Old politics in a new bottle
India has room for social democratic politics but no party is up to the task
It took a while, but in the end two rivals in Bihar politics have joined hands to fight the forthcoming assembly elections in the state. Nitish Kumar, chief minister of Bihar and leader of the Janata Dal (United), or JDU, and Lalu Prasad, leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) will work together in a coalition that hopes to come to power in Patna again. It is an old socialist experiment being repeated.
The coalition had a long gestation period—almost a year. Some issues took time to resolve. For example, who will be the chief minister of Bihar? On Monday, both parties agreed on Kumar’s name. The overall complexion of the coalition was, however, always clear: Secularism and social justice are the two pillars on which the arrangement rests.
There is plenty of room for social democratic parties in India. The key idea at the root of all such politics, egalitarianism, however defined, remains potent. In a nation with a substantial number of poor and underprivileged people, there is a lot that can be done. Take the idea of a universal basic income for all citizens. This is one of the least disruptive and non-distorting interventions that a government can carry out. Suppose each Indian family, irrespective of age and income, were to get a universal basic income instead. Even a rough calculation shows that for a country of 1.2 billion people, handing out R5,000 (or even R10,000) per year to a family will not impose a heavy burden on the exchequer. Is this direct income a better option as compared with the rights-based approach of the past decade?
These are questions that require careful deliberation and can take a social democratic party far. But the current alliance, or any of its constituents, are incapable of addressing them, intellectually and politically. For one, the alliance is reactive in nature, born out of a fear of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s sweep in last year’s general election. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain how Kumar and Prasad, sworn enemies in Bihar politics, could form an alliance. For another, the issues mentioned above require a pan-Indian vision. The reality is that most socialist parties—all can trace their provenance to the erstwhile Janata family—are localized entities now. There is no socialist party that has an India-wide presence.
This makes for a formidable structural problem for any socialist party with India-wide ambitions. Should these parties coalesce into a single party to do this? Or should they first consolidate at the regional level and then form a national coalition? History suggests that they are content with forming governments at the state-level, and if they assume control at the centre, the experiment is short-lived. These contradictions can be seen in the present alliance too. Kumar had bigger dreams than just being chief minister of Bihar. He made a good start in Patna, eschewing short-sighted caste politics. But a series of political miscalculations from 2012 to 2014 forced him to fall back on the time-tested formula of one-caste, one-party that has been the bane of the socialist parties in the Hindi heartland. Now the fight between him and Prasad is purely for political gains and not the ideals that defined socialist outfits in the 1960s. Both harbour the desire to become chief minister while paying lip service to checking the “communal” BJP.
In fact, one can go further and even question the basis for socialist politics in India. In each instance of such experimentation, from the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal in late 1960s all the way down to Inder Kumar Gujral, who served as prime minister in the short-lived United Front government (1996-1998), it is personal ambition that has defined the limits of socialist politics in India. This is strange, to say the least: how is it that parties professing concern over justice and social emancipation have fallen victim to individual goals of their leaders? Surely, this sort of politics is to be found in parties such as the BJP and the Congress and not socialist parties like the JDU and RJD. This contradiction has never been resolved. Talented politicians like Chandra Shekhar, Ramakrishna Hegde and V.P. Singh, to name just a few, have all fallen victim to soaring ambition. That history is being repeated in Bihar.
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Business NewsOpinionOld politics in a new bottle
First Published:10 Jun 2015, 01:32 AM IST
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