EDITORIAL

COALITION ERA

The electorate has given a clear verdict in favour of coalition Government as discernible from single party rule. Although bipolarism as between two major players i.e. Congress and BJP is very much in evidence, it would be quite sometime when it takes concrete shape. The current verdict for the 13th Lok Sabha is very clear. It is also on predicted lines and as per poll projections of various exit polls. One can view the outcome from several angles.

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EDITORIAL

COALITION ERA

The electorate has given a clear verdict in favour of coalition Government as discernible from single party rule. Although bipolarism as between two major players i.e. Congress and BJP is very much in evidence, it would be quite sometime when it takes concrete shape. The current verdict for the 13th Lok Sabha is very clear. It is also on predicted lines and as per poll projections of various exit polls. One can view the outcome from several angles.

First, electorate did not believe in the Congress slogan of single party rule on the basis of which it sought their vote. This is largely attributed to Congress remaining ambiguous during run-up to the elections as also in between five rounds. Sometime they would say that the party is going to be the single largest. Another set of leadership claimed outright victory for the party on its own to form the next Government. Yet another set of leaders announced that they won't mind taking support from other parties. The party indeed had pre-electoral alliance with at least two regional outfits i.e with Laloo's RJD and AIADMK's Jayalalitha. To that extent Congress claim of capturing power on its own and single party rule advocated by it was disbelieved by the electorate. Contrarily BJP from day one went in for pre-electoral alliance with many of its erstwhile alliance partners as also roping in new ones. It had openly proclaimed that era of coalition is there to stay. It was this realistic understanding of the national psyche that motivated BJP to give up its own individual manifesto and instead opted for formation of National Democratic Alliance with National Agenda for Governance. There was absolutely no ambiguity about the goal i.e. recapturing Delhi throne. The electorate appreciated this realistic and frank appraisal and did show their clear preference for the NDA.

Second, Electorate which was initially disinclined to face another mid-term poll on non-issues wanted to punish those parties who have forced 13th Lok Sabha elections on a poor country. The Congress was treated as a party that is habitual in bringing down Governments without offering any viable alternative. Their track record on this factor was quite fresh in the mind of mature electorate. Majority of them did not approve AIADMK antics and opportunistic tendencies. That Congress encouraged them to go for it has also recoiled on its fortunes at the husting. It stands duly manifested in that all the three major players who brought down Vajpayee Government in Parliament have suffered heavy losses at the husting. Congress is at an all time low, much less than what it held in 11th & 12th Lok Sabha. AIADMK is cut to size in Tamil Nadu. From the earlier strength of 27 (including Jayalalitha's Tamil Nadu allies), it is down to eleven while Tamil Manila Congress is reduced to naught with even P Chidambaram losing. Same is true of RJD in Bihar where its leader Laloo Prasad Yadav faces defeat at the hands of Sharad Yadav. It is so because Laloo had been most vocal in going to any extent to bring down Vajpayee Government. Not only that. Even leftist bandwagon which was inclined to support Congress Government led by Sonia has been punished in its own strongholds and dwarfed in size. This punishment by the electorate should act as a deterrent for those who adopt foul means to dislodge well-functioning Governments. One hopes that all these parties would be wiser by the drubbing given to them by the mature electorate.

Third, BJP as single entity has been able to hold on to its strength, losses in UP, Punjab and Karnataka notwithstanding. There are various factors that resulted in reckonable losses in UP. These are attributed to three major factors. First, internecine squabbles based on upper and lower caste leadership revolving round Kalyan Singh which manifested its ugliness during run-up to polls. It defamed the party in public esteem. Second, the field reports indicate that Muslim voters followed uniform pattern of voting for any winning candidate of any party in position to defeat the BJP. That means minority voters did not vote en-bloc for Congress. Had that happened Congress would have been the major gainer at the cost of BJP. Instead, these votes went either to BSP or to the SP. Both these parties have made substantial gains. Incidentally, both Mulayam and Mayawati are not inclined to support Congress in any future effort to dislodge the new Government. Third, many local issues and strong arm-tactics of Kalyan Singh had turned the electorate anti-incumbent and Government employees indifferent which affected its fortunes as indicated by the results. The good thing is that BJP has succeeded in making good such losses in some northern States from other Centres like Delhi, Rajasthan, Bihar, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. So much so that it won even the Goa seat which has remained elusive for the last 39 years.

