Coping With Victory And Defeat

By Siddharth Varadarajan

With the poorly conceived Third Front promising little more than political instability and the Bharatiya Janata Party standing for greater social turmoil and division, the victory of the Congress is a vote for calm, centrist stability of the kind the country has not seen for more than two decades.

That voters have attached a premium to both the formation of a stable government and to the pursuit of social-democratic policies should come as no surprise given the spectres of economic hardship, terrorist violence and communal polarisation that haunt our collective psyche today.

The only irony is that the Left and the Congress, whose partnership for four out of the past five years provided the United Progressive Alliance both the aura of stability and the caché of populism, should have ended up such bitter rivals on the eve of the election.

On the eve of the general election, the coming together of major challenges like the world financial crisis, the implosion of Pakistan and the rising tide of religious intolerance within India and the region had shifted the matrix of rational policy in such a manner that the issues on which the Left and the Congress had parted company last year made no sense at all to voters in 2009.

On most issues of consequence, domestic and foreign, the distance between centrist and leftist policy was getting eroded. Having resisted the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme when activists first mooted the idea in 2004, the Congress took it up seriously only after the Left parties made it a priority.

Even then, conservative elements within the ruling establishment like Montek Singh Ahluwalia of the Planning Commission remained sceptical and sought to limit the Central government’s fiscal commitment to it.

Only when the economic slowdown hit India in 2008 — and the importance of NREGA as both a politically convenient safety net for the poor and an accelerator-multiplier to kickstart the economy became apparent — did the Congress make its implementation a priority.

The Congress may have been a late and even reluctant convert; but what matters finally is that the party and the Left ended up on the same page.

On other economic matters which divided the Congress and the Left like financial sector liberalisation, the fact that the Indian banking and insurance sectors were insulated from the global turmoil which felled giants like AIG and Lehman Brothers provided a further basis for the two sides to speak the same broad language.

Instead of celebrating the return of the social-democratic paradigm and using this to leverage a further shift away from neo-liberal dogma, however, the Left found itself holding the can on the one free-market policy its rural support base viscerally opposed: land acquisition.

If nationally, the CPI(M) and its allies were pilloried for a leftism that was largely declaratory, the Left Front paid the price in its bastion of West Bengal for the “rightism” of its policies that allowed Mamata Banerjee to emerge as a defender of the peasantry’s right to till the soil.

Consider the irony: the Left broke with the Congress because it felt the latter had deviated from the Common Minimum Programme of 2004. But in 2009, it allied itself to a diverse set of political parties without any programme other than the desire to establish a “non-Congress, non-BJP” government.

So it was that the Left found itself at election time with allies such as the Telugu Desam Party, the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Biju Janata Dal and the Bahujan Samaj Party — groups that had no interest in pushing the direction of national economic policy one way or the other and which had all, in recent times, been closely associated with the BJP and its communal politics.

This programmatic dilution of the ‘Third Front’ allowed the grouping to look strong on paper but it was devoid of any political ballast. But even this might not have proved fatal except for another factor: As a result of its break with the Congress over an issue that was not so decisive to the direction of Indian foreign policy in the long run — the nuclear deal — the Left facilitated the creation of a coalition that went on to storm the seemingly impregnable red fortress of Bengal.

To be sure, there were and are valid reasons for the CPI(M) to have wanted to build a Third Front. But its failure to articulate a positive pro-people programme around which such a front could be established rendered the exercise electorally and politically futile.

As it looks towards rebuilding itself in Kerala and West Bengal and enlarging its prospects as a genuinely national alternative, the Left will have to be self-critical about its preference for conjuring up expedient top-down coalitions rather than organic, bottom-up alliances based on the kind of struggles and movements the communists know best.

Unless it does so, the parliamentary communist movement will find itself increasingly squeezed by Maoist extremism on the left and the electoral machine of ‘bourgeois’ parties on the right against which it cannot easily compete. If the Left needs to introspect, what of the BJP, which paid the price for believing that the Indian voter would prefer divisiveness and strife to the comforting anchor of centrism?

