The next polls and beyond

Milligazette, 1-15 January 2014

Having lost in four states, the Congress is readying to pack its bags for vacating 7, Race Course Road, by May next. Its stalwarts, Mani Shankar Aiyar and Chidambaram, have both indicated that the divisions in polity are such that there is little chance of the next government sticking through the next five years at the helm. Aiyar therefore opines that the Congress could throw in the towel next year in order to ‘refit’ itself in a ‘break from governance’ for a subsequent meaningful try at the polls. Chidambaram, likewise, has suggested that the next elections will not throw up a solid majority. Maintaining that the current government is being hampered by pushback from the legislature and judiciary, he reveals that Indian democracy is undergoing a ‘churning’ at its ‘weakest point’ in its history.   

The open breast beating by the Congress in wake of their dismal showing is to be expected. It helps keep morale alive in that the Congressman is assured that even if the next polls are given a bye, the Congress can yet reposition itself – to quote Aiyar - as the ‘natural party of governance for the 21^st century’. While the Congress needs such self-consolation, the nation cannot be so sanguine. If history is any guide, the last time the Congress expected to return to power after vacating it in mid nineties, it was unable to do so for close to a decade. While the last time round, there was the sober and mature Vajpayee at the helm to keep the sangh parivar on leash, this time round, if and when the BJP gets to power, they are unlikely to restrain themselves.

Using government leverage they will position themselves for the long haul in order to reconfigure India in their image. It is for this reason that the complacency of the Congress cannot be allowed to seep into the nation and the forthcoming electoral fight by secular-liberal forces and minority interest groups must be taken for what it is and quite like the BJP and its affiliates are taking it, with a greater gumption than the ‘grand old party’, the Congress, has shown or is at all capable of showing.  

It bears recall that the Narasimha Rao government was beset with the same problems and lethargy at its term end as is the Manmohan government today. Quite the same fate administered it by the electorate then as seems to await the Manmohan dispensation. At the time, Shankar Dayal Sharma, had called upon Vajpayee to step in as leader of the single largest party. Vajpayee, seizing the chance, tried to cobble up a coalition.

Even as he did so he proceeded to order nuclear weapons detonation preparations to get underway in order to build a nationalist wave behind him. However, his initial stint lasted only thirteen days. It was in his second attempt that he used the nationalist gimmick of bombing his way into the nuclear club, alongside fighting a popular war in Kargil as a caretaker government, to insinuate the BJP into power that lasted a full term after the second elections.

The period in power was used to extend saffronisation of institutions and inveigle Hindutva into the national imagination. While Murli Manohar Joshi proceeded to rework education; other up front projects included a national commission to review the working of the constitution and the Vision 2020 document of the Planning Commission. Questions persist over the parliament attack that hanging Afzal Guru have done little to resolve. In the security field, India gave itself offensive military doctrines and a nuclear doctrine that even a change in government has not been able to dilute. The country barely managed to avoid being entangled in US’ Iraq quagmire by sending troops.

All this happened, despite Vajpayee generally having his heart in the right place. He reached out twice to Pakistan, at Lahore and at Agra. While the military there rudely overruled his interlocutor, Nawaz Sharif, by mounting a Kargil on unsuspecting Vajpayee, at Agra, a careful study by AG Noorani, informs that Advani exercised a veto. Advani also dispelled Vajpayee’s intent to take Modi to task over his lapse in ‘rajdharma’ in Gujarat.

The foregoing suggests that conservative politics is susceptible to capture by the ideological fringe. Two notable times this has occurred are in an outrageous way have been the Babri Masjid demolition and the Gujarat carnage. In both cases the conservatives got away, claiming loss of control, rather admit to the conspiracy behind both. In both cases, the minority was target. If a Vajpayee in their midst could not remedy matters, it does not take much imagination to envisage the rightist turn with Modi at the helm.

The Congress perspective is that political ‘untouchability’ will keep Modi from gaining any support, even if as psephologists predict and the Congress fears, the BJP does turn out the single largest party. Complacency on this score can prove fatal to India as we know it. The gimmick of the atom bomb is precedence on the way a national rallying call can be used to cement the incumbent in power. Modi has already sounded the battle cry in his Sawai Madhopur rally in which he suggested a reopening of the Article 370 question. With the long dreaded Year 2014 round the corner, a deteriorating national security can serve as a convenient nationalist rallying cry. The middle classes that are behind NaMo can be expected to chip in to foster a greater acceptability of Modi across party lines. He will get off to a running start since he has the way chalked out by right wing think tanks and diaspora support that have contributed to making his campaign such as to survive even a Snoopgate.

This implies that far graver possibilities exist in the post elections future than self-exculpatory political commentary from senior Congress sources suggests. Modi can be expected to play to the gallery, even as he lets loose saffronites into the state and nation. Once assured of sustaining, he will create the ground for another round. This will see the sangh pariwar celebrate its centenary while in power at the center.  Clearly, Congress faintheartedness cannot be allowed to get infectious. 

INDIA’S GRAND STRATEGY: ON TRACK

India’s Grand Strategy is not given out in a written policy document. However, its contours can be pieced together from the Prime Minister’s statements such as the yearly one from the ramparts of the Red Fort and from the actions being taken by the government on various fronts. This article attempts to make sense of India’s grand strategy. In doing so, it arrives at a conclusion markedly different from the spate of somber commentaries that greeted India’s Independence Day.

