Dwivedi may have diagnosis
Election time is not the best season for a harvest of good sense, letalone acute insight. It prefers the familiar, driving road-tested clichés to exhaustion. It was surprising therefore that Janardhan Dwivedi, a Congress general secretary, should choose an election eve to launch a long-distance trident that punctures three fundamental positions of his party. He acknowledges, courageously, that the present government has been a political disaster; he bemoans the rise of a new plutocracy within that is distant from the Indian voter; and he undermines the caste-reservations formula that has been a populist pillar of the entire democratic hierarchy. Dwivedi has lifted debate from that usual mundane swamp of me-too pandering.
Dwivedi says that Congress should not have formed the national government in 2009 despite a dramatic rise in seats and vote share. What precisely does he mean? After all, the only experience sweeter than election is re-election. It flies in the face of conventional logic that a political party should spurn such extraordinary endorsement. The talk within the beaming circles of Congress in 2009 was that they had created the base for a second high jump in 2014.
But Dwivedi suggests something far more audacious. He believes Congress, after having demolished BJP, should have challenged voters with a new dialectic. The new choice would not be between a resurgent Congress and crippled BJP, but between a coalition fatally flawed by compromise, and stable government. Because Congress did not raise this question in 2009, Narendra Modi is in a position to ask it now.
Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh had a perfect opportunity to create electoral history in those dramatic few days in May 2009 between their triumph and UPA2’s oath of office, when DMK threatened to withdraw support if its minister, A Raja, was not given the telecommunications portfolio. The reason had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with corruption.
Manmohan did not want to give telecommunications to DMK precisely because he knew it amounted to blackmail. The moment he succumbed, he lost that invaluable asset called moral authority. He could never regain it. If he had taken a risk, and gone back to the people in 2010, or even early 2011, asking for a single-party mandate, there would neither have been the shadow of Anna Hazare in the background nor the sight of Modi in the foreground. Or, as Dwivedi notes, Congress could have chosen to sit on opposition benches and waited for the slapdash alternative to crumble. By 2011 it could have blossomed into a 300-seat party.
Dwivedi, who comes from the Hindi heartland, traces the decline in Congress to its inability to seed regional leaders who were not educated abroad, or speak fluent English, or are “experts of new technology”. This is an unambiguous attack on the culture spawned by Rahul Gandhi, and endorsed by Sonia, without whose support Rahul might still be an understudy rather than an heir apparent.
Politics has no space for lost-and-found options. What is lost, remains lost. Dwivedi’s suggestion that the time has come to reconsider job and political reservations based on caste already seems lost in the immediate din. At one level, this will be written off as a Brahmin’s lament. Dwivedi, as his surname indicates, is a Brahmin. If this is nothing more than special pleading to woo Brahmins back towards Congress, then it is either irrelevant or counter-productive, since every Congress ally, or potential ally, is a personification of caste politics. (Watch out for Bihar, to begin with.) But if this is designed to initiate a debate, then we are on to something.
A core problem with Indian democracy is the sanctimonious worship of sacred cows. Some issues are placed on an altar high above all levels of debate. Even discourse is sacrilege. It is not a question of right and wrong; or, more accurately, if what was right six decades ago continues to remain equally right today. One could make a persuasive case that reservations for dalits should remain in force for another five decades. But why should any subject be banished from discussion? Why cannot we introduce the thought of amendments: that those dalits or backward castes who have flourished from reservations should be excluded from further positive discrimination so that benefits can accrue to the less fortunate among them?
Dwivedi, who comes from the Hindi heartland, traces the decline in Congress to its inability to seed regional leaders who were not educated abroad, or speak fluent English, or are “experts of new technology”. This is an unambiguous attack on the culture spawned by Rahul Gandhi, and endorsed by Sonia, without whose support Rahul might still be an understudy rather than an heir apparent. Perhaps Dwivedi’s own career is on the wane since he is not an Englishwallah. But that does not make him wrong.
An obituary mixes sweet with sour, with less emphasis on the sour. The dead deserve charity. A doctor’s diagnosis is the opposite. If you cannot identify what has gone wrong, you will never discover how to set it right. Dwivedi deserves a doctorate.
