New data-centric book on Indian politics claims BJP's rise in 2014 was culmination of long-standing ideological conflict

On the same day the Union cabinet approved 10 percent reservation for the economically backward sections among the upper castes, a panel of academics, politicians and data analysts launched a book titled Ideology and Identity: The Changing Party Systems of India, deliberated — among other themes — on competing views on reservation and other factors that prove that ideologies have always shaped the Indian electorate, its political parties and its voters’ moods.

The book uses data from the Indian National Election Studies and evidence from the Constituent Assembly debates along with several surveys to show that Indian electoral politics takes distinct positions on two themes, that of ‘statism’ wherein the state has substantial control over social and economic affairs and ‘recognition’ that stresses on whether and how the state should accommodate various marginalised groups and protect minority rights from majorities.

The academic theorisation isn’t a surprise, given that its authors Pradeep Chhibber, chairman of Indo-American Community Studies at the University of Berkeley and Rahul Verma, a PhD student in Political Science at Berkeley, have scholastic backgrounds. Their experience in the research-intensive Western academia is also evident in the way historic data has been used to challenge the dominant view that party politics in India is far removed from ideas.

Shakti Sinha, former bureaucrat and now director of the Nehru Memorial Library, one of the panelists, shared instances from his brush with politics, starting from the 1971 mid-term gareebi hatao-centric election, stating that India has been telling itself that its politics is devoid of ideology and that everybody ultimately gravitates towards one large middle.

Rahul Verma, who is also a policy fellow at Centre for Policy Research, premised the need for the book on an opinion piece in The New York Times from 2009 that ranked Indian politics, wringing the ignorant exaggeration of an archetypal orientalist thinker, as the least ideological elections in the world and a cold contest between this side versus that side and bereft of all principle or any cause.

The two authors took cognisance of the way the West was viewing Indian political history, especially because the economic left and right didn’t exist here, given that India didn’t share its historical evolution with Western Europe, that of renaissance, reformation and industrial revolution. Verma described the cover of the book, which carries an image of India’s first cabinet. It had Jawaharlal Nehru in the centre, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad to the right and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee to the extreme right and on the left, it had Dr BR Ambedkar.

Tracing choreography in sitting positions and linking into ideological beliefs was a bit of a stretch but the two authors do cement the ideological conflicts present throughout history through empirical data to challenge assumptions from the Western world and also those from within the country that feel ideologies only seeped into Indian politics in 2014 when Narendra Modi steered the BJP to power.

By using data provided by Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, whose director Sanjay Kumar was present in the panel, the authors have deduced that ideological conflicts have remained stable since a long time and have transmitted from the political elite to the masses. Rahul asserted that the 1967, 1996, 2004 and 2009 elections had ideological elements. He then went on to share some facts that seem rather apparent to anybody even mildly familiar with the present political discourse, that the non-educated and non-English speaking voters were more conservative and the idea of liberalism remained limited to the English-speaking sections of society.

The merit of the book, as Rajeev Gowda, Member of Parliament and a panelist at the launch, pointed out, is in the systematic untangling of ideologies and stressing on what is worth pushing forward. “In the first party system, the Congress occupied the centre and the right (Hindu Mahasabha, Ram Rajya Parishad etc) were fragmented. In the second party system, right-wing parties started aligning. In the third-party system, after the birth of the BJP, the Congress moved left on the scale under the leadership of Indira Gandhi and the Congress became the bridge to bring the Swatantra (liberal-conservative) on one hand and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (right wing) on the other,” Verma explained, calling the political events in 2014 a culmination of a long historical process.

The presence of this ideology-backed narrative to the current political scenario is evident even in regional elections, because in states like Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where the Congress versus BJP fight is evident, Congress can ideologically differentiate itself from the BJP. But in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, where there are regional political parties, Congress cannot distinguish itself from recognition or statism from parties like the SP or BSP or Trinamool Congress. For the Congress, the authors feel the challenge has been the lack of a clear ideology in the last decade and for the BJP, which is now the centre of political competition, is the delinking of coalitions to reorganise ideological space and competitive populism that can create fiscal pressures.

Gowda agreed on the need to articulate ideological dimensions but somewhat disagreed on the all-imposing nature of ideologies in a political landscape where opportunism and the lust for power also reside. He gave the example of the no-confidence motion after the 13 days of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in 1996, which was considered the high mark of secularism when many parties refused to join hands with the BJP, claiming that its ideas were antithetical to the constitutional idea of India.

Gowda then talked about how after two years of the United Front Government, Chandrababu Naidu and TDP led an exodus of political parties that forgot all they had said in Parliament and joined hands with the BJP. Swapan Dasgupta, also a member of the Upper House, talked about the subterranean political storm within the BJP when LK Advani said in the first meeting of the national council after the party’s 2004 defeat that idealism and not ideology is important.

The general sentiment within the BJP was that the moment we give up on ideology, we are nobody. “This is contrary to the popular belief that the right is traditionally a stupid party built on a morass of bigotry and governed by instinct. There’s a body of thought to Indian conservatism and it has strands of similarity with western political thought, be it the idea of nation being important or the idea of community over individual,” he stated. Shakti Sinha pointed out that contrary to popular perception, the RSS doesn’t accept the Savarkar line of thought and that this was consciously argued and discussed.

The game of ideologies isn’t as easily perceptible as the manner in which it is understood and written about in present day India. Ideologies are merely reflected in opinions, statements and personalities but the play of right, left and centre has a history of reasons and incidents behind it. Right from the split between the moderates and extremists in the Indian National Congress to the formation of the Congress Socialist Party of 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan and Ram Manohar Lohia, and to Chaudhary Charan Singh’s objection of Nehru’s Soviet-styled industrial policy reforms on ideological grounds. The book that is peppered with tables and numbers and episodes of Indian political history offers insight into the minds of voters and the functioning of parties in these blatantly ‘left versus right’ times.