The wrong ways

This has not been a good week for the government. It has been embarrassed by the Rafale and Aadhaar issues.

These two matters have hurt the government as much as persistent street violence has hurt the party. Thus, bravado notwithstanding, both are on the backfoot.

These setbacks — one to the image and the other to policy — should also be seen in the context of the forthcoming 2019 general election. Suddenly too many things have begun to go wrong because that very precious thing, credibility in regard to probity, has taken a severe knock.

The Opposition is hoping that the Rafale controversy will enable it to do to the BJP what the Bofors once did to the Congress in 1989. This is partly because it is conceded by even the most ardent supporters of the BJP that a repeat of 2014 is not possible.

So the talk is about how many fewer than 272 seats the BJP will win in 2019. The worst-case scenario is a loss of 130-odd seats. The best-case scenario is 50-60 seats fewer. Of course, temple construction would change all this.

Now, unless the Congress wins 140-150 seats, it looks as though even in the worstcase scenario the BJP will be the singlelargest party. It will, therefore, be invited by the president to form the government.

It is, therefore, useful to ask: What lessons should the parivar have learnt about governing? Will the compulsions of a large coalition prevent it from making egregious mistakes?

A great deal will depend on how far from 272 the BJP falls. The further it falls the more lessons it will have to learn.

Three-legged stool

Three components of the parivar are important in this context: The RSS, the BJP and the prime minister. If the lecture series by Mohan Bhagwat is anything to go by, the RSS seems to have absorbed some crucial lessons about how to govern India.

He has said that the RSS is willing to do what Tony Blair did for the Labour Party, namely, revisit some of the founding portions of ideology. In 1995 Mr Blair pretty much overthrew Labour’s commitment to socialism contained in Clause 4 of its charter and became acceptable to the electorate.

But can we say the same thing about the BJP and the prime minister? There is today a question mark over whether Mr Modi will continue as prime minister. Assuming that he will because without him the BJP may lose even more seats, what can we surmise about the lessons he has learnt?

Two key features have marked his style: Focus on delivery of services because he thinks that in the end that is what will fetch the votes; and the impulse to run things from the PMO because that is how you can control the process.

He has thus been more of a CEO than a prime minister whose first duty is to reassure the people that the government is not your bitter adversary. This is where he has turned out like Indira Gandhi rather than Atal Bihari Vajpayee. One must, therefore, hope that he dilutes the former and reinforces the latter.

The BJP

As to the BJP, it has acquired the image of a party without any moral moorings when it comes to acquiring and exercising political and administrative power. Its ruthlessness and methods in both spheres have frightened the populace.

The chief lesson it needs to learn therefore is that intimidation makes for bad politics. You may think that asking for some discipline is not intimidation. But it’s the goose and gander problem.

That apart, even if India’s second and third tier institutions — the ones created by Parliament and by the ministries — are wobbly, the Constitutional ones are as robust as intended. They have checked the bullying.

Bullying is a new development in the BJP because until recently the party’s leadership was not inclined to be autocratic. A strong liberal seam ran through it but that has now been replaced by the Indira Gandhi virus of cynicism and harshness.

As a result, the BJP now faces exactly the same kind of opposition from the people as Indira Gandhi did in 1977. That is bad news because even in 2014, when it won a majority, the BJP’s vote share was just 31 per cent (however, it contested 428 of the 543 seats).

All that is needed for the Opposition is to field just one candidate against the BJP in no more than half the constituencies in the Hindi states.