Fourth, NDA partners together with BJP have improved their respective position. While it has provided BJP strong foothold in all the southern States, both Telugu Desam and DMK have performed remarkably well. This further strengthens the coalition culture when inborne checks will compel the Government to be on the right side of the people. The only negative aspect has been Karnataka where Hegde's magic of insisting on roping in ruling JD to form JD (U) recoiled on the NDA. Had it been the erstwhile alliance of Lok Shakti and BJP only, it would have been well received by the electorate. However, the same alliance with JD(U) has worked well in Bihar which has succeeded in marginalising Laloo's RJD and its alliance partner Congress. It is to be noted that for the first time leftists have been effectively challenged in their bastion in W. Bengal by Trinamool Congress -BJP combine. In Punjab however Congress comeback is attributed to wrong and chauvinistic policies of Akali Dal-BJP combine besides the emergence of Gurchuran Singh Tohra which cut the Badal Akali Dal to size. This loss in Punjab is more than made good in Haryana where Chautala-BJP combination has emerged victorious. The Maharashtra scenario has cost the Congress dearly with Pawar forming NCP. Pawar factor is significant in that Congress had maximum gain only in Maharashtra in 12th Lok Sabha. In J&K results are on expected lines. Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah has already announced full backing for the NDA and Vajpayee's leadership. The expectation is that this time round NC is likely share power at the Centre.

Overall scenario is that Vajpayee is accepted as the best bet for ensuring stability, progress and national security. It is his projection as PM that has given the NDA more than 290 seats. One hopes that there will not any string pullers this time to destabilise the Government like Jayalalitha did because all such parties and individuals have been heavily punished by electorate. For Congress in particular the message is very clear. It is in no position to capture Delhi throne on its own and that it should learn to sit in opposition and not adopt short cuts to power. It must also accept that coalition era is the verdict and Congress must swim with the tide by establishing viable tie-ups with regional satraps which invariably implies sharing power.

What do parties do between elections?

By Arun Shourie

What does a political party do between elections? The answer will give a good fix on its health and eventual prospects. An organization which has become merely an election-machine will not be able to deliver when it is catapulted to office, nor will it survive long.

Every one who gets a chance to watch politicians during a campaign cannot but come away full of admiration for the effort they put in. I got a good opportunity this time to watch the campaign, and it left me properly modest. There was no doubt at all: the kind of effort that leaders and even individual candidates put in was far beyond anything that a person like me could sustain.

During one stretch, while observing the campaign in UP, I also happened to read two management books. The better one being, The Leader of the Future, an anthology put out by the Drucker Foundation. The essays are addressed primarily to business organizations. But our political parties would find what the experts urge to be pertinent, and so I will list some of the criteria that struck me as I read the essays amidst the whirl of a campaign.

A touchstone that springs from what one of the experts urges is: to what extent is the party utilizing the talent that lies within it? The answer to that will alert us to both: how it will perform should it get power; as well as about the degree to which its members feel fulfilled or frustrated. The party is in power at the Centre, say, and also in some states. At least one or two of the state governments will have a competent finance minister. To what extent does the latter have the opportunity to contribute ideas for framing the Union Budget? And it is not sufficient that the person responsible at the Centre chanced upon the minister in the state, they got chatting and some idea stuck in the mind of the central minister. The index of vibrance is whether the political party has set up an institutionalized mechanism that enables persons in its varied levels and parts to exchange ideas and solutions with those at other levels.

The criterion can be generalized: to what extent has the political party set up mechanisms for members — specially those who have been placed in positions of responsibility — to learn from one another? A good model is Professor S. A. Dabholkar’s Prayog Parivar. Today lakhs of farmers in Maharashtra share information with each other — information which their own efforts at solving problems has thrown up. A sort of Internet on postcards.

They don’t pick up useful tips by chance. Dabholkar’s efforts have resulted in an institutionalized mechanism whose sole purpose is to enable members to learn from each other’s experiments in solving problems.

That test yields three sub-tests. How many members in the party who do not hold any official position, on hearing of a step that the organization or its government has taken exclaim, "Ah, that was my idea!" Second, do they hear from people at the higher levels that it was their idea which has been put into practice? Third, how often do members spontaneously form themselves into groups to either directly attend to problems, or to devise solutions for problems that really lie in the realm of some other level or part of the party? That is an index of the extent of trust among members. It is also an index of the extent to which they feel confident that such an effort is worthwhile, in that their proposal, if it is well worked, will be welcomed and acted upon by leaders.