The rot in the party runs so deep that it cannot be reversed by the resignation of LK Advani. The very fact that its spokesmen thought Narendra Modi’s name would generate a wave in favour of the BJP despite the Supreme Court ordering a probe into his role in the 2002 mass killing of Muslims in Gujarat shows the extent to which they are out of touch with the pulse of the country.

But since the party did relatively better in Gujarat and Karnataka, especially the coastal region where Christians, Muslims and ‘immoral’ Hindus have been targeted by the Sangh Parivar, it is possible the RSS will conclude that religious polarisation is a good electoral strategy for the BJP to pursue. If this is the direction the party takes, its capacity to generate tension and insecurity in civil society will increase even if its national political prospects continue to remain dim.

As for the Congress, the party needs to guard against the hubris that usually accompanies the kind of dramatic, unexpected victory it has just received. The INC defeated the Left fair and square but must realise that its success owes more to the social-democratic elements of its economic policies than to the ‘reforms’ the party’s more affluent backers espouse.

Second, vanquishing the politics the BJP stands for requires more than electoral success. The socio-economic and administrative support structures on which the politics of communalism thrives need to be dismantled through careful, sensitive intervention.

The party must resist the old Congress way of pandering to identity politics as a low-cost way of doing the right thing by India’s diverse electorate. India’s Muslims, for example, want equal opportunities and justice, not the banning of a book or the expulsion of a Taslima Nasreen. Providing these will involve taking on entrenched interests and attitudes, especially in the police and administration, something the
Congress has always shied away from doing.

Finally, the re-election of the UPA must not be seen as a licence to indulge in the ‘Congress culture’ of the past. The public got a glimpse of that culture when some leaders started pushing for Rahul Gandhi to be made Prime Minister as soon as the scale of the party’s victory became apparent.

Sonia Gandhi did well to nip these demands in the bud. If she can go further by pensioning off entrenched interests and democratising the functioning of the party’s leadership, the Congress will be better placed to meet the expectations of those who have voted for it.

Courtesy: The Hindu

Left Out

By Roger Alexander


The results are out and the verdict is unambiguous. Contrary to predictions and analysis, including that of this writer, there is only one winner – the Congress, even though it has won just 205 seats. And every other party, including the Congress's own allies, are losers.

Till the night of May 15 it was believed the Congress would have to beg estranged friends, especially the Left, to return to the UPA fold to reach the halfway mark. Nothing of the sort was required for the Left has been decimated. Indeed, the Left is the biggest loser in this election.

While details of voting patterns and other details will be available only after a few days to enable an in-depth analysis, it is evident that in Kerala factionalism led to a rout of the Left. Indeed, a faction-ridden Communist party is an oxymoron. And that's what seems to have dismayed even die-hard supporters outside the party fold, not to speak of disgruntled allies and disenchanted workers who seemed to be working at cross-purposes during the campaign.

No amount of semantics over pre-poll hiccups over seat sharing, community preferences, or minor swings can explain the debacle especially since the Kerala state government was supposed to be doing a decent job.

But it is the storming of the Left citadel, West Bengal, that has everyone - party bosses, sympathisers and independent observers alike – flummoxed. Indeed, all exit polls predicted around 26 seats for the Left Front. The result is worse – a paltry 15 seats.

This performance is worse than its previous low of 16 in 1984 when the election was fought in the shadow of Indira Gandhi's assassination. And the argument that the Left was against a formidable Trinamool-Congress 'mahajot' does not explain the crushing defeat.

It will be remembered that a similar 'mahajot' existed in the 2001 state assembly elections. But the Left Front easily met that challenge. Even in the panchayat elections last year, the Left Front emerged victorious – though battered and bruised - with a 52 per cent vote share.

So it all boils down to the failure of the CPI(M)'s fabled party machinery to convince the Left's traditional supporters – the working class, farmers, sharecroppers, and other poor sections – to once again vote for the Left.

Remember, the Left citadel was built on the land reforms post 1977 when it won a decisive victory in the assembly elections after the Emergency. Though the Zamindari system was abolished by an enactment in the West Bengal State Assembly way back in 1957, the land holding pattern had undergone little change.

