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BJP comes centrestage

Whenever they voted for the Congress, the party swept into power. Whenever they voted against the Congress, it limped into power. But power was something that the Congress somehow managed to cling on to, often precariously. Simply because of the TINA factor -- There Is No Alternative.

The people of India knew that a squabbling Opposition was not exactly a change for the better. It was, in fact, worse. Worse because India needed a strong, resilient government; not a weak, waffling one at that time. That is why, much as they loathed the Congress, they never voted it out of power. They kept teaching it a lesson from time to time but, in fond memory of the great party it once was, they never actually booted it out.

Till the Emergency happened. That was when the Congress crossed the threshold of tolerance.

Shocked and angry with the way Indira Gandhi had destroyed every institution in the land, the voters decided to hit back with a ferocity they had never shown before. So the Congress was chucked out, lock, stock and barrel. Indira Gandhi lost her own seat. And, for a brief while, it almost appeared as if it was all over for the Congress. The voters had kissed it goodbye.

But history has its own compulsions.

Within a few months of coming to power, the Opposition was back to doing what it did best. Squabbling among themselves. It did not take them long to reach a stage where they were so mean and vicious to each other that the Janata government collapsed under the strain of its internecine feuds. It did not take India long thereafter to limp back to the Congress and its depraved politics.

When Indira Gandhi was killed, Rajiv came to power. Riding yet another sympathy wave. He was fresh faced and innocent and his fixers in the media succeeded, for a short spell, to sell him as the great white hope of the future. For a while it looked as if he had come to stay. The Congress spoke the language of change. It put on jeans and Reeboks and rooted for a new approach to politics. Old leaders were exorcised and Rajiv showed his impatience with the past by humiliating the party elders.

But the emergence of Vishwanath Pratap Singh changed all that.

And, of course, Bofors.

Singh brought together all the anti-Congress forces and taught Rajiv a lesson. To prove that it was now possible to create an alternative government bonded by a single emotion. Hatred for the Congress. The new regime had its own contradictions of course. These began to surface after a while. When Lal Kishinchand Advani went off on his rath yatra and Devi Lal decided to take on Arun Nehru by calling him a fat elephant. This looked like a re-run of the first Janata experiment but actually something far more interesting was happening. The realignment of political forces. Sans ideology, sans principles.

The next elections, post Rajiv, helped this to further coagulate. With no definitive verdict, Narasimha Rao got a wonderful chance to sneak into power and slowly consolidate his numbers by bribing MPs. The Opposition by now had split into two feuding groups. The BJP versus the anti-BJP forces led by the Janata Dal and the Marxists. By turning a Nelson's eye to Ayodhya, Narasimha Rao actually drove them further apart.

So you now had three forces. The Congress, receding into a minority. The anti-Congress forces now gathering momentum and yet splintering into two distinct groups: the BJP and the anti-BJP. This created multiple new options.

It was no longer a choice between a Congress and an anti-Congress government. You could actually have other combinations. The Congress plus the anti-BJP lot. Or the BJP plus the anti-Congress lot. Or the Congress plus the BJP. Any one of these three basic combinations could form a government. But what was far more interesting was the fact that ideology and principles having died, in reality any one of these combinations could easily splinter and realign themselves into even more complex patterns.

For instance, the BSP could move out of any of these three combinations and join another. Without batting an eyelid. So could the All India Anna Dravida Kazagham. Or the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Or the Haryana Vikas Party. Or the Tamil Maanila Congress. Or the Telugu Desam. Or the Republican Party of India in Maharashtra. Each one of them owed no allegiance to anyone. They were like whores ready to marry anyone for bed and breakfast.

Values or principles had no role to play in such realignments. Rewards were the only issue.

That is why H D Deve Gowda came from nowhere to lead a minority government supported by the Congress. The Congress, which had no hope of ever making it to power, suddenly decided one fine morning that Deve Gowda did not fit their scheme of things. So he was ignominiously dropped. In his stead, they propped up an even more tottering government led by Inder Kumar Gujral. Gujral's credentials were the fact that he had no grassroot political standing and was even more at the mercy of the Congress support. Which was, predictably, yanked away the moment the Congress felt that they could improve their chances in a fresh election.

Needless to say, the Congress got it wrong again. The electorate delivered yet another ambiguous verdict. But a verdict that the BJP exploited this time, by piecing together an equally unprincipled coalition of political riffraffs who are now hanging like an albatross around Vajpayee's neck. They will not let his government fall. Nor will they allow it to succeed.

Every move is cannily checkmated and all they do from morning till night is find ways and means to blackmail him. J Jayalalitha wants the cases against her withdrawn. Mamata wants the Left Front government dismissed. Samata wants Rabri Devi out. Om Prakash Chauthala wants Bansi Lal checkmated. Everyone has a personal agenda and the Vajpayee government does not have the numbers to please any of them. It barely limps along.

The fact that the BJP's own musclemen-- like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch-- are also giving it a hard time does not exactly improve matters.

But the interesting outcome of all this is that we have now reached a stage where political options are getting polarised and we are moving towards a two-party system. Not a Congress versus a non-Congress alliance, as we have seen during the first 45 years of independent India. Not even a Congress versus BJP scenario, as the Congress would like to believe is now emerging. But a BJP versus a non-BJP alliance.

That is the crucial change. The so-called pariah of Indian politics -- the BJP -- has finally emerged centrestage. The electorate will henceforth either vote for the BJP or against it. As it had once voted for the Congress or against it.

That is the BJP's single biggest achievement. It has not only found the credibility it has so restlessly yearned for, for five decades. What is more important, it has emerged as the crucial factor in Indian politics. You can love it or hate it but you can no longer ignore it.

Whereas the once mighty Congress is slowly becoming just another bit player in the politics of the future.

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Pritish Nandy