The refrain is that UPA II is a dysfunctional dispensation, much prone to infighting. Its coalition partners, tying down hefty ministerships in agriculture and railways, are a liability. Critics have it that the aging Prime Minister is waiting for handing over the reins to the next generation of the Gandhis. The party is in disarray in its critical home base, Andhra Pradesh. Kashmir burns. The CBI is barking up the wrong tree in Gujarat. The CRPF is lost in the jungles of Central India. The multiple blockades in the North East cast a shadow over the future. The CWG have driven the corruption index through the roof. Inflation is also through the roof. The Bollywood commentary on the times, Peepli Live, is entirely plausible.

The main line of critique is that India requires to grow at ten per cent in case it is to accommodate the demographic trends staring India in the face. India’s rise is to be economy driven and the economy is to be private sector led. This would place it favourably in the eventual face-off with China later. This requires infrastructure needs and governance and security issues to be addressed by the government. Since the government’s approach appears slovenly, India is said to lack variously national will, grand strategy, leadership etc. India is adrift.

However, a review of the initiatives of the UPA II seems to suggest that it is embarked on the right direction. Whether it gets anywhere, time will tell. It has major initiatives, in the tradition of UPA I’s coup de grace of MGNREGA and RTI, in the offing. There is the Right to Education Bill that seeks a demographic dividend. The Food Security Bill is to cast current reports of godowns overflowing with rotting grain a part of history. A revised Nuclear Liability Bill is to enable future energy needs for the growing economy. The trade with China, our largest trading partner, is set to top $ 60 billion. This would help avert conflict and moderate crisis someday. India has offered aid to Pakistan in its hour of need with the PM talking to his Pakistani counterpart on phone in an act of ‘disaster diplomacy’ of potentially long term consequence.

But two particular advances on the internal security front dispel the notion of a non-performing government. The two foremost threats have over the past decade been the rise of Maoism and of terrorism.

Though the casualty figures of the CRPF rightly suggest that action against Naxalism leaves much to be desired, the story has more to it. The latest is that the final clearance for South Korean steelmaker Posco’s project at Jagatsinghpur, in Orissa, will have to wait till settlements rights under Forest Rights Act, 2006, is complete.
Jairam Ramesh’s MoEF plans to send a team to undertake, ‘with due diligence’ in the words of the news report, the settlement of forest dwellers’ rights. Apparently there is cause to suspect the Jagatsinghpur collector’s report which said, “no claim for settlement of rights from tribals and traditional forest dwellers has been received.”

But more significantly, the mining giant, Vedanta, has been found to be afoul of the Forest Rights Act and the Forest Conservation Act in collusion with state officials implementing a fast tracked policy of mineral exploitation with political blessings. The NC Saxena committee report in preserving the Nyamgiri Hills, sacred to the Dongaria Kondh and the Kutia Kondh tribes, prevented a real life adaptation of the theme of the Hollywood megahit, Avatar.

This implies the state is serious, to the extent it can, of taking the ‘root causes’ approach to counter insurgency. In not deploying the military to chase down Naxals and persisting with CRPF, at some political cost, it has sensibly not militarized its response. Instead, it appears resolved that the experience in Bellary, the stronghold of BJP leader Sushma Swaraj and the Reddy brothers propping up the BJP ministry in Bangalruru, is not to be repeated. A commission under the Commission of Enquiries Act of 1952 is on the cards. A National Mining Regulatory Authority Act is in the pipeline.

Clearly, the Sonia headed NAC appears to be back in action. NC Saxena is one of its members. To it is credited the backing of the common man for the Congress in the last elections. It has appropriated to itself the need to ensure that growth is an inclusive process, as promised by the Prime Minister from the Red Fort: ‘When our Government came to power in 2004, we resolved to build a new India under a progressive social agenda. We wanted the fruits of development to reach the common man.’

There is a consensus that India needs to come to grips with the Arjun Sengupta report pegging the poverty figures at 836 million people living on less than Rs 20 a day. The divergence is on the means to this end. Those enamoured of the growth rate opine that trickle down from the ten per cent figure is necessary to reduce these. Headlines, such as farmers protesting land alienation to the Noida-Agra expressway, indicate that this may not be enough.

The second major initiative is that of the Supreme Court. The Court appointed CBI team has zeroed in on the junior home minister in Gujarat for an ‘encounter’ killing, one passed off as one Jihadi terrorist less. Alongside another minister, Kodnani, has been displaced from the ministry for her role in the Gujarat pogrom by the working of the Raghavan team, yet again one appointed by the Court. This constraining of the forces of majoritarian nationalism is what has led in part to the absence of terror attacks, perpetrated by extremists of any camp, over the recent past.

From a security point of view those dispossessed by India’s infrastructure needs would be vulnerable to revolutionary propaganda. The Maoist threat, reportedly already in urban alleyways, would grow. Response incapacity would make the right wing stake claim to steward the state. The majority-minority cleavage would reopen for exploitation, reinforcing plausibility of the right wing’s claims to having answers.

India is not out of the woods yet. A ten per cent growth rate, as seen, may not be the right route out. The Center appears to be on the right track. The hope is that it does not get waylaid.