Fractured democracies

The BJP's ideological commitment and disruptive tactics pose a threat to the survival of the Constitution.

"A society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nature of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish. What is the spirit of moderation? It is the temper which does not press a partisan advantage to its bitter end, which can understand and will respect the other side, which feels a unity between all citizens - real and not the factitious product of propaganda - which recognises their common fate and their common aspirations, in a word, which has faith in the sacredness of the individual."

Judge Learned Hand, who spoke thus in 1942, was the wisest and most erudite of American judges who did not grace the Bench of the Supreme Court. What he said of a democratic polity riven by a deep, apparently unbridgeable, chasm is true of presidential as well as parliamentary democracies. His words have a contemporary relevance both for the United States, whose government the neocons control, and for India where the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)-controlled Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claims to be a party with a difference and rejects the values on which the national consensus rests. Its credo - Hindutva - is inherently divisive and splits the nation apart.

Bill Clinton was attacked by the Republican leader Bob Dole on the very day of his inauguration in January 1993. The BJP cannot accept the fact that it has been rejected by the people in a democratic contest in the 2004 general elections. Five days after the Mumbai blasts of July 11, L.K. Advani demands a general election, for another chance to win power. The BJP's response to the blasts was disgracefully partisan.

Republicans claim that theirs is the only party that can protect the nation's security. Voters trust "the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America", Karl Rove, George W. Bush's adviser, told his party in January 2002, shortly after 9/11, while urging it to make this an issue in the polls. On March 13, 2004, during the general election campaign in India, Advani said: "A solution to the [India-Pakistan] issue is possible, but not easy. There is a change in the attitude of Pakistan. I would not say why." What he added is shocking: "The BJP alone can find a solution to our problems with Pakistan because Hindus will never think that whatever we have done can be a sell-out. The Congress can never do this because Hindus will never trust it."

This is, historically, a brazen falsehood, as he well knows. Hindus, indeed, the nation at large, supported successive Congress Prime Ministers when they concluded accords with Pakistan. Advani can never touch any subject without communalising it and thus widening the divide. Be it Kashmir, the boundary dispute with China or even an issue like Siachen, an accord will succeed best if it is based on national consensus. Indira Gandhi went ahead with the Shimla Pact in 1972, overriding the Jan Sangh's opposition articulated by A.B. Vajpayee. The agreement was a success.

When in power, the BJP demanded the Congress' support even for the perilous and hare-brained Operation Parakram. The Congress went along for fear of seeming unpatriotic. Similar inhibitions have paralysed the Democrats in the U.S. and rendered it unfit for national leadership at a moment when the Bush administration's chickens are flocking home to roost in large numbers. As in India, many in the media have also been pulverised.

Paul Krugman remarked recently on "the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on", namely the unconstitutional amassment of power by the White House and systematic violation of citizens' rights while Bush's foreign policy meets defeat everywhere. The media world is split ideologically. So is the U.S. Supreme Court.

In another column in The New York Times, Krugman wrote: "In case you haven't noticed, modern American politics is marked by vicious partisanship, with the great bulk of the viciousness coming from the right. It's clear that the Republican plan for the 2006 election is, once again, to question Democrats' patriotism." Citing a recent study, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches by three scholars, Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, he says that "for the past century, political polarisation and economic inequality have moved hand in hand. Politics during the Gilded Age, an era of huge income gaps, was a nasty business - as nasty as it is today. The era of bipartisanship, which lasted for roughly a generation after World War II, corresponded to the high tide of America's middle class. That high tide began receding in the late 1970s, as middle-class incomes grew slowly at best while incomes at the top soared; and as income gaps widened, a deep partisan divide re-emerged. Both the decline of partisanship after World War II and its return in recent decades mainly reflected the changing position of the Republican Party on economic issues" (emphasis added throughout).

