Rivalry without respect is political hatred

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist

ONE of the most thought-provoking images last week that captured the state of the relationship between the ruling BJP and the Opposition was of Mamata Banerjee’s call on PM Narendra Modi, and Home Minister Amit Shah. The Trinamool Congress (TC) president and West Bengal CM had confronted the NDA government, knowing or not knowing that she might have to pay a political price for her ceaseless opposition. Pay she did. The investigative agencies hounded her apparatchiks, zoomed in wherever there was a whiff of an economic offence involving her political aides and relatives, and above all, the BJP mounted a brilliant campaign against her in the Lok Sabha elections that levelled, if not, elevated the playing field for the party in West Bengal. 

Mamata’s Delhi visit was built up by the TC days before she arrived, signifying that it carried far more importance for her than the BJP.  She raised the matter of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), intended to sift the “infiltrators” (ostensibly from Bangladesh) from bona fide nationals, possibly knowing that she ran into a cul-de-sac because the issue is at the heart of the BJP’s politics. There’s an Assembly election to be fought in 2021, projects to be completed and funds to be procured from the Centre. 

Still, as optics went, Mamata’s sojourn messaged a political lesson for the Opposition: a Centre, ruled by a brute majority, helmed by an extremely powerful duo that is single-mindedly committed to fulfilling an agenda laid down by the paterfamilias, the RSS, forever consolidating the old and seeking out new electoral constituencies and fighting each poll as though it was the last one, had etched the battlelines on the political landscape too ineradicably to be blurred by fleeting overtures from an adversary.

Mamata must have recalled that when her TC was an NDA constituent in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time, she had the then Prime Minister and his deputy LK Advani at her beck and call. At the sign that Mamata was about to throw a shindy, Vajpayee would mobilise his trouble-shooters, defence minister George Fernandes, and Sudheendra Kulkarni, then an official in the PMO, to rush to Kolkata and mollify the lady. She often ended up having her way.

It helped that Vajpayee’s NDA was critically dependent on mercurial allies while the coalition in its current avatar is not. “What if” scenarios are eternally tantalising to imagine. Perhaps, it is time to ask that if Vajpayee was similarly endowed with an unassailable parliamentary majority, how would he have conducted himself with the day’s Opposition? Run roughshod over it or be accommodative? Who is to know for certain? However, certain circumstances can be factored in construing a narrative.

Vajpayee was essentially a creature of the much-maligned Lutyens’ Delhi, unpretentious in appearance and cosmopolitan in sense and sensibility. He was a deep-rooted heartland politician who was more comfortable wearing a dhoti-kurta and using Hindi but was acutely aware that language was as polarising and emotive a subject as faith in India and was best not tampered with. He understood and appreciated the nuances of foreign and economic policies and, pertinently, recognised that the Opposition would have to be engaged as much in a spirit of consensus as dissension. 

Vajpayee recognised the Opposition’s value in negotiating a political crisis. He remembered that Pakistan was “shocked” when a former Congress Prime Minister, PV Narasimha Rao, sent him to disseminate India’s viewpoint at a UN Convention in Geneva as an Opposition leader. He counselled Islamabad that an Opposition did not merely exist to needle and dislodge the government but to foster national causes. More famously, when Parliament was besieged by terrorists in December 2001, Sonia Gandhi, the then Congress president, was not in the Lok Sabha. On hearing of the attack, she promptly called Vajpayee to ask if he was safe. Vajpayee’s response was that when the Opposition leader was concerned about the PM’s well-being in a national calamity, democracy was safe. 

At times, Vajpayee got so impatient with the BJP’s “contrarians” that he expediently deployed the Opposition to fend off their pressures. Recollect that in 2003, when the US wanted India to dispatch its troops to Iraq, Vajpayee’s top ministers, Jaswant Singh and Advani, readily agreed. Vajpayee disagreed with them. He invited the Left leaders, Harkishan Singh Surjeet and AB Bardhan, over for tea and tentatively broached the subject of sending the troops, to which Surjeet and Bardhan stated that India must not. Vajpayee’s reaction was he couldn’t live with domestic discord which the Left leaders read as a cue to step up their protests. The Left’s street demonstrations came in handy to Vajpayee to “convince” his colleagues that it was best for India to keep off Iraq. He got what he wanted from the Opposition.

But then, the Opposition itself was qualitatively different some 20 years ago. It was ruled by stalwarts who were wedded to political ideologies, distinguished the correct from the incorrect, and believed that India’s hard-fought independence and the foundation laid by a finely debated and thought-through Constitution must not be bartered away for expediency and short-sighted gains.

To begin at the beginning: is an impregnable parliamentary majority irreconcilable with evolving a political consensus in Parliament? We have history for a guide. In the Congress’ heydays under Indira Gandhi, the Opposition was mostly squashed, except when things reached a tipping point, as in 1977, when the non-Congress parties managed to cobble a front of sorts and dislodge the Congress government. It was not the Opposition’s victory as much as the people’s resolve to vanquish Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi was elected with a majority of 410 that has still not been beaten. Yet, at the end of five years, a tenuous Opposition, made up of 106 members from 12 parties, shook Rajiv’s government from within and outside, by resigning en masse from Parliament when Rajiv refused to step down as PM to take responsibility for a bungled arms purchase from Bofors. 

Where is the Opposition today? In the doldrums under a ruling party that seems so singularly adept in getting on top of and out of seemingly intractable problems that the Opposition’s platter remains empty.