It must be recognised that India is now a full-blooded capitalist country, said historian Irfan Habib at a recent lecture here on the 70th anniversary of Independence.
The octogenarian Padma Bhushan awardee added that as India turned into a major capitalist economy, the large parties such as the Congress and the BJP “have worked largely in unison as far as conformity of views with those of big business is concerned…” Habib also noted that the BJP “can serve the interests of capital with much greater promptitude and zeal than the Congress.”
This unprecedented growth of the BJP could be the hallmark of the politics of the third quarter of India’s independence. From a party with just two seats in 1984, it grew to be the single largest party in both Houses of Parliament with a total number of 339 members in 2017. The party’s members are in the top Constitutional posts of the country — President Ram Nath Kovind, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BJP or its allies run governments in 18 States across the country.
BJP patriarch LK Advani, who has been sidelined of late, attributed the success of the party to “the ideological movement” of which the BJP is an integral part: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), founded by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar in 1925. “It is precisely because of the massive, and steadily growing, collective strength of our ideological family that our adversaries have mounted the most vicious attack on us,” Advani said at a leadership meeting of the BJP in 2009.
The party always appealed to the Hindu vote bank. It has used issues such as the Shah Bano case, the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Article 370 and special status to Jammu and Kashmir, uniform civil code and even the worship of cows to garner votes. The rupture of the Congress and the huge scams it had to deal with during the UPA regime between 2004 and 2014 helped the BJP improve its credibility quotient and become the largest party in the country, step by step. The riots in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh ended up in communal polarisation.
On the other side, the assassinations of former Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi (in 1984) and Rajiv Gandhi (1991) created a leadership vacuum within the Congress. Former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s attempts to reorient the Congress from the pro-socialist camp to a market-friendly party met with instant success. Since 1991, the Congress has shown a commitment to reforms, even at the cost of its political future.
The party faced massive electoral setbacks in the 1996, 1998 and 1999 Lok Sabha elections. During these years, it looked as if the country was never going to have one-party rule. Rajiv’s widow Sonia Gandhi assumed charge and steered the party to victory in the 2004 and 2009 elections. However, the Congress failed to assess the aspirations of the emerging India, just as it failed to address effectively issues such as farmers’ distress, unemployment and urban migration. Corruption has been the trademark of the Congress’s style of functioning and it suffered the biggest setback in history in 2014, securing just 44 seats in the Lok Sabha.
The other opposition parties and regional outfits also faced a crisis. The Singur-Nandigram issues isolated the CPI(M) in West Bengal, the State where it ruled for 34 years. Socialist parties faced successive splits since 1977, and their leadership went to regional satraps such as Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad, Navin Patnaik or HD Deve Gowda. Regional players such as the Trinamool Congress, the AIADMK, the DMK or the PDP routinely face pressure from the Centre in the form of investigations into alleged corruption scandals.
At that point, a powerful leadership emerged in the BJP with Narendra Modi and Amit Shah as its axis. Electoral victories in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Assam cemented the position of the Modi-Shah team in the BJP.
This centralisation of power, however, raised questions on the increasing authoritarian tendencies in a democratic set-up. The Rajya Sabha — when the BJP still had a smaller presence there — was effectively undermined when important Bills were taken up by Parliament. There were allegations that the BJP used money and muscle power in Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Goa and during the recent Rajya Sabha elections from Gujarat. Attacks against Dalits, minorities and other weaker sections increased.
As CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury told BusinessLine in an interview, the effort of this government has been to transform the secular democratic character of the republic into the RSS’s vision of a fascistic Hindu Rashtra. “Everything else — the attacks on the content of education, on the universities with a progressive character, on minorities, the effort to replace Indian history with Indian mythology, Indian philosophy with the study of Hindu theology — fits into the overall character of the present regime and its effort to push the secular, liberal Indian democracy towards a Hindu Rashtra,” Yechury said.