During and after the War, the middle class prospered, the rich suffered. After the late 1970s, as the rich became richer, Republicans became increasingly partisan. However, a party whose economic policies favour the privileged few badly needs other issues to secure an electoral majority, besides campaigns of smear against opponents. Republicans used the cards of religion and security. They spoke of "terrorism" and "attacks on the faith". Opponents must be branded as agnostics and traitors. The BJP's bankrupt economics are of a piece with its Hindutva ideology and its aspersions on the patriotism of those who differ.

Krugman writes: "So what should we do about all this? I won't offer the Democrats advice right now, except to say that tough talk on national security and affirmations of personal faith won't help. The other side will smear you anyway. But I would like to offer some advice to my fellow pundits: Face reality. There are some commentators who long for the bipartisan days of yore, and flock eagerly to any politician who looks `centrist'. But there isn't any centre in modern American politics. And the centre won't return until we have a new New Deal, and rebuild our middle class." P.V. Narasimha Rao thought he could beat the BJP by practising soft Hindutva, and failed.

The British historian Godfrey Hodgson was shocked to see how "viciously polarised" American politics had become. We live in "confrontational times", an American writer rued. In truth, the entire South Asia presents a dismal picture of politics split by populist slogans raised by authoritarian founders of political dynasties. Z.A. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party with its roti, kapda aur makaan (bread, cloth and home) was ranged against all others. Rigged elections in 1977 paved the way for Zia's coup that year. Give them a chance and Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif will be at each other's throat. In Sri Lanka, it was the same story of "them vs us". S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike let loose the demon of Sinhala chauvinism, challenging the others to beat him at this game. His wife followed the tradition and was authoritarian. In Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman installed a dictatorship in 1975 and came to grief. Thirty years later, the rift between the Awami League and others has not healed. It has widened. Only in Nepal did King Gyanendra's assault on democracy force the parties to unite.

What of India? The Jan Sangh hated Jawaharlal Nehru, the most committed and articulate of secularists. It could do little about his national appeal despite the presence of its sympathisers in the Congress. It was Indira Gandhi who split the polity in 1969 by splitting the Congress and launching a campaign to secure a "committed" civil service and judiciary and encouraging pliant journalists. The Emergency of 1975 brought her opponents together, but only to part again. Just when it seemed that the polity was recovering in 1990, it was Advani's turn to create an unbridgeable divide; this time, in the name of religion - Hindutva.

The campaign began with the BJP's Palampur resolution on Ayodhya, rose to a crescendo with his rath yatra in 1990, and culminated in the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. Having reaped electoral dividends, he found himself cheated of the Prime Minister's post in 2004, facing even more depressingly, a receding prospect of acquiring it in the future. That is, unless the Congress party and/or its allies present power on a platter to the BJP as the Janata Party and its supporters did to Indira Gandhi in 1979 and the Congress did to the BJP in 1997. As Adenauer remarked, the Almighty limited the intelligence of man but placed no corresponding limits on his folly. But if the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government functions well and survives, the BJP will find the ground under its feet slipping away. It will be reduced to a shambles.

No Constitution can work well if national consensus is absent or if there is no viable party system. India has not yet succeeded in evolving such a system. The ad hoc coalitions of 1977, 1989, 1996, 1998 and 2004, which ensured change of power at the Centre, testify to that failure.

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, that "however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution can provide only the organs of the state such as the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary. The factors on which the working of these organs of the state depends are the people and the political parties they will set up as their instruments to carry out their wishes and their politics. Who can say how the people of India and their parties will behave?"

In the last two years, the Lok Sabha has worked fitfully. Aspersions have been cast on Speaker Somnath Chatterjee despite his creditable performance in the Chair. What is not realised is that the BJP's ideological commitment and its disruptive tactics pose a threat to the survival of the Constitution and to the democratic parliamentary system.

As for ideology, since it is rooted neither in economics nor in politics but in the religion of the majority community, Hindutva is inherently divisive and not susceptible to compromise. We know how the BJP behaved in the six years that it was in power under the umbrella of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Imagine how it would behave were it to secure a majority by itself. Its ideology touches the very foundations of the Indian state and of the Union of India. As Hans Morgenthau pointed out, "All politically civilised societies - in contrast to tyrannies - owe their continuing existence to a consensus concerning at least the foundations of society and to the power of the government to enforce that consensus against recalcitrant minorities."

