That the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been the dominant political player in India since its 2014 victory is beyond doubt. That Narendra Modi is the most popular politician India has had since Indira Gandhi and that he has been able to convert a parliamentary-style national political contest into one which very closely resembles a presidential one is also true. These two factors have made the BJP a strong favourite for the 2024 contest.
Then what explains the BJP’s unending urge to recruit local/regional level leaders from other political parties even 10 years after being in pole position in Indian politics? Why is the BJP still trying to engineer splits in rival political parties? And why is the BJP still faced with an occasional rebellion within its own ranks — a problem that becomes bigger in scale as one goes down the ladder of democratic competition from national to local elections?
Realpolitik veterans might scoff at these questions. Political promiscuity, after all, is not something which the BJP has invented in India. The BJP is only being pragmatic in inducting influential boots on the grounds to generate tailwinds for its campaign in every election. Given its hegemonic status today, it is also in a much better position to accommodate the aspirations of such people.
However, what makes this question worth asking is that the BJP is not just any other political party in India. Its ideological moorings are on the extreme right of the political spectrum and it has strong organic links to a hundred-year-old political project of aligning India’s politics and statecraft with the so-called ‘civilizational (Hindu) state’ values that its fellow travellers claim India had for many centuries before being conquered by first the Muslims and then the British. This ideological core is one of the biggest reasons the BJP has seen very little defection from its top leadership to other political parties.
But pragmatism aside, every outside induction or alliance the BJP makes also means that the committed foot soldiers of the BJP’s ideological core are denied their proverbial place under the sun. Sure, some of these opportunities are passed on to celebrity recruits such as film stars, but one can rightly assume that induction of erstwhile ideological adversaries, perhaps even oppressors from a distant past, must be a bitter pill to swallow for the BJP’s ideologically committed workers on the ground.
Also, an argument can be made that the BJP today is in a position where it can accommodate the pent-up aspirations of its ideological foot soldiers and fellow travellers in arenas other than electoral politics. The proliferation of people with a link to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in various parts of the government and institutions is one such example.
Having said all this, the original question is still worth asking. If the BJP does enjoy high support for its core ideological agenda in large parts of the country — there is nothing to suggest that it does not — why is it still doing business with political actors outside its ideological core? Why not rely completely on people from within its own ideological stable?
The answer to this question is interesting because, at least in this author’s view, it makes India a very unique democracy. The argument is as follows. Unlike democracies such as the US, where party loyalties are a driving factor in not just political but even social interactions (multiple surveys show that the probability of a Democratic and Republican supporter even being in a relationship is very low and has been falling in the US), a large part of the Indian elite has had and continues to have absolutely no problems in switching ideological camps to retain local political power or salience. This can be seen in a Shiv Sena deciding to call off a multi-decade alliance with the BJP to join hands with the Congress because it wanted the chief minister’s post or a talented but beleaguered (by his own comrades) Jyotiraditya Scindia deciding to desert the Congress and join the BJP. In fact, if one were to look at data carefully, local political elites or their families would show a staggering degree of affiliation to multiple parties not just over time but even at the same time.
What does this kind of political promiscuity and its new gravitation towards the BJP entail for Indian politics? Three key takeaways can be listed.
One, what is often described as the most polarising factor in sanitised political discussions of the social elite, such as the BJP’s Hindutva politics, might not be polarising at all among the majority (read Hindu) voters and local elites in large parts of India. Sure, the othering and vilification of religious minorities and tactics such as communal riots have been used by political actors — they are not limited to the BJP — to sharpen these fault lines ahead of elections. However, belief in the core tenets of Hindutva does not guarantee a consolidation of all members of the majority community behind the BJP. This is the biggest limitation of the RSS project in India’s realpolitik. It has helped spread this consensus but that is not a sufficient condition for the BJP being in power. As discussed above, this challenge increases at lower levels of democratic competition (Centre to state, state to constituency etc.) because local political actors find it easier to assert their salience on a smaller scale which leads to a proliferation of local-level conflicts.
The second follows from the first. A competitive political landscape where local elites are fighting for power while adhering to the broadly similarly ideological framework forces the BJP to look for the strongest horse in the local race rather than field an ideologically committed lightweight who will have nothing apart from ideology going for him. This is exactly what explains the kind of rebellion the BJP is facing even in some constituencies in a state like Gujarat in these elections.
Because the BJP’s political dominance in most parts of the country is relatively recent, it is only natural that a lot of such capable political actors are to be found in other political parties. If the BJP continues to be the dominant political party, more and more local actors seeking political power will naturally gravitate towards it and they will have to pledge allegiance to the BJP’s core ideology. Having said this, what the BJP’s top leadership seems to be determined to do is to, slowly but steadily, reduce the power these local political actors wield in the realm of realpolitik. Everything from direct benefit transfers to the strategy of putting lightweight chief ministers under the rhetoric of ‘double-engine’ governments is designed to achieve exactly that.
