Ideologies are being masked

Prakash Karat

The Economic Times Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Ideologies are not irrelevant in today’s politics, but there is a definite attempt to mask ideologies. What must be recognised is that the campaign to deny the relevance of ideologies is in itself an ideological position. This is a position that suggests that parties must de-ideologise themselves and accept the dominant policies of the times as the only valid ones. It is therefore an ideological position that defends the status quo, one that postulates that prevailing policies cannot change. It is in this sense that it is a move to cloak the hegemony of the prevailing ideology as the absence of ideologies.

In our country, for instance, there is the view that whichever party might come to power, economic reforms must go on. Thus, whether it is the Congress, the BJP or any other party that runs the government, economic policies must remain the same. This assertion that politics must be separated from economics is quite clearly an ideological position. Today, the differences between political parties are sought to be trivialised — who has more popular film stars, who has the support of the more numerous castes, who has a more charismatic leader and so on. All those who subscribe to politics of this variety are in fact in the same ideological camp — the one that tries to subsume all other ideologies within the prevailing one.

This also explains why there is such a concerted attack on the Left, accusing it of being fossilised and living in a time warp. This is because the Left continues to contest the dominant ideology. Let us also be clear that the sangh parivar has a clear ideology, which it too tries to mask by using euphemisms like cultural nationalism. The NDA agenda may be a bland agenda with no contentious issues, but those issues don’t go away simply because you keep the common agenda bland. One of the weaknesses of the rest — and that includes the Congress — is that they are not prepared to defend their ideology. After all, secularism as a principle is also based on an ideological position, but most who subscribe to it are unwilling to assert it as such. (As told to Shankar Raghuraman)