NEW DELHI, 6 May — Nothing comforts the establishment more than a holiday in the name of the working class. May Day came on Tuesday; not quite as convenient as Monday, which would have meant a long weekend, but at least it did not coincide with a regular holiday.
Give Calcutta a holiday and the price of fish goes up. Calcuttans are relaxed. Even politics is invisible in the city. The tension begins to rise, slowly but perceptibly, on the second, with only eight days to go before a contest that promises to be pivotal in the history of Bengal.
There are suggestions, a few streaky signs in the air, that the pivot could swing. The crowds at Mamata Banerjee’s rallies are phenomenally higher than those at Communist meetings, and this is not because of novelty value, I can assure you.
The young have found a nickname for the Communists: Kamiye Neesh, or Make Your Money in Bengali. This is unfair; the level of corruption in Calcutta would invite a sneeze of disdain from a peon in Delhi. But the judgment of the electorate is a tough kind of justice.
The Communist answer to crowds is party muscle. How much of this support will alchemize into votes? Senior and highly experience as well as much-respected cynics say that the party machine has the ability to cover as much as a twenty to twenty-five percent gap.
The Left’s real worry may in fact have very little to do with the specific situation in Bengal. There is a perceptible and growing anger against all governments, against any establishment, that is going to make re-election difficult even for the best organized political force in the country.
The conviction that all politicians are on the take (Kamiye Neesh) has topped the prevalent frustration, particularly of the young, who see the gap between their expectations and reality continue to grow. The young are now the most decisive fact of elections.
Their anger will defeat the Left in Kerala, DMK in Tamil Nadu and the AGP in Assam — but there is an attendant paradox. The credibility of the parties that are seeking to replace the DMK and the AGP and the Left is not particularly high.
The anger could well travel into a myriad rivulets in a state like Assam, where each constituency seems to have a favorite party of its own. The novelty of the election is the sight of two middle-aged ladies campaigning together.
Sonia Gandhi has learned to walk like Indira Gandhi, but she still talks like Sonia Gandhi. If anyone could become Indira by imitation, Ben Kingsley would be a better Mahatma Gandhi than the original. Compared with this artifice, the Left is a portrait of sanity.
Its only problem is that it has been around too long, and there is a price to be paid for age. Bengal has a reputation for violence. That reputation has outlived reality. The real violence is further east. The gray had lifted from the skies of Guwahati but it had enveloped the mood of the city. There was a bandh on Wednesday, called by All-Assam Students Union to protest the murder of an AGP-BJP alliance candidate by ULFA, a militant organization that, well, controls the shots.
Every day the news from Assam is written in the colors of death. The targets are political; the only party that is safe from ULFA is the Congress party, because the Congress has made a deal with ULFA in order to insure a victory. The death of opponents is a strange kind of life insurance.
The only argument that the Congress has, in private, is that P.K. Mahanta made exactly the same kind of deal before the elections he won five years ago. Cynicism then, cynicism now. ULFA has not forgiven AGP for reneging on the deal the moment the elections were won.
Mahanta chased the ULFA with a determination that surprised his friends and unsettled the terrorists. What will the Congress do after using ULFA to achieve power? The realist view is that Congress ministers and MLAs will be too busy recovering what they spent on the elections (in many cases, starting with purchase of the nomination) to worry about ULFA or anyone else. That of course is the point. The anger against future betrayal will be far more intense. Assam has become a beautiful graveyard. No politician moves without a phalanx of guns protecting him. The less privileged must remain at the mercy of God.
The Congress has learned nothing from its past. Punjab paid such a heavy price in the Eighties for the party’s deals with Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.
There will be no victors in these assembly elections, because all political parties are on a losing streak. Someone will get more votes than someone else, but that is arithmetic, not politics. A victory in politics represents hope; at the very least the hope of some change for the better. No matter who wins the elections in the four states, no one will represent any hope. The Left can only be more of the same.
Assam shudders even while it prepares to vote against the government. The Tamil voter has been there, seen everything about Jayalalitha: she is a cyclical necessity rather than a revolution. Kerala has elected and defeated A.K. Antony before, more than once. Mamata promises change, and offers confusion. The regions are an image of the nation. The same situation prevails at the center and therefore nationally.
The government has lost its commanding popularity, but no one has gained from the government’s loss. There is no stream into which this anger can flow; it keeps breaking up in search of a destination.
Sonia can barely lead the Congress let alone lead a coalition that can offer a sensible alternative, either in this parliament or during the next elections.
We have heard of speech writers in public life; Sonia is the first speech reader. Whenever she speaks she also confirms that she is a foreigner. India is not ready to accept a foreigner as prime minister. In fact, one of the reasons for growing popular anger against the BJP is that it is selling out repeatedly to foreign interests. There is immense resentment against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition at the center.
Individually, the BJP is tainted as corrupt; and the government has acquired the dubious distinction of ultra loyalty to American interests and policy. Allegations, some spurious, some with substance, about Yashwant Sinha’s economic policy, not least by the Rashtriya Swamsewak Sangh (RSS), opened the gates of doubt.
His colleague Jaswant Singh’s unilateral declaration of dependence to George Bush’s nuclear shield has converted doubt into conviction. The foreign minister’s decision is without parallel and precedence. Apparently he consulted no one in Delhi before committing India to a place at the head of an obedient queue.
I can only assume that the foreign minister thought he was serving his country, although he might have checked back with his country. The most charitable explanation is that he wanted to get brownie points from a reluctant superpower on a dream which is unlikely to become substantial, and therefore means very little.
As I noted, such an explanation can only be described as charitable. The government could take comfort from the absence of a serious adversary on the national battlefield. Such complacence would be unwise. The true adversary of any government is not a political party but the people.
Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani should have powerful memories of the emergency: political parties did not remove Indira from power, the voter did. The Janata Party was actually formed after it had won the elections. Some formation will rise that will catch the spirit of the next moment.
The BJP will do badly in these elections, losing vote shares in all states (in Assam, the true comparison would be with what it was expected to get). If the prime minister does not reinvent his government, that slippage will enter freefall. He could have continued if he had been in charge of a single-party government; a coalition cannot bear the strain of eroding relevance.
The defeat in Uttar Pradesh, now a matter of time rather than speculation, will complete the journey to the margins. The horrifying thought is that the vacant center-space of Indian politics could be claimed by a gaggle of confused competitors.
People realize this, even if they will not admit it. Congress leaders will agree, on condition their view is not reported to Sonia. They are in terror of her disfavor.
She exercises draconian control over her party without having genuinely won anything, even applause. She will be tempted to advertise a victory in Assam as vindication of her leadership; that would be self-delusion. The Congress is in a position to provide stability in the vacuum: it has the structure, the history, the institutional credibility and the national presence.
But it cannot move forward because it has cut off its tongue and shackled its limbs. What a time to be dumb.
