Not cricket

It’s always a little tricky to mix cricket with politics. But tomorrow is the day of the trust vote in the Indian parliament. It is likely to be a petty and pathetic event with historic consequences. Since my interest in politics rivals that in cricket, and since the stakes of this are very high, I thought I would throw my two cents into the picture here.

First of all, my political affiliations, which might well put off some of those who agree with my cricket views. I am rabidly opposed to the BJP. I think far-right, fundamentalist parties that at the end of the day base their politics around xenophobia are dangerous anywhere in the world, and they have shown time and again to be dangerous to the Indian context. Regardless of whether one is a secularist who does not like the communalization of the polity; a socialist who wishes to have political priorities set for the common man rather than the elites; or a globalization supporter who wishes to create a stable climate for the growth of business or capital; the BJP’s myopic and hate-based politics is antithetical to those interests. There was a time a decade or so ago – before the BJP actually had much experience governing – when they could make the claim to be “the party of good governance”, and people believed them. After 6 years of BJP misrule at the centre, and any number of similar experiences in various state governments, even that claim cannot stand scrutiny. Another myth is that the BJP is not problematic when it practices a “soft” Hindutva, of the Vajpayee version. But so-called “soft” Hindutva has simply been a mask to legitimize virulent Hindutva, just as John McCain’s so-called “moderate” Republicanism is completely in sync with the most right-wing elements of American politics and society. At the end of the day, all fundamentalist parties – and both the BJP and the Republicans are examples of this – have at their core the belief that some people are inherently superior to others. And such a core belief is always one step away from violence, exclusionary politics, war and in extreme situations genocide. Regardless of my opinions of the nuclear deal, there is no way that I can support a situation that facilitates their return to power.

Then there is the Congress. They have hardly covered themselves in glory over the nuclear deal. Again, regardless of the merits of the deal per se – they have bungled the situation both from the perspective of policy and politics. Both sound policy and their own political interests would have been facilitated had they been open and transparent about the deal, had they actually made even a gesture of taking the nation into confidence, had they actually tried to argue the merits of the deal in a public forum. Instead, they have been secretive and intransigent; have gone on about the fact that the nuclear deal is in the nation’s interests without at any point indicating how; have dug their heels in the most unbecoming manner; and have further sullied their image by openly practicing in horse-trading in the lead up to the confidence vote. Even if the Congress was to win the confidence vote, their image would be seriously tarnished, and they will spend their last year in office kowtowing to the whims and fancies of Mulayam Singh Yadav and sundry others. Any legitimacy that they might have will be thrown out the window.

The first political mistake the Congress made was to not call a mid-term election a year ago, when their position was far more secure. Now, they have suffered a string of electoral defeats at the state level, they will be blamed for rising inflation (even if other structural factors are at play), and their credibility will be seriously tarnished regardless of the outcome of the confidence vote. Whether they survive another week or another year, they have created the ideal conditions of possibility for the BJP to form the next government.

The larger mistake of the Congress however was not political but policy, and that was their failure to adhere to the Common Minimum Programme that they drew up with their coalition partners when they came to power. The CMP was in fact a quite remarkable document, because it attempted to meld an imaginative global-oriented market agenda with policies that focused on human resource development. The mistake of both the Narasimha Rao government and the BJP government was that they both assumed that an embrace of the free market alone would trickle down to solve basic problems like education, health, electricity, water and other human resource issues, even though trickle down has never worked anywhere in the world over the last two centuries. And they both assumed that pretending that the majority of Indians simply don’t exist, and catering to the elite urban ruling class, would be sufficient to keep them in power – a point whose lie was dramatically demonstrated in the 2004 elections, when no amount of India Rising or India Shining nonsense could hide the fact that basic developmental issues had been neglected for a large majority of the Indian population, and those were the issues around which most Indians voted. Adhering to the CMP would have allowed a terrific opportunity to experiment with an embrace of the market (important for all sorts of reasons) with a serious attention to questions of human development. A focus on basic issues such as poverty alleviation would have made not just good policy, but also good politics, and could have allowed the Congress, over time, to wipe the BJP off the electoral map. Instead, the Congress played the same old dalal game that they have played for the last four decades – doing business with powerful and opportunistic elites abroad, and doing business with ruthless and opportunistic political interests at home. At the end of the day, dalal politics can only provide transient gains, because the other parties who are involved are going to look after their interests before they consider yours. In this way, the Congress has lost a historic opportunity to re-establish its hegemony as the legitimate ruling party of India. Regardless of one’s opinion of the nuclear deal, it is more than a tad pathetic that the matter of “principle” that Manmohan Singh has staked his government’s survival upon is honoring an agreement with George Bush.