A deep divide between the political parties inevitably affects the working of the Constitution. In his introduction to the third edition of Walter Bagehot's classic The English Constitution, the statesman A.J. Balfour opined that if the divisions among the political parties "tend to be either too numerous or too profound, the successful working of British institutions may be difficult or impossible. It may indeed be least possible where the arts of parliamentary persuasion and the dexterities of party management are brought to their highest perfection... a change of administration would in fact be a revolution disguised under a constitutional procedure."

People who talk glibly about review or reform of the Constitution miss this aspect. Of course, review and reform can help, though not of the kind the M.N. Venkatachaliah Committee appointed by the BJP attempted. But the main flaw is that political conventions of the parliamentary system work when there is a balance of political forces that accept the system and the ideology on which the state was founded. The BJP rejects the ideal of secularism on which the Constitution rests, prevaricating about "pseudo-secularism". Its parent, the RSS, is not committed to the Constitution.

However, as a U.S. Intelligence report of May 29, 1998, remarked prophetically, "the BJP is not invincible... a number of developments could cause the party's popular support to erode". The report was published on April 13, 2006, by the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. along with other U.S. intelligence reports. The tensions within the BJP, with its allies and its mentor the RSS were set out in this as well as an earlier report of April 19, 1998. The report of May 29, 1998, had a section on "cultural assimilation" that recorded: "The BJP calls for an undivided India that is united by Hindu culture." This is what the BJP reduced the country's image to, internationally. "Hindu national theorists reject the pacifist strains of Indian nationalism and champion images of martial prowess and strength. They insist that India's regional primacy be asserted vigorously. Attempts by external powers - the United States and China, in particular - to alter the Delhi-centric balance of power in the subcontinent by supporting India's neighbours are opposed bitterly."

The documents reveal clearly that the U.S. had absolutely no illusions about: (a) the spuriousness of the BJP's commitment to secularism; (b) the depth of its commitment to Hindutva; (c) its dependence on the RSS; (d) the RSS' real character; (e) Vajpayee's doubletalk; (f) the BJP's vulnerability. It was not "invincible", as it imagined. Which is why it has not yet recovered from its electoral debacle in 2004. The U.S. did not also have any illusions about the BJP's dependence on the tenuous partnership of two persons, neither of whom thinks much of the other - Vajpayee and Advani. In particular, the April 13, 1998, report said: "Vajpayee took pains to assure reporters in February 1998 that he, not BJP president L.K. Advani, would be Prime Minister in a BJP-led government. His comments struck many as a veiled threat to hardline colleagues that he had no intention of being upstaged."

But upstaged he was, at the Agra summit in July 2001; on the choice of the President; and on Godhra in March 2002. Frustrated, Vajpayee made Advani Deputy Prime Minister. Once out of power, Vajpayee has been busy upstaging Advani when he is not ostentatiously bailing him out of trouble. As La Rochefoucauld sagely said: "In the adversity of our friends there is something that pleases us."

The media have a lot to answer for. Large sections lionised Vajpayee and Advani. A good few became "embedded" with the Sangh Parivar and became its spokesmen. The BJP is a wasting resource. Vajpayee is out of electoral politics.

If demoralised by the UPA's success, Advani will follow suit. The seconds hate one another more than they detest their adversaries in other parties. The BJP will be shorn of all pretence and become a department of the RSS. Under Rajnath Singh it has moved halfway in that direction.

The UPA owes it to the country to galvanise secular forces, give battle to all communal forces ideologically, and hit the Sangh Parivar at its weakest point. The Parivar has no economic agenda worth the name. The UPA has a carefully drafted Minimum Common Programme. (It matters not that, of late, such documents have been called CMP not MCP.) The UPA must not let down Indian democracy. It cannot afford to be split by the forces of Hindutva.