The states of the nation will determine the state of India
Change is a mist which floats through events, often obscured by the daily cloudburst of facts. It is noticed least by those it affects most.
Politicians have a sharper eye than they are given credit for, but they can miss the obvious. A tectonic shift is taking place in the structure of party politics. After a long and dominant reign, the high command is dead. It has become a dinosaur, a museum piece whose skeletal jaw hints at the massive bite it once possessed. Sonia Gandhi and LK Advani are the last inheritors of a concept that has exhausted its moment in history. After them, there will be command, but it will not be very high.
As in so much else, Mahatma Gandhi institutionalised the idea. In 1919, when he took control, he reinvented a top-heavy Congress with some radical engineering. He created a pyramid without slopes. Gandhi sat, or strode, at the apex. Across the wide base were the masses, busy building crypts in which Gandhi intended to bury the British Empire. The relationship between people and leader was direct, without intermediaries, nourished by mutual sacrifice and commitment. Gandhi was transparent about his methods. He called himself a dictator before anyone could accuse him of being one.
Ascent between base and summit was by nomination, as Subhas Bose was to discover when he claimed an independent share of the mantle.
Of course Gandhi never imagined that Congress would become family property merely one generation after his martyrdom, but his pyramid-without-sides was perfectly suited for a dynastic module in which a different set of Gandhis claimed the first word and had the last one. The seal of authority is with the family, not the prime minister, whether the issue be a minor nominee for any position or partition of a state like Andhra Pradesh.
Non-Congress parties devised variations peculiar to individual culture. Communists imported their command structure from the Soviet Union; it lasted about as long as the Soviet Union. The Marxist politburo is a pale shadow of what it was even under Harkishen Singh Surjit. Today, the Bengal and Kerala parties shrug and take their own decisions.
India’s melee of socialists, who were more democratic than Congress but not necessarily more egalitarian, despised the idea of command so much that they went the extra mile and destroyed their leaders. The movement, paradoxically, could only survive by splitting. It has quietly abandoned ideology for caste, and inducted some stability through family rule in smaller but more homogenous units.
The BJP created a high command, RSS, which served primarily as a guardian of ideology. This involved some contradictions. When the BJP was too weak to protect the Indian state in a national crisis, RSS gave nation priority over party and readily allied with Congress PM Lal Bahadur Shastri during the 1965 war with Pakistan, lauded Mrs Indira Gandhi as a goddess after the formation of Bangladesh in 1971 and helped her during the seminal challenges from secessionist forces in the 1980s despite the fact that she had banned RSS during the Emergency. On a parallel course, RSS interacted with BJP through a small set of Delhi leaders, who thereby also became pre-eminent figures in the party.
A rising federal impulse has also changed the character of parties. If chief ministers now bring in the votes, they will also take the decisions. The central government does not manage any geography; CMs administer the country. Delhi is almost quasi-colonial. It collects taxes, shapes legislation and takes some responsibility for security, but any policy relevant to the people, including food security, is the business of states. Delhi might, for electoral reasons, usurp advertising rights, but the real annadata is the chief minister.
This phenomenon has strengthened regional formations, but also exposed their limitations, for none of them is in a position to provide the strong kernel without which a national alliance becomes too flimsy to survive. The solution to this conundrum? National parties with strong regional spokes.
Indian politics will mirror India. The balance of power within BJP has shifted. Its CMs are not beholden to Delhi; if anything, it is the other way round. The leadership tensions we report today are part of the transition process. Congress is less tense only because its provincial leadership has been emasculated. And yet, even a weakling like Kiran Reddy can threaten to split over Telengana; while in Assam a confident Tarun Gogoi swats away local ambition promoted by Delhi. Gogoi has measured the high command and knows it has potency issues.
Rahul Gandhi will not be able to run Congress as his mother has done, let alone his grandmother, Indira Gandhi. If he had a stronger personality he might have postponed the inevitable, but not prevented it. Change took its time, but it has arrived. The states of the nation will determine the state of India.
The writer is a senior Indian journalist.
