Can Congress, BJP shrug off the past?

Suddenly the chill winds blowing through the corridors of the Congress headquarters in Delhi are not winter drafts as much as symptoms of loss and rejection. What had seemed an eminently workable piece of Parliamentary consensus is coming unstuck even before it had got off the ground. With the retired Supreme Court judge KT Thomas becoming the second legal luminary to refuse the job of selecting the Lokpal panel, the litany of woes for the Congress grows longer.

Too late in the day did Rahul Gandhi push for the ordinances to realise critical legislations; getting Jats OBC status is second best. So what is the Congress left with?

Right now, it must be feeling left out in the cold. What can it claim as its achievements that can persuade voters to its fold? The economy is not in good shape, the UPA’s first term till 2009 appears a distant memory; what sticks is the sense of confusion that has bedevilled it the last five years and that gives the feeling of a government asleep at the wheel.

Search for a word or a tagline to define the UPA and, more specifically, the Congress’s discursive identity, and you are likely to conjure up conflicting images. The simplicity of vision that marked the first term served it well to get re-elected because it rode on the crest of the boom that was yet to peter out. Its self-definition was concise and uncluttered. It stood for the new economic model of free markets, less of government crowding out the private sector.

Unencumbered by the Common Minimum Programme, forgotten with the exit of the Left from the alliance, the Congress, defying its historical legacy embraced the growth model that the organised economy had found so profitable. India was producing billionaires and the trickle down effect would work, so really that there seemed no need for the government to run up fiscal deficits.

But then something happened. The “family” stepped in through the National Advisory Council to re-anchor the party to its historical legacy. While some key ministers held fast to the new economic discourse of fiscal “management”, of reforms to liberalise sectors still untouched by the market force and turned a deaf ear to the growing clamour about corruption, other sections motivated by loyalty to the old discourse being pitched strongly by Sonia Gandhi (and later her son) gave the Congress an alternate image.

For the past five years the government seemed to be running on two tracks, and the twain did not seem to meet to present a coherent vision — either to itself or to the nation.

In fact, the Congress seemed to embody within itself the dichotomies evident in the nation; the urban elite ensconced in its self-perpetuating image of prosperity and the other, the dark hinterland of multiple deprivations.

So it was hardly surprising that the business of government came to a halt. Some policymakers, most notably those in North Block, carried on with typical optimism, addressing the sectarian concerns of the organised economy. But other ministries appeared to be paralysed by the bright lights of a resurgent social democratic agenda pursued assiduously by the Congress president and her son.

Unable to mesh the two visions, the party slipped from indifference into a kind of isolation. Lost in this inner confusion was the gravitas a government in control should inspire. Even Pranab Mukherjee was not on the same page with Rahul Gandhi whose push for the ordinances appeared a telling statement on the conflict within the party.

The BJP is not better equipped with clarity of vision either. Its prime ministerial candidate may have defined for the party an economic discourse that addresses the organised economy’s concerns about growth. In this the party will present a more dynamic sense of purpose, given the experience Modi has had with Gujarat. Many voters will be convinced of his powers to replicate the model nationally. To do that they would have to vest Modi with magical powers, because anyone can see that the problems ailing the organised economy are not the result of bad policymaking or governmental inactivity. But we need Gods and Modi’s campaign projects him as a deliverance from a corrupt, inefficient of the Congress. So in this sense this governance discourse sounds inclusionary.

But then the BJP as a party also carries a historical legacy of exclusion that it ca nnot hide or even erase. In a mirror image of the Congress that tried to shed its inclusionary ethos for the market oriented approach, the BJP is now trying to shed its exclusivist premises. It knows that image militates against its model of economic growth that it projects as a package of inclusion: prosperity for all.

But the market driven growth model is not inclusionary. There is enough evidence to show how it excludes as is evident from the low growth in employment in the most productive sectors of the economy. Add to that the BJP’s historical precedents of Hindutva and what you get is a discourse highly tainted by exclusion.

Both Modi and the party are aware of this and will walk that extra mile to sound inclusive. When party leader Rajnath Singh gets ready to apologise to Muslims you can see where that kind of plea comes from.

What we have in the run up to the elections are attempts by both parties to shed the weight of their legacies. The BJP would like to hide its exclusivist sectarian past and proclaim a more inclusionary vision. The Congress would have liked to forget its inclusionary past as a burden of fiscal profligacy and burdensome government. Its inability to do that despite the efforts of the mandarins in the party leaves it even more confused than the BJP.

Both would like to project themselves as the catalysts of the modern economy but in the case of the Congress it is more problematic because the Gandhi family keeps reasserting the legacy of social inclusion. As a result of their inner contradictions, both the BJP and Congress will project to be what they are not. So how will the voter decide?