Opening up the socialist space in Indian politics

Harish Khare

The Hindu Wednesday, Dec 07, 2005

The central compelling fact of Indian politics remains that with the exception of the Left parties, there is no genuine organised platform that seeks to speak primarily and essentially for the poor who still constitute the majority of the Indian society. The poor no longer figure in anybody's calculus either as "vote-bank" or even as a sociological category. Both the Congress and the BJP are consciously committed to the welfare and prosperity of the consumerist middle-classes, which at best account for 30 per cent of the population.

In immediate historical terms, the BJP leadership has reason to be extremely grateful to Mr. Fernandes. Had it not been for Mr. Fernandes' willingness to break bread with the saffron crowd, the BJP would have not been able to overcome its untouchability problem at the national level with centrist/socialist forces. For a long time, except the Shiv Sena, no other political outfit, regional or national, was willing to sign up with the BJP. Then came Mr. Fernandes bringing with him a life-long cultivated anti-Congressism, which enabled the smaller groups to overcome their aversion for the saffron colours. As far as Mr. Fernandes was concerned, his anti-Congressism was topped with a generous serving of the anti-Nehru family animus. This helped the "socialist firebrand leader" become a natural ally of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and all its political offspring. While this convergence of antipathies sustained the Fernandes-BJP love affair, it nonetheless drained the socialist elements in the Janata parivar of their traditional concerns.

In a way the George Fernandes-BJP jugal bandhi was a replay — if only a self-serving repeat — of the Ashok Mehta "thesis" in the early 1950s. Those were still early days of Independence and Ashok Mehta argued that India's inherent social stagnation imposed "inescapable compulsion" on political parties and that rather than act merely as "obstructive factions," the socialists could give "on the basis of programmatic agreement between democratic parties" the ruling party a helping hand in implementing the task of nation-building. For years the Ashok Mehta thesis confused the socialists and reduced them (in Rammanohar Lohia's evocative phrase) to "paralysed socialists." But more than this, the thesis of collaboration with Jawaharlal Nehru's Congress was, as Madhu Limaye was to point out later, "to make the progressive opposition an apologist for the government and let parties like the Communist Party take leadership of the discontented masses."

Just as Ashok Mehta generated confusion and chaos among the socialists in the earlier era, the Fernandes-BJP jugal bandhi hastened the creeping fragmentation of the Janata parivar in the late 1990s. Once Mr. Fernandes shepherded the "Janata" forces into the BJP/RSS embrace, the socialist voice lost out on two counts — a commitment to the secular values and a firm alignment on the side of the poor, the have-nots and the marginalised. Without these two notes the socialist voice lost its moral tenor at the national level; and within the socialist/Janata parivar, the gentle and the sensitive faces — Madhu Dandvate, Surendra Mohan, Kishen Patnaik, Rabi Ray, Mrinal Gore, Ramakrishna Hegde — got pushed into the background; newer, rougher and louder advocates of socialist dreams — Mulayam Singh Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, and Lalu Prasad among others — set up their private fiefdoms, all in the name of social justice. But with George Saheb so cheerfully playing raj guru to the BJP crowd, be it the Staines murder or the Gujarat massacre, the socialist voice ceased to count cumulatively at the national level.

The earlier socialist tradition of debate, arguments, and theoretical formulations gave way to the settling of scores with money and muscle power. Now the socialists have a chance to turn a new leaf. The socialists will have many opportunities in various parts of the country to tap the alienation of the poor from the mainstream economy. Not only will they have to reject the Fernandes' type of collaborative impulses, they will also need to find ways of rescuing socialist politics from the politics of social justice entitlements. A new beginning is possible.