BJP is becoming like every other party, centred on just one individual

TCA Srinivasa Raghavan has an article on this development how BJP is just around one individual. Well, this is what people (read economic elites) always wanted.

He calls this development as totem politics:

The evening that Narendra Modi left for France, Germany and Canada, there was a very silly talk show on NDTV. It was about how many days Modi was going away for. On Doordarshan (DD), too, there was Modi. And only him. You know, Modi did this, Modi said that, Modi went there, Modi came back. It was as if we were back in the days when the only things you saw on DD were the three Gandhis – first Indira in the early 1970s, then Indira and Sanjay in the mid-1970s, and finally Indira and Rajiv in the 1980s.

But DD is not alone. If you happen to watch regional TV or read the regional papers, it is the same story in many states also. The state leader currently in power dominates the news. Whether it is Tamil Nadu or Punjab, West Bengal or Andhra, Kashmir or Odisha, it is the same story – a one-person show.

A former editor of a major newspaper was the first to put a name to this tendency back in the 1980s. He called it totem politics. Indian politicians, he said, needed a totem around which to drink and dance.

🙂

There is history around all this:

He did see the modernising instincts of Nehru, Indira, Rajiv, NTR, MGR and so on. But he also saw how medieval their parties were. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), he said, didn’t suffer from this malaise. No individual was held to be above the party in the BJP. He was right – then. I could not quite believe this of the Congress, at least before 1971. So, I read up on it and, believe it or not, from about 1920 onwards, the Congress, too, had drifted in that direction. The year 1920 was when Gandhiji took complete control of the party and he was very clear: only what he said mattered. He demanded complete obedience. The alternative was complete oblivion.

Jinnah chose the latter, at least till 1936, when he came back from London to take control of the Muslim League. Then, hah! He, too, became its “sole spokesman”.

It has been the same in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, to name the three big countries in South Asia. All suffer from this problem of family-run parties. It is a strange kind of schizophrenia where the objectives are modern but the methods are medieval. The results, needless to say, are dismal.

Time to go back to BJP foundations:

After 11 months in office, Modi has become no more than primus inter pares, a first amongst equals. Politically, this means he has far less wiggle room than he would have the country believe. The wizardry of Amit Shah notwithstanding, it’s only going to get harder from here on, even in the elections.

This is something the party should start worrying about. There are two simultaneous ways it can pre-empt the emerging problem. One is for Modi to be more like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and less-in-your-face. The other is to restore the party’s democratic instincts rather than copy the Congress and the rest.

Like Prof. MN Srinivas said Sanskritization, there is Congressization in Indian politics. As political parties move centre stage, they want to resemble more like Congress party.  And this from a party which wants to eradicate India from Congress..

Well, this is not limited to Indian politics alone. Indian central bank too suffers from a similar problem..