BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Guided Democracy

For V P Singh the end always justifies the means.

There are many politicians who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge their own obsolescence. Vishwanath Pratap Singh happens to be one such leader who refuses to vacate the centre stage. After countless proclamations of political retirement which many have viewed with dollops of scepticism, Singh has decided to resume his open battle against the usual suspects: the so-called "communal forces". With his pet coalition government at the Centre in ruins thanks to the venality and ineptitude of its practitioners, the Raja of Manda has turned to "political alchemy" to bail him out. His blueprint for the next general election is not merely novel, but characteristically diabolical.

Reduced to bare bones, the Singh rescue plan rests on the conviction that a gullible and ignorant electorate must be saved from itself. Under no circumstances must it be offered clear-cut alternatives. Instead, it should be presented with a series of make-believe, dummy options to facilitate a pre-determined outcome. Singh concedes that there is no fundamental difference between the Congress and the constituents of the United Front, except by way of social bases. At the same time, he insists that the two must nevertheless maintain a pretence of divergence and antagonism to prevent the BJP from grabbing the alternative space. In Singh's scheme of things, the Government and the opposition should be mirror images of each other, bound by a "strategic understanding". Politics, in other words, should resemble the tussle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola, with no place for the nimbu pani.

At the heart of Singh's guided democracy project is also the exclusion of the BJP from meaningful democratic participation. This would have been understandable if the BJP was spewing religious hatred and positing an ugly variant of Hindutva. However, the Ayodhya debate, even if inconclusive, is well and truly a feature of yesterday. The BJP recognises that it cannot secure a conclusive mandate by stressing national identity alone. To succeed, it has to become inclusive and address the issue of purposeful governance. Singh's bid to re-anoint the BJP with the stigma of untouchability amounts to an invitation for the revival of Hindu-Muslim tensions that have been dormant for the past four years. It is a senseless move to turn minorities into electoral cannon fodder.

It is also a characteristically Singh ploy. His decision to implement the Mandal Commission report in 1990 and unleash caste war stemmed from a desire to outmanoeuvre his then factional adversary, Devi Lal. In the relentless pursuit of political power, Singh has always lacked a sense of proportion.

For many years, Singh has successfully packaged his amorality as self-denial and saintliness. Now, sensing an impending electoral rout and the collapse of his India-is-a-coalition dream, he has fallen back on recklessness. First, anti-corruption disappeared from his list of priorities. He is willing to embrace embezzlers, bribe-takers and other shadowy creatures as long as they swear by secularism. Subsequently, anti-Congressism was quietly jettisoned. Now, he is seeking to subvert democratic choice by organised deception. Decisive governance has diappeared from his vocabulary and has been replaced by coalitionism for its own sake. Singh, by his own admission, is now doggedly practising alchemy -- a pseudo-science that endeavours to turn base metal into gold. The nation should be wary of quacks masquerading as spin doctors.

© Living Media India Ltd