosion. But the inability of the regional parties to withstand it is more vivid. Their platforms were smaller to begin with — even those that have had links to large movements and causes, like the DMK or the RJD.
But it is not just impersonal processes, the problem also lies in regional parties’ own abdications that have come to haunt them in their confrontation with the BJP.
Travelling through UP recently was to be struck by how much the Akhilesh Yadav-led SP, more than nine years out of power, is still a prisoner of its past image. Akhilesh is still widely seen as the leader circumscribed by family, the SP as the Muslim-Yadav party that presides over lawlessness in government. The SP can blame these frozen perceptions on the BJP’s propaganda machine. But it must also ask itself why its efforts to look more inclusive are dismissed by so many so easily.
These are extraordinary times, when the BJP labels and cramps spaces for opposition politics. But like other regional parties, the SP has not been able to summon, in response, an extraordinary politics. It has fallen short even on a politics that is ordinary.
It has not put forth a new political or economic model. On the ground, its proclaimed shift from M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) to PDA (pichhda/backward, dalit/SC, alpsankhyak/minority) politics is seen as a variant of an old, exclusionary caste arithmetic. This, against an opponent that outmanoeuvres it by a wider social engineering at one level, and by claiming “sabka saath…”, on the other. The BJP’s social coalition excludes Muslims, but the SP dare not point to that exclusion because of its own timidity — its past record of uneven-handed politics undercuts its credibility.
The inability to fight the BJP on terms not set by the BJP, apart from the incapacity to climb out of the trap of a politics of family, one caste-one community, is common to the regional parties that are seen to be fading or hastening to the side of the BJP.
For now, even as cracks in BJP dominance begin showing, the parties that could have benefited from the opening up of political spaces are unfortunately not up to it.
The writer is National Opinion Editor, The Indian Express. vandita.mishra@expressindia.com
The predatory politics of the BJP, backed by its “one nation” thesis and drive towards uniformity, its use of fear and favour to skew the playing field, has quickened the crisis of the regional party. (Express photos) 
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