A vast majority of the cultivators had little or no land in their possession. In an effort to penetrate and widen its support base in the rural areas, the CPI(M), after coming to power, initiated steps to correct the existing imbalance in land relations.

For this adopted a two-prong strategy. On the one hand, it stressed the empowerment of the landless and marginal farmers – ‘Operation Barga’. Additionally, it tried to complete the unfinished task of distributing surplus land vested from the landlords.

On the other, the Left Front government introduced a three-tier panchayat system and in 1978 held its first election. The panchayat system was important for it was expected to give the people a participatory role in the process of rural development.

So along with its deep roots in the working class movement the CPI(M) also won the allegiance of the rural poor as Operation Barga empowered not only the tillers of the land but the rights of sharecroppers as well. And that's the way it remained for the next 30 years.

But when the CPI(M) decided to take economic development to the next higher plane through industrialisation as the gains of land reforms were petering out, it made a monumental tactical blunder: it failed to convince farmers and sharecroppers that land acquisition for industrialisation was in their interest.

For this the CPI(M) does not have anyone to blame but itself. First, the Left Front was divided over land acquisition with the Forward Bloc and RSP bitterly opposing the policy.

Second, even after the Doubting Thomases within the Left Front were arm-twisted into accepting the new reality, the party cadre were neither ideologically equipped nor trained to take the all-important message to the grassroots.

In fact, the whole exercise was entrusted to the government bureaucracy without the participation of the gram panchayats and zilla parishads, led by party members, that were supposed to be part of the decision-making process.

Ironically, the very forces led by the Congress that had determinedly fought for the 'rights' of the jotedars (landlords) when their holdings were expropriated in the Seventies have now emerged as the 'saviours' of the beneficiaries of the land reforms undertaken by the Left.

The farmers, of course, have no future as land fragmentation has made most holdings economically unviable. It will be remembered that compensation for the 1000 acres acquired for the Tata Nano plant in Singur was distributed amongst 10,000 title holders, meaning one family eking out a living on one-tenth of an acre.

Yet the party cadres at the village level failed to convince the farmers that they could become more prosperous if industry came up on their land. Politically that was a fatal error.

Of course there are other issues – arrogance of party cadres, complacency, revisionist tendencies, an unhealthy reliance on bourgeois democracy to achieve revolutionary goals, and revisionism - that contributed to the rout of the Left, but at the moment
the failure to address the concerns of farmers seems to be the biggest factor that led to the shock result.

Imagine, if in a politically conscious state like West Bengal where the choice is between a pro-poor and progressive Left Front and a mercurial and retrograde Mamata Banerjee, the electorate chooses the latter, there must be something really wrong with the politics of the CPI(M) and its allies.

(If there is one lesson to be learnt from this election, it is this: Electoral arithmetic does not always work. That is why the Left Front decisively lost an election this writer earlier felt was a no contest.)

Congress Left In The Lurch

By Roger Alexander

The Left is back in fashion.

Even with Manmohan Singh who hated being a “bonded slave” of the comrades. He now "regrets" having parted ways with the Left.

And Rahul Gandhi, who wants “to keep communal forces at bay” with the very people he called "obsolete" just the other day.

And Sharad Pawar, who is shouting from the rooftops that “no government can be formed without the support of the Left.”

And Lalu Prasad and Ramvilas Paswan who get nostalgic about “past friendship”.

And Amar Singh now wants an “urgent meeting” with Prakash Karat.

And Kapil Sibal. And Jayanti Natrajan. And Prannoy Roy. And Rajdeep Sardesai. And Arnab Goswami...The list is long and interesting.

All insist the Left has "no choice" but to support the Congress. According to them, "politics is the art of the possible."

Indeed, so loud is the clamour to do business with the Left parties and their allies in the Third Front that one wonders what happened to Rahul Gandhi's brave words of taking the Congress back to the halcyon days of one-party rule.

So what gives?

It is evident that with the five-phase election now over, the Congress has got the heebie-jeebies. Gone is the bravado and swagger of the five past years. And as the day of reckoning on May 16 approaches, the ruling party is literally clutching at straws.

