May 17, 1999

It's going to be a very down-to-earth election.

By Swapan Dasgupta

This is not a good time to talk politics. With the 13Th general election scheduled after four months, the mercury touching the mid-40s and public preoccupation darting between the World Cup in England and a murder scandal involving the rich and famous of Delhi, the travails of A.B. Vajpayee and Sonia Gandhi have receded from collective consciousness. The silly season is well and truly upon us what with an intrusive media stalking private dinner parties in desperate search of undercover deals. The dirty tricks departments are working overtime but an over-politicised India is yearning for a breather until democracy resumes in September.

With weariness in the air, it is hardly surprising that cataclysmic political changes are not registering. On the weekend of May 1-2, the BJP National Executive met in Delhi and apart from recording the party's gung-ho mood, decided that the general election would be fought on the strength of a common National Agenda for Governance (NAG). In short, the party of "distinctiveness" that had once revelled in what L.K. Advani was fond of calling its "majestic isolation" was willing to put its core identity on hold. This year's NAG will have no mention of the Ayodhya controversy, Article 370 and a uniform civil code. It will be couched in what Vajpayee called the "dharma of coalitions", a code that will appeal to the BJP's Hindu nationalism, the Samata Party's Lohiaism and the MDMK's Dravidian ideology.

For BJP watchers, accustomed to detecting perennial conflicts between the Vajpayee "moderates" and the Advani "hardliners", the move was unexpected. They are unable to fathom how a momentous decision like this was allowed to go unchallenged by elements that dream of a Hindu millennium. For conspiracy-theorists, there is either a sinister design or else a "hidden agenda" that has been kept in temporary abeyance.

The reality may be a bit more simple. For the BJP, as with other political parties including the CPI(M), power has been a great leveller. There seems to be a grudging realisation that there are substantial areas of governance that are untouched by faith. Ideological positioning is a very important facet of what is called "identity" politics but recedes into the background when coping with administration. This time, unlike 1991 when the Ayodhya movement was at its height, the BJP is an admitted contender for power. The electorate has a shrewd idea of what the party stands for; it wants to know how those beliefs will translate into policy. The two are not necessarily coterminous.

Like it or not, this is going to be one of the most down-to-earth elections in living memory. It's a straight battle between two contestants with no ambiguity over who will become prime minister in the event of either winning. This was never the case earlier. Invariably, it was the Congress that had a prime ministerial candidate. The other side wasn't so blessed. Even in 1977, the electorate didn't know at the time of voting who would be prime minister in the event of Indira Gandhi losing.

The two-horse race has produced a welcome clarity into politics. There have been too many elections and too much uncertainty. The mood is one of fatigue. People just want to get to the basics and the parties don't want extraneous issues to influence the outcome. Loftier issues haven't been forgotten. They merely await an election one side knows it will lose. No one is taking chances this year.

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