Karat to carrot

Mon, Jul 7 02:14 AM

Amar Singh's braggadocio, which sometimes makes you wince, not Prakash Karat's easy-on-the-eye gentility, is setting the tone of national politics. Bazaar bargaining is back. Deals are being cut again in the political marketplace. Ruthlessness, profiteering, greed and basic instincts are in view. It's a bit ugly. And it's very, very useful for this country.

If carrot has replaced Karat as the principal determinant of national politics, it is only because India's policy-making system needs a politics that's pragmatic, even if it's not pretty. Four years of Marxist finger-wagging have made many of us forget how national politics has operated after the Congress ceased to be a natural winner - it has operated by handshakes between many apparently disparate parties. Marxist proscriptions on policy have also made us forget that these handshakes, frequently followed by unrepentant palm-greasing, have delivered the following immensely important political/policy paradigm shifts: the Congress was made to pay for political arrogance and then rewarded for humility, the BJP was shown as fit for governance and then made to pay for political overconfidence, the third front was made to pay for political fantasising, economic reforms happened, and foreign policy became rational.

Post-Rajiv Gandhi, Marxists and the BJP together at one point as well as other players kept the Congress out for long enough for the party to understand that its patent on governing India had expired. Atal Bihari Vajpayee built a tactical alliance that's still the model of coalition governance. Then, post-Vajpayee, the Congress's newly minted friends and the Marxists showed the BJP that even being a few seats behind its national rival could mean five years in the opposition. The Congress twice ruthlessly established that trying to run a national government by having a national party hold up a third front variation doesn't work - the logic of national politics is against it.

Through all this making and unmaking of friendships, haggling and sometimes ghastly personal profit maximising, India started and never reversed its dissociation from socialism. Narasimha Rao, who politically broke the back of the economic ancien regime, did not even have a full-term parliamentary majority. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral weren't passionate reformers. As prime ministers with little hold on real levers of power, they were content when the then ex-Congressman P. Chidambaram, who had a communist as a cabinet colleague, took up the job of reforming the economy.

Vajpayee was apparently forced by the RSS to pick Yashwant Sinha as finance minister because Sinha better understood swadeshi. But Sinha, as many astute observers of the Indian economy point out, proved to be a doughty and clever reformer. Foreign policy changed, too, in part because of another nuclear test, for which Rao, who allegedly had to buy votes to secure a House majority, had prepared brilliantly and which Vajpayee, leading the BJP's first coalition that lasted barely a year, executed equally astutely.

So when the UPA took power in May 2004, Delhi since 1989 had been witness to plenty of bazaar politics and a few great, positive changes. The hope was that the UPA would be no different in essence. The common minimum programme was on the face of it a silly document. Actually, it contained a serious promise - that this would be the template on which policy bargaining will happen and the fig leaf that would cover policy "departures". But then something changed. Karat's CPM abandoned the rules of the bazaar. Bar putting some of the party's fellow travellers in decorative public offices, Karat's CPM wasn't interested in give and take.

Had Karat been interested in give and take, as every member of the ruling alliance has been since 1989, the UPA could have done a number of things without the CPM having to change its rhetoric. It could have sold small stakes in PSUs without privatising any of them. It could have worked on passing a banking bill that calls for upping the quantum of minority private shareholding in public sector banks and still kept the banks in the government fold. It could have increased FDI limits in some sectors. It could have passed the pension bill at the Centre, taking advantage of the fact that many states were already undertaking pension reform. It could have easily parsed nuclear-deal politics to make the deal look less "American".

Karat's CPM didn't want to trade, though, and the astonishing thing is that the Congress chose to be blind to it for so long. It suits the prime minister's spin doctors now to put out stories that the PM always knew the Left wasn't a good partner and the thought of looking elsewhere had always been in his mind. The fact is that the Congress's pusillanimity allowed the Left to suspend politics as usual.

But never mind. Late in its term but finally the Congress is back in the political marketplace.

Mulayam Singh Yadav has been a socialist, a caste leader, an eager pursuer of corporate friendships, an occasional agrarian reformer (sugarcane in western UP), a spoiler when the Congress wanted to topple the BJP, a helper when the BJP wanted to make sure its presidential candidate defeated the Left's, a friend of the Left and now a friend of the Congress. He knows the bazaar. With him or the likes of him on its side, the Congress or the BJP can rule by having room for policy manoeuvres.

How else can this complex country be run? With national politics not in a stable bipolar mode but with the country requiring that a few key policies be delivered, change-makers have to tactically use the attractions of political power.

It is satisfying to note therefore that Karat's CPM may pay for subverting the rules of political business. Minus the whip hand over a government, with the next elections most likely delivering fewer seats in Kerala and perhaps even in Bengal, with the Congress surely having learnt a lesson and the BJP declared a pariah by the Marxists, the CPM may be reduced to being a witness to many deals being made, who knows, may be even the nuclear deal.

Call it carrot's revenge on Karat.

saubhik.chakrabarti@expressindia.com

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