...Ashok Malik
- The PioneerDecember 19, 2007
Just before 4.00 pm on Thursday, December 13, a warm-up speaker at Ahmedabad's Sardar Patel Stadium announced Ms Sonia Gandhi was about to reach. It was a modest crowd that had gathered, no more than 15,000 -- never mind if a Congress leader later wrote the audience was "at least 50,000" strong and the city's leading English-language newspaper reported the stadium was "jam packed". Yet, this was the moment everyone had been waiting for: The arrival of the Congress president.
The warm-up speaker tried to rouse the crowd: "Congress party zindabad." "Zindabad, zindabad," answered the throng. "Sonia Gandhi zindabad ," he went. "Zindabad, zindabad," it came back. Now he delivered the coup de grace: "Narendra Modi murdabad." There was no response, only silence -- a long, very articulate silence. The warm-up speaker repeated the lines, but this time, wisely, dropped the denunciation of Mr Modi.
Depending on how you interpret it, this anecdote could mean nothing at all or sum up the Gujarat election. As was apparent to any visitor, Mr Modi's identification with Gujarat is now absolute. There is -- or was -- no hostility to him among mainstream voters, not even Congress partisans.
This is not to suggest that Mr Modi will win every single seat and the Congress can pack its bags and leave Gujarat for good. It is only to point out that the personality factor brought Mr Modi a uniform incremental vote across the State. What the uncommitted voter was telling him was: Give me a local candidate and caste/community coalition I can live with, and I have no problem voting you back to office.
Mr Modi has emerged as a pan-Gujarat phenomenon. He has not reduced the Gujarat BJP to a regional party, but has become a regional leader. It is crucial to understand the difference and an example would be illustrative.
In the 1980s, NT Rama Rao invoked "Telugu pride", built a movement out of nothing and swept to power in Andhra Pradesh. Between 2002 and 2007, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Samajwadi Party (SP) ruled Uttar Pradesh. NTR was a regional phenomenon, geographically located within a State but also symbolising a cultural identity. The SP was and remains a regional party, a State-specific political unit. Mr Yadav is not a pan-UP leader; he does not seek votes in the name of "UP pride".
Should he win in Gujarat -- and political assessment would suggest exit pollsters have been conservative in tabulating his mandate -- can the Modi model be replicated nationwide? There are two ways of addressing that question. The first is to wonder if Mr Modi can some day become the president or prime ministerial candidate of the BJP, whether he can work with the NDA partners; in a sense, it is to re-visit the tired debate between two equally spurious notions of secularism.
However, there is another aspect to the Modi/Gujarat model -- can it redefine the national party? In the coalition system that emerged in the 1990s, a national party -- focussed on 'national issues' -- joined hands with regional parties and regional leaders. Today, the space for what was considered 'national politics' and what constituted 'national issues' has declined. Short of war or perhaps terrorism, there is little possibility of a political theme uniting all India at election time. Even inflation affects different States differently, given their prosperity levels.
As such, national parties such as the BJP and the Congress are faced with two choices. They can slowly atrophy, ceding more and more ground to regional rivals. Alternatively, they can join the game and become umbrella groupings of strong regional/state leaders.
To some degree this is already happening. If the Congress defeated Mr N Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh in 2004, a contributing factor was that it actively promoted Mr YS Rajashekhara Reddy as an alternative Telugu strongman, albeit under the Congress aegis. In Gujarat, the Congress refused to project a face, countering Mr Modi with Ms Sonia Gandhi: Straight-from-the-heart Gujarati with stilted Hindi, a local boy with a distant figure from Delhi.
That aside, India's political economy has become so consciously federalised that a 'one size fits all' approach is suicidal. Exemplary as it is, Modi-style governance cannot be easily repeated across India. The Gujarat Chief Minister has knocked down patronage raj. He offers electricity if you pay your power bills; and 280,000 defaulters have had cases filed against them. Rather than promise free education in moribund Government-dependent schools, he encourages self-financing schools that charge a modest fee.
This model can work in a self-starter society like Gujarat, where entrepreneurship and civic consciousness have reached critical mass, and where an enlightened, transactional view of public goods is possible. This model will be a non-starter in Bihar or Madhya Pradesh. Even in the reformist south -- Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu -- business-friendly Chief Ministers have combined economic deregulation with vast doses of populism. The DMK courts Nokia's manufacturing plant but also gives away free television sets. It is possible that Mr Modi's success will encourage others to adopt a no-nonsense, freebie-free culture, but there is no guarantee.
In this situation, the national party of the future would need to allow regional leaders to blossom and occasionally dominate the institutional structure in their respective States. If you can accept a Naveen Patnaik outside the BJP, is there really a problem accepting a Naveen Patnaik inside the BJP? The national party's regional leaders will respond to political and socio-economic stimuli in a local context.
So if the national party becomes an integrated network of regional bosses, who is the 'national leader'? The Prime Minister (or prime ministerial candidate) will, in this case, be a genuine first among equals: A peer who works with his State colleagues, is an adept political manager and tempers contradictions. Even if Mr Modi were to come to Delhi, he would find himself performing this role.
Actually, such a matrix is no different from the Congress of the 1950s, when a BC Roy in Bengal or a K Kamaraj in Tamil Nadu were the sinews of the all-India party. To them, the Prime Minister was not Panditji placed on a pedestal, but simply Jawaharlal, a friend and comrade, a first among equals.
Can national parties come to terms with these federalising impulses? If they want to stay relevant, they have to. That is the lesson of the 2007 Modi election.
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