BJP Searching the Vital Center of Indian Politics

This article is a part of the ongoing political debate series Mandate 2014: Citizen Politician on LILA Inter-actions, the online debate platform of LILA Foundation for Translocal Initiatives.

The Middle Path

Contemporary Indian politics seems to be marked by an intriguing competition between the extreme — which involves different polarities — and the moderate. And, the extreme tends to win more often than the moderate, for, it is rather easy to carry the flame for a brief while. But the profound irony of our circumstance lies in the fact that what we see and hear today do not belong to the true extreme at all—these elements do not have the extreme passion that invariably collapses from its own intensity, dies by the same fire that it tries to inflame, thus ultimately making the participants realize that the extreme is not the answer. The truth is, we are now going through a decadence, a mere pretense of passion. And, where it would lead us politically is open to debate.

India, by its very nature, has always sought a resolution for a moderate, accommodative politics for its continuance. In this country, we have an almost indefinable, indiscernible thread that strings us together, across the hills, the desert, the coast. Political actors must try and discover that invisible connecting string, for, our answer cannot be found in pursuing any extreme of thought, conduct or behaviour.

In ’47, we went through a partition, because it seemed separation would be the end of the turmoil; there was hope that it would bring peace. But peace has since abandoned South Asia. The bus trip to Lahore was an attempt to restore peace and some accommodation. A national political party like the BJP cannot consider such an endeavour to be a single person’s ideology or inheritance. The party as a whole must aspire to seek precisely that mandate in order to go beyond the present moment, and continue. It must come from the realization that we have to think and act beyond manifestoes, which are mere externalities. The BJP necessarily has to emerge as the integrator, not the disintegrator, in these times.

Let us look at the political map of India today—it seems so disjointed. The Congress is terminal; it is flogging itself to keep it going, its articulation is not at all coming across as credible. The BJP is struggling even as it is endeavouring to search for a voice. The history of the world and our own historical experience in India inform us that it is a certain weakness in structure that impels an administration to forgo the middle path of moderation and push the finite individual to the foreground. We saw it in the case of Indira Gandhi, and time shall offer the same lesson to anyone who tries too hard to make a similar move.

Evidently, no party can win this asymmetrical country with mere numbers or by managing an electoral success. The numbers do not really total unless we encourage greater debate, and actively invite dissent. In the context of the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party, the principal national parties of India must introspect: What is it that they do not provide the citizens? Is there some lack, a vacuum or lacuna which has caused this new political development in the country? Now that the AAP has brought home these questions to us and created a chink for reflection, even if they fail in delivering their own promises, in some form or the other, an alternative idea, an alternative thought, an alternative methodology, would keep pushing itself, and claim the attention of every citizen.

Has the emergence of AAP shown that there is a lack in what the major
Indian parties are providing the citizens

It would require deep reflection and brave historical studies to understand the roots of our political dilemma today. Even though our fast-paced world does not readily offer many media spaces that allow subtle levels of contemplation, in order to take redemptive steps and arrive at the heart of our democratic dream, it is imperative that we initiate this discussion. I would say our original political sin was the adoption of the concept of the nation-state — a concept which was born in Europe. Are we a nation at all? We call ourselves a ‘rashtr’— is rashtr equal to ‘the nation’? People had lived in these parts for centuries with no concept of a unified state, and yet India had been thought of as a civilizational ‘rashtr’ — an utterly non-territorial one.

Here, I am questioning our constitution’s foundations in the Government of India Act of 1935, which merely reflected what the western mind had thought of governance in that context. While almost adopting it as our country’s governing document, we forgot that the functioning of the British parliament had improved through a series of reform bills during the Victorian times. We had to study those bills to see how they slowly gave rise to a better constitutional practice in Britain, and then find our own way of making a constitution that suited our variegated civilization. We did not do it, and that historical error will continue to haunt us.

A country like India cannot afford a governance rooted in the construction of the nation-state. A very wise PN Haksar once told me that the cellular core of our country is our society. It is the society that has kept us afloat through centuries of want, and deprivation, and conquest. And now, for the first time perhaps, the state of India is attacking the seminal core that is our society. Our society has always had a self-cleansing mechanism, and we are destroying that by implanting it with ideas that originate in Delhi and cannot be uniformly tried across the country. Somehow, Gandhi had caught the flavour of our societies, but he could not go further. Towards the end, apparently, he too had the fear of failure. Unfortunately, the present political discourse lacks the profundity to recognize such deep sentiments and address them.

In this tentative world, India will have to readdress itself to the questions related to all types of connections as well as disconnections — knowledge, warfare, peace. We have to review the whole question about the weapons of mass destruction at this time. For instance, what is a nuclear weapon today? It is not an actual war-fighting equipment; it is a virility symbol, and a figurative means of safety. You have it, so I also have it — no more than that. So humankind has to wake up and understand that our weapons no longer suit the description of weapons, and for the same reason, ironically, the extreme sense of safety that we are deriving from them cannot be real, too.

Ask without Thinking- When a right becomes an obsession, it engenders irony- a poster on the RTI.

The seminal question here is how we are trying to understand, to know. We must realise that knowledge accessibility and the right to know are two separate things. When one refers to knowledge accessibility, it envisions a world where humankind is free to search for knowledge and acquire it. It is about questing for knowledge, which should help us find answers to our deeper questions. We often confuse accessibility to knowledge with the right to information. Information is related to governance, and in today’s governance one cannot allow unlimited flow of information to everyone at all times, lest premature or unwanted revelation of information caused us collective damage.

As I mentioned, the BJP, as a national political party, has to address these questions in order to arrive at a path of governance that is appropriate for our society and our times. For a party that aspires to win this country’s heart, this is as much a challenge as winning the polls. We are truly at a tipping point, in every sense. Where we go from here is again dependent on the larger question of our understanding, our knowing, and our openness to follow the moderate way. At this point, not just the political players of our country, but humankind as a whole has to wake up to the middle path, indeed.

Written by Jaswant Singh >>

Jaswant Singh is a senior politician from the Bharatiya Janata Party. He resigned his commission in the Indian Army to pursue a career in politics. In the BJP-led governments of 1996, and 1998-2004, he held charge of six ministries including Finance, External Affairs and Defence. He was the leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha during 2004-2009 and is currently representing Darjeeling in the Lok Sabha. He has authored many books on current affairs and history.