Nothing illustrates this better than Rahul Gandhi's craven overtures to J Jayalalithaa, Chandrababu Naidu, Nitish Kumar and, above all, to the Left Front even before the election process is complete.

The Congress, of course, is an old practitioner at chicanery, back-stabbing, underhand deals, and double-cross. Remember Manmohan Singh jauntily flashing the V-sign just before he faced the trust vote on June 22 last year? He could afford to be optimistic then, secure in the knowledge that with Amar Singh's help he had bought off enough MPs to save his government. But buying a billion votes is a different kettle of fish.

Rahul's plans to once again sneak him into 7, Race Course Road through the backdoor without having to face the electorate lie in tatters. Even self-professed allies have called his bluff.

For the Congress, the writing is on the wall. The maths is working like this: the Congress's dream of winning in Andhra and Tamil Nadu have evaporated; Sharad Pawar has shafted it in Maharashtra; Mamata Banerjee may not win more seats than the Left Front in West Bengal; Naveen Patnaik may hold his own in Orissa; and most importantly the BJP should retain its strength in the states it rules.

Rahul has no choice. He must turn poacher.

But alas, the only thing coming in the way of the Congress's political nirvana is the Left-led Third Front. Not only have the members of this front – the TRS and JD(S) notwithstanding - snubbed the Congress, other parties that are not formally part of the Third Front are also eyeing greener pastures in a non-Congress, non-BJP dispensation.

The fact of the matter is that after ten years and two coalition governments – NDA and UPA – the small parties are chary of being handmaidens of the two big parties. Not only do they have to scramble for crumbs thrown at them when it comes to cabinet berths, the big brothers also try to muscle into the political space they have carved for themselves in the provinces.

Chandrababu Naidu was the first to realise that the BJP was gaining at the TDP's expense in Andhra Pradesh during the Vajpayee years. Naveen Patnaik came to the same conclusion in Orissa recently. Deve Gowda is still to recoup after being taken for a ride by the saffron party. And Mayawati who has played footsie with the big two in the past has only scars to show for her dalliance.

On the UPA side of the fence, Lalu Prasad and Paswan realised late in the day that the Congress was keen on regaining Bihar for itself using their muscle. Mulayam Singh
Yadav did not yield an inch over sharing seats in Uttar Pradesh knowing full well he would be writing his own epitaph. And Mamata Banerjee was smart enough to offer only “unwinnable” seats in West Bengal and keep her options open.

So it is only natural that whoever forms the government, the small parties will hold the whiphand. And if they stick together and play their cards smartly, they can certainly take the country on a new track.

For this to happen the Left Front must emerge as the largest formation after the Congress and BJP to provide the glue to keep the smaller together in a tight bloc that can call the shots when it comes to forming the next government.

Roger And Out!

Third Time Lucky?

By Mahesh Rangarajan/DNA/May 11, 2009

The spectre of a Third Front government looms large over the political scene. Both the Congress and its premier rival, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are struggling to cross the 150 line in the Lok Sabha. The hill is tough to climb for each party though for very different reasons.

Since 1996, it has been impossible for the BJP to aspire to power without brining a significant clutch of regional party's on board. And the Congress has found that for the most part, the key to power lies in befriending the Left parties.

There have been difficult moments in Jayalalithaa's parting with AB Vajpayee in 1999 and in the Left-Congress divide of August 2008. It is sign of the times that large parties are unwilling to foreclose options.

Both fear the return of a Third Front as it would provide a different kind of alternative. At the base of the endurance of such an idea is the simple fact that one of every two Indians does not vote for either the Congress or the BJP.

There have been two Third Front governments in history and both were short-lived. VP Singh lasted from December 1989 till December of the following year. The Deve Gowda and IK Gujral ministries together lasted only 21 months.

On the first occasion, it was the BJP that propped up and then toppled the government. On the latter occasions, Congress did the honours. It is therefore ingenuous for either party to say Third Front ministries are inherently unstable. The prime reason they broke up was to do with the choices of the larger national parties.

More serious is the idea that economic crisis necessarily follows in the wake of such governments. The balance of payments crisis of the summer of 1991 is laid at the doors of VP Singh and Chandrasekhar.