One of the experts makes the gauge more specific: to what extent are cross positional inputs made? That strikes me as a very telling test for our cabinets. In theory, a cabinet form of government operates on the principle of collective responsibility. But from what civil servants who have been sitting on the margins of meetings tell me, over the years, cabinets have come to operate on an unwritten rule: the exception apart — the exceptional minister, and the exceptional occasion apart — each minister sticks to his portfolio. One reason for this is security: if you comment on some one else’s proposal, he will comment on your proposal; to ensure smooth passage for your proposals, let the proposals of others pass smoothly. Whatever the reason, when what the expert calls "cross-positional inputs" have dried up, the organization — be it a cabinet or a political party — is that less likely to come up with creative solutions.

The extent to which members spontaneously form themselves into groups to devise solutions, the extent to which members feel free to provide inputs to problems that lie outside their assigned duties — these are also good indicators of another vital thing to which these management experts point. How much do members feel part of "an organic community"?, they ask. Given what has become our national habit — of believing the worst about every one, and, behind his back, of talking the worst about every one — two indices that spring from what these experts set out will be excellent pointers to the extent to which the party is a healthy, organic community. First, the ordinary talk of ordinary members about their colleagues, and even more so of leaders at intermediate levels of the organization: do they ordinarily talk about the shortcomings or about the strengths of their colleagues?, the experts ask. Second, does the member or intermediate leader see the success or accomplishment of his colleague as a threat to him or as something that adds to the strength of the party and therefore to his own strength?

One of the experts prescribes a role that struck me as particularly useful for our parties. There should be an "ecologist of the organization," he writes. A person or compact group whose only task is to monitor the internal environment of the organization, to monitor the levels of pollution in it, so to say, and to recommend or directly introduce cleansing agents as soon as these are required. Is the conduct of the members in accord with what the political party professes? Is it in accord with values which the leaders personify in the public mind, with values by which they want the party to live? Given the pace at which infections spread within organizations, given too the fact that every little fall in standards of conduct is bound to get known to the people in no time, this role – to monitor and ceaselessly cleanse the internal "ecology of the organization" – is an imperative.

And that points to another requirement. Each time a party has to select candidates, to assess the work of its state governments or the goings-on in its state units, the same difficulties spring up: leaders at the top are necessarily preoccupied; reports that reach them on these matters – for instance, in regard to the prospects of a candidate in a particular constituency — are diametrically opposed to each other; they have next to no independent sources of information on the question at hand. This absence is shown up by the results: parties renominate almost 85 to 90 per cent of sitting legislators; half to 60 per cent of them are thrown out by the electorate in the next round. One reason for that, of course, could be that in this period of transition, central units of parties are in fact too weak to enforce their writ on constituent units. The other is that in fact they do not have any independent sources of assessing rival claims, of sifting mutual allegations of rivals. They have to fall back on the local functionary. But he may be exactly the person who will not be able to give an objective assessment of the facts – entangled as he might be in those "interlocking webs of mutual complicity." Hence the need for the leaders to develop independent – possibly, unknown – sources of information.

Naturally, ascertaining the true state of affairs is but the first step: corrective action must follow swiftly – and that as jhatka, rather than halal! All members of a political party, as much as of any other kind of organization must know that action will be swift, certain, and decisive. And that conviction will seep in only when the erring members or units are actually and visibly made to pay the price for their lapses.

There is a good and ready barometer in this regard. Recall the last set-back the political party suffered — in an election, say, or the most recent split. What did it do in response? Did it just look the other way? Did it explain the debacle away? Did it set up a committee to examine what had caused the problem? If so, what happened to the recommendations of that committee? In a word, in what way has the political party altered its way of handling such things as a consequence of that set-back?

It is true that the electorate has got ruinously fractured: specially along caste lines as a result of V. P. Singh’s lunge for Mandal. And even a few days in UP or Bihar are enough to awaken one to the fact that not only is the electorate fractured, it is frozen: people talk in terms of nothing but castes and sub-castes, voters are said to vote by this criterion alone. But even in such a poisoned atmosphere, cohesion and past performance matter: specially because the outcome often comes to turn on small swings. It is particularly important, therefore, for a party to get the governments it controls at the state and lower levels to perform well. Satisfaction or disgust at what they have done or neglected can swamp the achievements of the central government: that is doubly so because state and local governments are what the citizen encounters in his day to day life. Moreover, people are becoming more demanding as well as more possessive: recall that figure about their throwing out 50 to 60 per cent of sitting legislators who stand for re-election.

