:: Balbir Punj

BJP, Cong are adversaries, not enemies

By Balbir K. Punj

A chance meeting at the Delhi airport has helped highlight an emerging problem of great import to the Indian polity. According to a national newspaper, the Leader of the Opposition L.K. Advani and the young Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi came across each other at the airport lounge. The BJP leader was going to Gujarat for campaigning and the Congress general secretary was on his way to Amethi in Uttar Pradesh.

In true Bharatiya tradition, it was the younger man who walked to the veteran BJP leader to greet him. Gandhi is stated to have asked Advani about his "mid-term views" on the national polity. Advani's response was that the UP election results showed that the two mainstream parties' political space was shrinking, while the regional forces were extending their reach. Gandhi reportedly agreed with this view as also with the BJP leader's concern about the consequences. At this, Advani suggested that the Congress and the BJP should treat each other as political adversaries and not as enemies.

Whether Rahul Gandhi agreed with this view or not is not known. But the issue cannot be brushed aside. Only the other day finance minister P. Chidambaram was lamenting how two areas of reforms that he considered critical for progress were being stalled - banking, insurance and pensions. Though he did not say by whom the roadblocks were being erected, it was obvious: the culprit is the Left. The obvious answer for the Congress should be to explore whether the BJP, a mainstream political party, would support it in such a situation. When the NDA was in power, and found that reforms like the electricity bill were being stalled, it worked out with the Congress a strategy of support, and got them passed through Parliament despite Left opposition.

Even on the controversial nuclear deal, the predicament the government finds itself in because of Left opposition, could have been mitigated had the Prime Minister taken the trouble to get the BJP on his side through honest consultation. But the PM did not do so for fear of being attacked by the Left for collaborating with the "communal" BJP. The Left opposition to the deal is intense because of its pathological anti-Americanism. The Congress could have easily acknowledged that neither itself nor the BJP had any pathological hatred for America. But then in this government it is the Left tail that wags the Congress dog. That is the problem.

In every successful democracy, several national policies are forged through bipartisan support. Whether in the US or the UK or Germany, bipartisan politics is expressly practised, overcoming political rivalries, because that strengthens the government's hand in policy implementation and provides continuity to governments even while the party in power and Opposition may change places.

Branding the Opposition as "national enemy" is what has prevented the full play of bipartisan politics in this country. Ever since the complete ascendancy of the Nehru family in the Congress, the party has harboured this attitude towards the Opposition - more particularly, first towards the Jan Sangh and then the BJP. Ironically, the promoters of this "communal" tag, the Communists themselves, had no compunction in supporting or aligning with the BJP in opposition to the Congress when it suited them.

In the first flush of Samyukta Vidhayak Dal politics in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, MP and elsewhere in the late Sixties, the entire non-Congress Opposition joined hands against the Congress. This continued in the Seventies and the first non-Congress Janata government at the Centre had Marxist support. The Bofors issue in the Eighties saw all non-Congress parties in Parliament joining hands against the Congress, and even forcing a mid-term poll. At the initial stages, the V.P. Singh-led Janata government had support both from the BJP and the Left. In 1991, when P.V. Narasimha Rao took over as the leader of the Congress government at the Centre, he cultivated support from the BJP as his was a minority government.

It is the communal vote-bank politics of the Congress and the Left that has disrupted such inter-party cooperation. The self-styled secularists have sought to isolate the BJP in the hope that it would go away. A policy of avoiding the BJP has been fashioned in recent years, but the BJP remains in its own strength very near the Congress in the Lok Sabha, despite the NDA losing the general elections in 2004. The political apartheid, in any case, came to a nought when the NDA was formed in 1999, with several regional parties supporting the BJP.

The best demonstration of the irrelevance of the communal tag came when Deve Gowda's party, calling itself JD (Secular) did not hesitate to make common cause with the BJP to share power in Karnataka. The Gowda-led party had split from the JD claiming that it was doing so because JD, as JD(U), was aligning with the BJP in the NDA coalition. The same Gowda started negotiating with the BJP when the political situation demanded it. Remember, that this same man who was living in well deserved obscurity in Karnataka's backyard, was presented as an icon of secularism and anointed as Prime Minister in June 1996 to keep the "communal" BJP out, following the resignation of the 13-day-old Vajpayee government. All this shows how farcical and irrelevant is the "communal" tag that the Left uses in its attempt to isolate the BJP from other parties.

The issue that Advani raised with Rahul Gandhi, namely the shrinking of political space of the two mainstream parties, has other implications as well. The Left has an extremely limited space, and is confined to just three states out of the 30 in the country. For the Left, and for the regional parties, the divide, bordering on untouchability, between the two mainstream parties helps them expand their own clout, as has been seen in the case of the Left-Congress relationship. The so-called regional forces have, in effect, been nothing more than personal fiefdoms of leaders like Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Chandrababu Naidu, the Gowdas, M. Karunanidhi, J. Jayalalithaa, etc.

The more the mainstream parties are kept apart with clever manipulation, the more the regional parties (including the largest regional party, the CPM) will gain political space. Their little agendas overwhelm the national agenda. Their regional approach eclipses the national view point. The nation is burdened with small men who cannot think big.

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at bkpunj@gmail.com