But the seeds of the crisis were laid in the Rajiv Gandhi era, which ended in December 1989. By then, the fiscal deficit of the Union and states combined stood at a hefty 10 per cent.

Similarly, it is often forgotten that the devaluation of the rupee and the painful adjustments that followed happened for the first time under a Congress government and that too one headed by none other than Indira Gandhi. In 1966, after three failed monsoons, India was in a fragile state and there was no option but to accept the bitter medicine prescribed by the US.

More serious is the charge that coalitions fare worse in the sphere of domestic economic policy. VP Singh waived farm loans for over Rs10,000 crore and a few months later announced implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations for reserving jobs for the OBCs.

Yet, these were followed up in 2004-2009 by Manmohan Singh. The difference was that the farm loan waiver was now seven times as large. And those reservations were extended to higher educational institutions.

In effect, there are larger forces pushing for these changes and they operate even when the governments are headed by one large party or consist of a mosaic of parties. Obviously, it is not coalitions per se but the art and style of governance that matters the most.

The coalitions that have governed India did set down some significant milestones. VP Singh took steps to restore peace in Punjab. The United Front stood for a federalist principle in Indian politics and fell because it refused to give into the Congress bullying on the issue of the dismissal of the Karunanidhi government in Tamil Nadu.

It is indeed the case that coalition regimes have coincided with times of economic retreat. This was the case in 1979-80 when the economy shrunk by 5 per cent. There was similar turbulence though not of such degree in the start and the end of the 1990s.

But for the most part this was also due to larger economic trends at the global level. No one could have predicted the impact of the first Gulf War on oil prices in 1991. If this undid the positive record of the National Front, the United Front's dream budget of 1997 was undone by the Asian flu.

In any case there are major contrasts between 2009 and 1996; the last time such a formation had looked feasible. One is that regional parties have by now been stable partners in alliance governments. On one occasion, even the Union finance minister was from a regional party.

Second, the experience of such parties in administering complex and large economies has grown manifold. Leaders like N Chandrababu Naidu and J Jayalalithaa have run large states with significant overseas trade and large secondary and tertiary sector economies.

There are reasons galore to criticise a Third Front. Most crucially it lacks an arbiter in case differences arise. But the larger charges of economic mismanagement and political drift hardly stand up to serious scrutiny.

It may not be a blessing given India's myriad problems but a Third Front is a political possibility, not a spectre to give anyone sleepless nights. It might even enable more decentralisation in an over-centralised federal polity.

Welcome Prime Minister Narendra Modi

By Roger Alexander

Now that I have your attention...

A carefully placed remark by Arun Shourie that Narendra Modi should be the prime minister of India and Arun Jaitley's quick endorsement - “Gujarat under the leadership of Narendra Modi has emerged as a role model for India” - has unleashed paroxysmal excitement in media circles. And true to form, most corporate media outlets in the country are spending considerable resources to follow and interview not the Butcher of Gujarat but the state's “saviour”.

Not surprisingly, the BJP has been quick to cash in. So what started as a ringing endorsement of Narendra Modi's “industry and business-friendly” policies by “captains” of Indian Inc, including Anil Ambani, Sunil Mittal and Ratan Tata, is now being palmed off as gospel truth.

Indeed, even the Supreme Court's recent direction that Modi's role in the 2002 Gujarat riots be probed by the Special Investigation Team is being termed a “shot in the arm” for the chief minister by self-appointed TV commentators and pollsters.

Their electoral calculations point out that this investigation will “enhance Modi's standing”. BJP spokesman also gleefully point out that the SC's directive will help the BJP in electoral arena.

These shameless apologists don't care that Modi's so-called “Vibrant Gujarat” is a figment of their warped imagination, a PR coup. But fortunately, truth is stranger than fiction.

Vivian Fernandes of CNBC-TV18, a pro-business channel, reported from Ahmedabad recently, “The land of the Nano is not just hungry for investments, it is just plain hungry. Also, it fares even worse than Orissa.”

According to the first-ever India State Hunger Index there is not a single state in the country where hunger levels are low or moderate. In most, they are alarming. The index is a combination of three measures: calorie deficiency, underweight children and infant deaths.