While caste seems to be all that matters today, the problems that people have to contend with are becoming so onerous that the ability of a party to alleviate those burdens is bound to become an increasingly important consideration in the voter’s mind. And this ability the party must demonstrate between elections. By the work its state governments have done. By the work the party has done outside the formal structure of the State. By inducting persons who are known by the work they have done in their spheres – people are less liable to be convinced that it can attend to their problems by a spurt of advertisements as they are by the fact that the party has as its members persons who have actually transformed agriculture or dairy farming, and that it will place them in positions of authority were it to come to power.

Given the level of frustration I have had occasion to see in parties that started with such enthusiasm and promise — like the AGP — and the abysmal, stuck-in-the-clichés-of-the-past debates in Parliament, two other criteria seem to be very relevant.

Several of our parties – specially the younger ones – have grown out of movements. What was a movement becomes a party, and eventually the party becomes a government. The transformations are necessary to carry the work of the movement, and then of the political party to fruition. Yet, I have seen that with each advance in evolution, so to say, the level of frustration in the organization mounts. There are several reasons, and unless the party attends to them the cumulative frustration will eventually overwhelm it.

As a movement, the group is agitating about some problem, it is demanding that the problem be solved — by some one else. When people place it in office, it sees that the problem can be solved only to the extent that the society at large is ready to do what is required: the government can urge, it can induce, it can prod; but only up to a point. Take the AGP as an instance again. That the inundation from Bangladesh must be ended immediately is obvious. But the last fifty years of perverted discourse has left our society so confused, and the problem in the meanwhile has grown so huge that neither our people nor institutions like Parliament and the courts are willing to face the facts. Thus, neither the AGP Government in Assam, nor the BJP Government in the Centre, nor indeed the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra is able to do much in this regard. Members of the party who had expended so much of themselves in the movement naturally feel frustrated and angry.

Similarly, a movement divides people: some will be passionately for the great issue, others will be just as passionately against it. In a sense, what is important for the success of the movement is that the ones who enroll for it are passionately for the cause. The more lukewarm the others are, the better. But once the movement has transformed itself into a party, it has – even to achieve that single objective it had espoused as a movement — to win elections. And to win elections it has to bring disparate groups of people together. It has to take on the character of the people at large.

That change in "character" has to be pervasive, comprehensive. Strong words have to be shed for moderation. The leaders who had come to be associated in the public mind with the sharply defined positions that the movement had pressed have to be replaced by leaders with a more ambiguous visage. Agitational and organizational skills have to be replaced by executive skills. Suddenly, one set of persons – in fact, the set which is likely to be in control of the organization – will find themselves being replaced by others. By persons whom they would have been looking down upon during the course of the movement, as being ones who were inadequately committed to the cause. By persons who have been just about inducted into the organization because they have the very different skills that are now needed. Tensions, frustration, bewilderment are natural.

For reasons of this kind, the party – specially one that has come to power through an activist programme – must find ever new ways to utilise the talents of members who were vital in the preceding round, and also ensure that all members are trained and retrained into the new skills that are required. Moreover, its leaders must exert to remain in close touch with members so that they can alert the latter come to how the tasks of the party have changed.

And it isn’t that the tasks have changed because the movement has become a party and thence a government, and that is the end of the matter. As a government the tasks it will have to handle will change by the year. For this reason another suggestion that management experts urge is an imperative. The party must have a group whose only task is to keep track of change, to delineate the new skills that members must acquire, to arrange for their being equipped for those new responsibilities, to delineate as ruthlessly what the party, like any other organization must discard.

To assess how it is doing on this score, a party can use several touchstones these experts list. Of the innovations that have come on the scene in the last year, which is the party using? A new way of sending useful material to its state units? A new way of training its spokesmen for the television age? Conversely, which of its old ways, even of its cherished dogmas has the party replaced?

Not just for parties, but for Parliament itself, I would adapt one test. To what extent is the party, and a fortriori the legislature in touch with experts outside politics? At election time, for instance, several parties now make it a point to be in touch with market researchers, with psephologists, with persons specializing in information technology: to understand trends, to make out what issues are engaging the people, to devise better ways of getting their message across. This is substantial advance: from astrologers to psephologists is definitely an advance. A good test is: how many of the parties are in touch with new professions of this kind when elections are not upon them?

Even better, how many of them are in touch with scientists, with industrialists – with persons who are actually changing India, with persons to regulate whose activities they are forever passing laws, and prescribing policies?

"In touch with" in the sense of listening to. Thus, to find out how well it is attuned to the future, the question the party or legislature should ask itself is: which are the positions that we have altered as a result of what we learnt from these experts?

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