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Business News/ Opinion / End of a political supercycle
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End of a political supercycle

Does the saffron surge mark the end of a supercycle of political fragmentation in India?

Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: PTIPremium
Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Photo: PTI

The appointment of M.L. Khattar as the chief minister of Haryana and the sidelining of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra are signs of India’s changed political landscape. Khattar does not belong to the dominant jat community in the state and is one of the few non-jats to become chief minister. The Sena, for long the political bearer of Marathi identity, has received an electoral drubbing. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the winner.

There is plenty of quibbling about the BJP’s win. It has not crossed the 30% vote mark; it has benefited from a divided opposition; India’s upper castes and urban voters are in a hurry, etc. All this may be true but it can’t mask the reality that a structural change is at hand in Indian politics.

These elections may well mark the end of a supercycle of fragmentation of the Indian polity that began in 1969. That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended the run of the syndicate—the old guard of regional leaders in the Congress that called the shots in the party. The cycle emerged from a psychological factor. Gandhi’s fight with the syndicate and her quest for political security led her to impose leaders from the top in Congress party ruled states. Strong leaders were not allowed to emerge and weak ones thrived. This was the start of the process that led to the slow destruction of her party as an organized force in most Indian states.

Any chief minister, acting as a head of government, is tasked with providing an efficient administration. This is largely centred on provision of local public goods such as health services, education, a properly organized system of food distribution and law and order. But there is another aspect to the life of a chief minister, his survival as the leader of the party in power. If he (or she) does not have an independent existence as a strong leader, it does not need much imagination as to what he will do. In this world of insecurity, he is least likely to be interested in providing good administration. Survival is his top priority. Most Congress chief ministers in a certain age (1969-1985) devoted most of their energy to survival.

That provided an opening to the sons of the soil parties across India. While the vocabulary of such parties was not couched in Paul Samuelson’s ideas of efficient provision of local goods and the economic problems of indivisibility, the idiom of localization—caste leaders, language, culture—expressed all that in commonly understood language. That has run its course. Regional parties soon degenerated into single caste and single family parties. Take a look at each Indian state run by a regional party today and see the state of law and order or of any local service to be provided by the state government.

The elections in Haryana and Maharashtra showed that this logic of fragmentation has peaked. Politicians are very sharp to changes in public mood. The multi-cornered contests showed that local leaders did not realize that this is India’s moment of political re-aggregation. Indians are tired of being treated as mute political cattle.

A lot depends on what Narendra Modi will do. In many respects he occupies a structural position not very different from the kind Gandhi found herself in. If he wants, he can kickstart the next super-cycle of fragmentation. Like Gandhi, he can do a pick and choose act and prevent confident chief ministers from emerging in the states. The results of those actions will only be visible in the future, perhaps even decades. He can choose a different path as well. He can let strong leaders from his party take reins in states and focus on providing local public goods. The winning proposition in having strong chief ministers from the same party as the one that governs at the Centre is the smoothening of investments in states. Frictions and coordination problems—the norm when regional parties ran the show—can then be history. One reason why India could not grow rapidly in the last decade was this fact. From roads to bridges to airports to steel plants and what not, investment projects were slain at the altar of political competition between regional parties and an ineffective Union government.

As to regional parties, they face a stark choice. Either they reform and reinvent themselves or else the Kautilyan logic of matsyanyaya will prevail: their decimation at the hands of national parties. There is nothing pre-ordained about this but if the past is any guide, these parties will not reform and their strategy of survival will force them into forming coalitions to counter the BJP in the name of spurious ideologies like secularism. That process is already visible in Bihar (where Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad have joined hands). It may be replicated elsewhere. That will not help these parties survive for long. The reasons for BJP’s victory are not to be found in some kind of smart caste engineering; they are to be found in India’s slow growth, the dwindling chances for its educated youth in the last ten years and a general shrinking of the horizon of hope. Regional parties, however, will not read the political situation that way. That may well be the last mistake they make.

Siddharth Singh is Editor (Views) at Mint. Reluctant Duelist takes stock of matters economic, political and strategic—in India and elsewhere—every fortnight.

Comments are welcome at siddharth.s@livemint.com. To read Siddharth Singh’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/reluctantduelist

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Published: 21 Oct 2014, 11:15 PM IST
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