Of 88 countries studied internationally, Indian ranks 66. And within India there are wide variations. The index paints a grim picture of Gujarat under Modi's rule. The reports reveals that despite double digit overall economic and agricultural growth, Gujarat is 13th on the Indian list, below Haiti which is ranked 69. So despite double digit overall economic and agricultural growth, Modi's “Vibrant Gujarat” is at the same level as Orissa.

The BJP's drummer boys claim, “Under Modi, Gujarat has become an economic dynamo.” They point out that the state grew at approximately 12 per cent in 2006-7 against India’s overall growth of about 8 per cent that year.

But what is so great about this statistic? In 1994-1995 Gujarat surged at the rate of 13.2 per cent. There was no Narendra Modi then. In the years 1994-2001, Gujarat’s state domestic product registered a growth average of between 10 and 13 per cent. There was no Modi then either. He stepped in only at the tail end of this period so obviously he has done nothing special.

On the other hand, despite decades of growth, as much as 93 per cent of Gujarat’s workforce still toils in the informal sector. This is why growth is not always development. In fact, on the Human Development Index, Gujarat fell one place in 2003-2004, and now ranks below Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka. In terms of rural prosperity, Gujarat is at number five and well behind Punjab, the front ranker.

There is more. Workers employed under the National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREG) scheme in Gujarat receive half of what their counterparts get elsewhere. Interestingly, this fact was recently released by a Parliamentary Committee headed Kalyan Singh, once Hindutva's poster boy.

According to Ernst and Young, hired by Modi as consultants for the Vibrant Gujarat conclave of 2005, in terms of investment climate Gujarat ranked behind Kerala, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and on par with Karnataka at that time.
In terms of Workforce Quality, the same professionals gave Gujarat a very average “B grade” as it failed to measure up on a number of counts. It may be recalled in this connection that the Asian Development Bank in 1996 had ranked Gujarat as number two in India in terms of its investment climate. But in 2005, it was rated at number five.

So it is obvious that it is Modi’s highly personalized executive style, rather than his gift for economic miracles that attracts India Inc. “They give as much thought to Gujarat slipping in the development index as they would a drain inspector’s report. What matters to them is the manner of delivery. Modi did not just give Nano shelter, but also readied permits for Ratan Tata in three days flat...Here is a man who can bend the law at will, but you have to be good to him. Sweetening politicians is easier than playing by the book,” observes JNU professor Dipankar Gupta, adding, “CEO’s now look at Modi just as the ancient Israelites must have looked at Moses.”

Not surprisingly they don't give a damn about Modi's abysmal human rights record. The latest statistics put out by National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) reveal that Gujarat stands third in the list of states of complaints about human rights violation.

According to Vijay Zala and Zahid Quereshi reporting for the Ahmedabad Mirror on March 16, 2009, “A total of 3,813 complaints of human rights violation were received from Gujarat. That’s a notch higher than Bihar, much maligned for its lawlessness.” Overall, Modi's Gujarat ranked third in the rogues' gallery.

The Ahmedabad Mirror reporters talked to noted human rights activists, police brass and representatives of NGOs to know how bad the situation was on the ground level. Among those who gave an insight into the human rights situation in the state were senior lawyer and rights activist Girish Patel, NGO Citizens for Peace and Justice’s Teesta Setalvad, senior lawyer Mukul Sinha and social scientist Achyut Yagnik.

According to Girish Patel, violation of human rights is rampant in Gujarat. “This is the only state where ‘state terrorism’ prevails, where encounter deaths, forced disappearance of people, custodial violence, misuse of POTA and illegal detentions are common.”

He said district magistrates in Gujarat invoke Section 144 for long duration, which is an infringement of citizens’ human rights. The Gujarat Human Rights Commission is left non-functional, which burdens NHRC with a lot of monitoring in the state.

Patel said civil and political liberties of people are being violated in Gujarat in the name of development. Many projects launched in the state have taken away shelter and means of livelihood of poor people. The Kankaria lake front and Sabarmati river front projects in Ahmedabad have displaced a number of marginalised people, who were promised rehabilitation but never provided.

