This Article is From Apr 17, 2015

Janata Parivar's Struggle For Relevance

(Nalin S Kohli is spokesperson for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Director of the party's Public Policy Research Centre. He is also a lawyer and has extensive experience in media and education.)

The Janata Parivar merger has finally been announced. Six primarily family (parivar) driven regional outfits have come together in a seemingly forced marriage of convenience, hoping to create an alternate pole to the BJP. However, if the past is an indicator, the Janata experiment is remembered less for unity and more for its amoebic propensity for repeated splits in the quest for office and power.

The urgency for this merger ostensibly appears to be rooted in the forthcoming assembly elections in Bihar later in the year. The threat of losing power to the BJP and its allies has forced even erstwhile bitter foes like Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD to merge with Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav's Janata Dal United.

But this obvious reason hardly paints a complete picture. If the merger was only Bihar-centric, neither the Samajwadi Party, nor the Janata Dal Secular needed to renounce their individual identities. Mergers necessitate new organisational structures, a uniform electoral symbol and a collective approach in decision making, all of which pose serious challenges especially for those who see themselves as centres of undisputed power and authority.

To appreciate the bigger picture, one needs to recall political trends over the past several decades. It took 30 years after independence for a coalition government to come to power in 1977, riding on a massive rejection of authoritarian politics that culminated in 19 months of emergency. But three tumultuous years of fractional politicking ended this experiment and voters once again voted the Congress party in.

Nine years later, another coalition government - of VP Singh - failed to rise to the expectations of the electorate and the people once again handed over an almost clear mandate to the Congress Party in 1991.

The Congress-supported United Front government led by I K Gujral and later H D Devegowda, didn't have much of a tenure or no real accomplishments to speak of, save a rather idealistic doctrine of foreign policy rooted more in nostalgia than real politick.

Yet, beyond doubt, at the national level, barring five years and two governments (1977 and 1989), it was the Congress party that controlled the reign of power at the centre, either directly or indirectly, often supporting a motley team of regional players with socialist leanings. For much of the five decades since 1947, the Congress was virtually the unipole of power politics at the centre.

It was around the 50th year after Independence that the BJP evolved into an alternative second pole of power in national politics. The six years of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance under Atal Bihari Vajpayee confirmed that coalition politics was here to stay for a while and even close to two dozen political parties could work together with the right effort and focus.

Between 2004 and 2014, for a full decade, the Congress-led UPA alliance reaffirmed that coalition governments were now the norm rather than an exception. As a result, regional political parties commanded a presence in national decision-making and leveraged this for political benefit at the state level.

The 2014 elections, dramatically and suddenly, changed this. The electorate reposed complete faith in Narendra Modi's leadership and voted in a full majority government after 30 years. Simultaneously, the Congress party found itself decimated to its lowest tally in history. Quite similar to the Cold War era, Indian politics once again became unipolar.

The relevance of smaller regional players has also been conversely impacted. They have been primarily restricted to cooperation or confrontation in Parliament without being a major part of the decision-making process of the union government. An expanding BJP also indicates the expansion of political threat to many of the regional players and their hold on respective state politics.

In this sense, the larger objective of creating a single political entity is an attempt to establish political relevance. Politics, as well as political parties, to a large extent, rest on the pillar of relevance. In the absence of it, they may come to a naught.

While the Congress party is yet to come to terms with its electoral decimation and is also grappling with leadership issues, the Janta Parivar hopes to establish itself as an alternate pole in national politics. Feeding this desire is a simple mathematical equation wherein the combined vote share of the individual constituents in some states exceeds the BJP's vote share.

However, politics is more than statistics. The reasons that drive voting are far more complex than equations on paper. People assess much before casting their ballot. So far the Janta Parivar constituents have displayed a consistent tendency to split rather than unite.

Moreover, the desire to be politically relevant may be a good starting point, but that will not inspire voters. In states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the lack of governance cannot be hidden from the sharp eyes of impatient voters seeking meaningful change and development.  Forming a parivar is easy getting the janta to accept this is the greater challenge.

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