However, none of this absolves the Left. Their “principled” opposition has been based in a hidebound, reactionary and reactive stance. If the Congress has done a poor job in explaining the benefits of the nuclear deal, the Left has made no effort whatsoever in explaining why it is bad for the nation. “Anti-imperialism” is a trite, jingoistic slogan; to say that every agreement that is made with the US is necessarily imperialist is simplistic. The BJP, the certain beneficiary of the Left’s high dudgeon, will not only rush to have nuclear agreements with the US, but will, unlike the Congress, try and use nuclear diplomacy towards an aggressive weapons program, as opposed to just civilian uses. But for me, the biggest irony is that the Left’s principled opposition to “imperialism” doesn’t seem to extend to its own backyard. After all, the Communists are the only party in the country to have embraced global capitalism so aggressively that they have inflicted violence and police brutality on villagers in order to dispossess them to construct Special Economic Zones, as they did in Nandigram. At that point, Leftist intellectuals / apologists assured us that Leftist violence was better than Rightist violence, because the Left at least defends secularism. And yet here is the Left engaged in games of political brinkmanship that are guaranteed to replace a secular government with the most odious of fundamentalist governments.

This is not the first time the Left has let the country down. Indeed, every time the Left has had an opportunity to take a historic stance in the national interest, it has failed. It opposed the Congress during the Quit India movement, effectively siding with the British Raj. It sided with Indira Gandhi during the Emergency instead of joining the democratic opposition to it. When it had a historic opportunity to lead a Third Front government in 1996, it decided against doing so, thereby dealing a severe blow to the long-term possibility of developing a viable Third Front. It attacked villagers in the state that it rules in order to protect the interests of capital. And now it is pulling the rug from under a secular government in ways that will most certainly benefit the BJP. When I was in college, Prakash Karat was for me the shining hope of Indian politics – articulate, principled, brave. He has now revealed himself to be an eighth-rate individual with absolutely no political intelligence.

The role that the Left is playing today is akin to the role that Ralph Nader played in facilitating Bush’s election win in 2000. But it is worse. In 2000, fair-minded people could argue that there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans because they had not experienced the extremes of Bush rule. In 2008, the Left ought to know the consequences of BJP rule, since we have experienced six years of it. The Left is acting like Nader in 2008. Imagine that Nader had the power this year to scuttle Obama’s chances of winning the election; imagine that he did so on a single issue in the full knowledge that on virtually every other issue, there were significant differences between the two candidates; imagine that whatever this single issue was happened to be something that Nader took the great moral high ground on, declaiming as if he was a saint and everyone else sinners; and imagine that on the side, he had also sent the police to kill a few people in rural Virginia so that the very sorts of policies he was voicing opposition to in one context could be upheld in another. And you have the Indian Left parties. They disgust me.

In terms of what will happen: In my opinion, the Congress is in a no-win situation regardless of the outcome of the vote. If the Congress loses the vote and there are elections, the BJP is bound to win, and might even come close to an absolute majority. If the Congress squeaks through, they will effectively be a lame-duck government for the next year, and will spend most of their time and energy attending to the whims and fancies of the Samajwadi Party. Their credibility will be so tarnished that it will just help the BJP in the coming months.

From the perspective of the Congress, the best outcome would be as follows: that they lose the confidence vote but, instead of elections, a government gets formed under Mayawati’s Prime Ministership. Regardless of one’s opinion of Mayawati – and I am certainly no fan of hers – one will have to concede that the possibility of a Dalit Prime Minister is as historic as the possibility of an African-American President in the US. There is however no possibility of Mayawati forming a government unless either the BJP or the Congress supports it, because the numbers don’t exist for the so-called Third Front to form a government on its own at this point. There is absolutely no hope of the BJP supporting a Mayawati government when an election is almost certain to bring them to power. So the only possibility for a Mayawati government would be for the Congress to give it outside support.

If the Congress loses the vote, I think it will be a stroke of political genius for it to support Mayawati from the outside rather than call elections. This will stymie the BJP; give the Congress time to regroup; and allow the Congress to build bridges with a politician who is likely to be a major player in the formation of governments after any future election. It will also allow the public to measure the performance of the Congress against that of its successor; there is a very good chance that the Congress will start looking rather good in comparison. But most of all, it will give the Left a kick where it hurts most. It will be impossible for the Left to be supporting the same government as the Congress after creating all these shenanigans; a Mayawati government supported by the Congress will be the ultimate testament to the Left’s political irrelevance. And that is a lesson they deserve.

Failing this, I cannot imagine any other outcome than five more years of BJP rule, either sooner or later. And that is a very dark thought indeed. One that the Communists can take pride in making possible. What a glorious legacy, Mr. Karat.