He said Modi claims to make the state free of fear, corruption and hunger. But while the three scourges remain, what has gone is the state of being ‘free’. Coining a new term - Unfortunate Resident Gujaratis (URG) - Patel said that is what has become of the state’s people.

Teesta Setalvad encapsulated the human rights situation in the state. “The mismatch between industrial and economic progress of Gujarat and its abysmal human rights record only points at how low the level of human development index in the state is. People must be provided health care, education, employment etc for Gujarat to be truly vibrant,” she says.

Social scientist Achyut Yagnik said three sections — Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits — have all along faced atrocities and human rights violations in Gujarat. The frequency and intensity of atrocity on these sections have increased since 2002. “There are two Gujarats – the ‘aam’ and the ‘khaas’. Of the two, the ‘aam’ Gujarat has been suffering badly at the hands of the ‘khaas’ Gujarat,” he points out.

Senior lawyer and social activists Mukul Sinha said incidence of human rights violations have increased in Gujarat since 2002. “Victims don’t get compensation, legal aid and proper rehabilitation. Crime against women has also increased. And disturbingly, rights violation cases occur more in the developed areas of the state,” he observes.

Yet, Narendra Modi, the chief minister of this state, is actually being seriously promoted as the Prime Minister of India!

The likes of Prannoy Roy, Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai may think that Narendra Modi and Varun Gandhi make for great prime time television. So besides giving the BJP the boot in these elections, it's time right-thinking viewers gave these shameless media pundits the thumbs-down as well.

Roger And Out

Who's Afraid Of The Third Front?

By Roger Alexander

Blessed are those who do not watch TV news channels or read newspapers, for they have missed nothing. Indeed, even as the month-long election process come to a close on May 13, newspaper readers and TV addicts alike remain clueless. This is not an election in which there will be winners and losers; this is a “game of numbers”, we are told.

The most important number – indeed the “magic number” - is 272. Any party that can can “cobble together” 272 MPs will form the next government. In other words, we are told the best cobbler will win.

So there's a catch, and it's called Catch 272.

No political party can claim it can win 272 seats on its own. Indeed, no pre-poll alliance can reach the magic number. So the media has gleefully job of the cobbler. And self-appointed pollsters/opinionators are busy dreaming up scenarios of post-poll tie-ups.

The easiest way to build castles in the air is to first knock the Third Front as a serious contender out of the picture. You see, if the Third Front is allowed to remain in the reckoning as a bloc, even if the Congress and BJP join hands they do not add up to 272 and therefore unable to form a national unity government, a concept that has fund favour with many commentators. You see, in this scenario the Left parties have no role to play; good riddance.

Rather than recognise the Third Front, our pollsters/opinionators are more comfortable with a category labelled “others”. In this discourse, it's easier to steer “flotsam and jetsam” towards one or the other “national party”.

The high falutin “analysis” from the likes of Prannoy Roy and Rajdeep Sardesai is that almost all regional parties will happily join either the Congress or the BJP and some, like Ram Vilas Paswan's LJP or the AIADMK can do business with both.

In this scenario, even the Congress and BJP would not be averse to ditching existing allies and align with their opponents to reach the magic number, we are told. This is not rank opportunism, for long the hallmark of the so-called national parties, but a legitimate democratic exercise to form a “viable and stable government”.

What we are not told is that these so-called national parties do not exist in large swathes of the country. The Congress has virtually disappeared from the Gangetic plains. Mulayam Singh Yadav was willing to give Sonia Gandhi just 17 seats of the 80 from UP. Lalu Prasad was willing to concede just three of the 40 in Bihar. And Mamata Banerjee has parted with 14 seats (most of them “unwinnable”) in West Bengal that elects 42 MPs.

In Tamil Nadu/Puducherry Karunanidhi has allotted just 16 seats to the Congress from the state's quota of 40 constituencies. In Maharashtra, once its bastion, the Congress is contesting just 25 of the 48 seats, the rest going to Sharad Pawar's NCP. Together, these states send 250 MPs, i.e. nearly half the Lok Sabha's strength. And this party and its cheerleaders in the media insist it is a national party.