To be sure, the worsening of terms of trade for local political actors in India’s political economy is not just a doing of the BJP or its current leadership. It is also a result of the growth of the national capitalist class which has been pushing for a gradual dismantling of all barriers to the movement of goods and services within national boundaries and uniformity in factor markets across the country. The growing economic clout of domestic capital the BJP’s growing political dominance, and the mutual affinity between the two, have brought India to the cusp of an unprecedented concentration of political and economic power.
The third is a deduction from a joint reading of the first and the second. A large part of India’s opposition seems to believe that fighting the RSS’s ideological agenda is its biggest political responsibility. It also seems to have decided that the best tactical plan to achieve this strategy is to exploit the caste fault line within Hindus and replicate the Mandal defeats Kamandal history of the 1990s. This is a strategy doomed to fail because it puts the cart before the horse. OBCs did not oppose the BJP in the 1990s because they were programmatically against its core ideological agenda. They opposed it because the BJP did not have the political wherewithal to win and therefore offered them rewards of power.
At a time when the BJP is ahead of its other ideological competitors by a distance, its opponents will always get leftovers in the struggle to attract local political actors. OBCs are no exception to this trend.
What is ironic and, in a way, tragic is the fact that in its pursuit to defend the secular strategy with the Mandal can defeat Kamandal tactics, very little attention is being paid to the process of simultaneous concentration of political and economic power in India. It is this trend, rather than things such as misuse of investigative arms of the state against opposition leaders — persecution of a leader with a strong mass base can always backfire — which poses a real threat to democratic checks and balances in India. The use of checks and balances is a deliberate caveat because democratic bargains do not necessarily lead to the best outcomes at times. To completely ignore this fact and be obsessed with more and more local political actors willy-nilly moving towards the BJP as evidence of democratic backsliding in India is to miss the proverbial woods for the trees.
Sure, opposition leaders do pay lip service to the growing economic and political concentration in their day-to-day rhetoric. But there is absolutely no clarity on how to evolve tactics for fighting this trend. What has made evolving such tactics extremely difficult is that the period of concentration of political and economic power is also one where labour has become extremely disorganised and can only be described as both sectorally and nationally footloose.
This is a political and intellectual problem of a much larger scale than what the usual commentariat has been saying about democracy being under threat in India. This is exactly why it requires a more sincere and humble engagement rather than angry grandstanding without any political accountability by the self-appointed guardians of democracy in India.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa
Roshan Kishore is the Data and Political Economy Editor at Hindustan Times. His weekly column for HT Premium Terms of Trade appears every Friday. ...view detail
Terms of Trade | What critique of BJP gets wrong about Indian democracy
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05.04.2024
That the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been the dominant political player in India since its 2014 victory is beyond doubt. That Narendra Modi is the most popular politician India has had since Indira Gandhi and that he has been able to convert a parliamentary-style national political contest into one which very closely resembles a presidential one is also true. These two factors have made the BJP a strong favourite for the 2024 contest.
Then what explains the BJP’s unending urge to recruit local/regional level leaders from other political parties even 10 years after being in pole position in Indian politics? Why is the BJP still trying to engineer splits in rival political parties? And why is the BJP still faced with an occasional rebellion within its own ranks — a problem that becomes bigger in scale as one goes down the ladder of democratic competition from national to local elections?
Realpolitik veterans might scoff at these questions. Political promiscuity, after all, is not something which the BJP has invented in India. The BJP is only being pragmatic in inducting influential boots on the grounds to generate tailwinds for its campaign in every election. Given its hegemonic status today, it is also in a much better position to accommodate the aspirations of such people.
However, what makes this question worth asking is that the BJP is not just any other political party in India. Its ideological moorings are on the extreme right of the political spectrum and it has strong organic links to a hundred-year-old political project of aligning India’s politics and statecraft with the so-called ‘civilizational (Hindu) state’ values that its fellow travellers claim India had for many centuries before being conquered by first the Muslims and then the British. This ideological core is one of the biggest reasons the BJP has seen very little defection from its top leadership to other political parties.
But pragmatism aside, every outside induction or alliance the BJP makes also means that the committed foot soldiers of the BJP’s ideological core are denied their proverbial place under the sun. Sure, some of these opportunities are passed on to celebrity recruits such as film stars, but one can rightly assume that induction of erstwhile ideological adversaries, perhaps even oppressors from a distant past, must be a bitter pill to swallow for the BJP’s ideologically committed workers on the ground.
Also, an argument can be made that the BJP today is in a position where it can accommodate the pent-up aspirations of its ideological foot soldiers and........
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