Similarly, the BJP just does not exist in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. In Bihar it has to ride piggy-back on Nitish Kumar and in Maharashtra Bal Thackeray is its big brother. In Haryana its fate is decided via an alliance with Om Prakash Chautala and in Punjab, it has to be content with the crumbs that Prakash Singh Badal throws its way. Together, these states account for 256 seats, i.e. nearly half the Lok Sabha's strength. And given its emasculation in Uttar Pradesh, one wonders what kind of national stature is the media talking about.

If you look at vote share, the Congress and BJP respectively attract around 25 per cent of the votes nationally; and in this election both parties combined will win less than 50 per cent of the votes. Yet both fancy themselves as the natural party of governance. And the cheering media is determined to perpetuate the myth.

However, voters are not buying this argument. Voters, more than the media, are acutely aware that India is a complex and diverse country. They have different loyalties and identities that drive their aspirations and actions. They may not have enough to eat, but they know that they have a vote in a country where electoral democracy is deeply entrenched and difficult to dislodge.

Not surprisingly, regional parties have grown from strength to strength in the last two decades, making coalitions an indelible part of the national political discourse. Remember, since 1996, a motley bunch has ruled from New Delhi. The NDA was an amalgam of around two dozen parties and the UPA's survival was dependent on a similar number of allies. So why does the media scoff at a Third Front, which is also a potpourri in the same mould?

The most significant fact behind the rise of the Third Front as a serious challenger to the status quo the corporate media favours is that the bulk of people who have been adversely affected by neoliberal economic policies - workers and peasants, students and self-employed, those searching for jobs and those working at multiple jobs to make ends meet – are seriously looking for alternatives that can deliver.

The smaller regional parties have very different bases, perceptions, identities, ideals, political strategies and forms of organisation and mobilisation. Some of them have already been, or continue to be associated with fronts formed by one or the other of the two large parties. But the current evidence of the disintegration of these fronts is not without significance.

Among other things it indicates that the smaller parties recognise that the role and power of the larger parties is likely to be further constrained in the near term. Otherwise, the likes of Lalu Prasad, Ram Vilas Paswan, Naveen Patnaik and Mulayam Singh Yadav would not have cut themselves from loose from the apron strings of the big parties, especially at this juncture.

This is what the current election is all about. The electoral outcomes in the past decade reflect the political churning that is going on at a furious pace. It continues apace and it is likely that it will throw up newer and different combinations of parties in power (who would have thought that the Congress would dump its myopic Panchmarhi Resolution to always go it alone in the dustbin of history?).

Indeed, what we are witnessing is a work in progress. The Third Front is a sign of a national polity that is emerging out of an immensely complicated reality, in a process that has taken several other countries much longer - often as much as a century - to complete. But we Indians are an impatient lot. We want it here and now.

For the likes of Congress and BJP spokespersons and their drummer boys in the media, democracy is only a game of numbers. It’s not about real people and their real lives or real problems; it’s not about the future of India and her children. But alas, even the numbers do not stack up for either the Congress or the BJP.

By my reckoning, the Congress will be lucky to get more than 100 seats and the BJP will manage to win a few more since it can boast of a few strongholds like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat whereas the Congress has none (yes Zero, unless you count the Andaman& Nicobar Islands where the party has only lost once since Independence).

I'm not making this up. Just over a month ago before the election process got underway (and before Lalu Prasad threw the Fourth Front bombshell) the then UPA was supposed to be winning 257 seats, well within striking distance of the magic 272 mark, with the BJP a distant second with with 210 seats and “others” with 76 seats. Game, set and match Congress, was the verdict.

In the last week of April, the figures were revised drastically. A headline in DNA, a Mumbai daily, said it all: “The 'Others' Are Back”! The breakup was: Congress+ 188, BJP+ 183, Others 172. Obviously, parties like the MNF, NPP, SDP, MIM, PMK, KC, ADMK, PRP, LCP, BNF, FPM, IFDP, JSS, JMM, PWP, PMK, TRS, UDGP will all be “kingmakers”.

And therein lies the rub.

Roger And Out