Mandate 99: National Parties: Slip and Slide

This was supposed to be the great contest between the two national parties, the election that would take India inexorably towards a bipolar polity. The electorate had other plans. The Congress encountered the worst drubbing in its history, while the BJP, despite leading the NDA to a simple majority, found itself thrashed in Uttar Pradesh.

As the two all-India parties ponder the verdict and plot the future, they must be wondering if the age of sweeping, grand, single-party majorities will ever return. For both the decade began optimistically -- in 1991, the Congress recaptured power and the BJP registered spectacular growth -- for both it ends with a certain sobriety. The Congress continues its longest exile from office. The BJP realises it may just have peaked individually.

BJP
After addressing over 100 election rallies and covering 86,000 air miles, Atal Bihari Vajpayee may have become the first non-Congress prime minister to win a second term in office. But with the BJP unable to improve its electoral tally, neither Vajpayee nor the party had much cause for celebration.

The euphoria over the clean sweep in Delhi gave way to introspection when it became clear that the party faced a debacle in Uttar Pradesh, where its tally had been halved. The crucible of the Hindutva movement, Uttar Pradesh has always been the backbone of the BJP. Home Minister L.K. Advani admitted that the signals from the country's largest state put a damper on victory celebrations: "We knew we were in for losses in Uttar Pradesh but never expected them to be so huge."

The BJP will now have to grapple with Chief Minister Kalyan Singh's virtual rebellion in the state and the growing OBC-upper caste divide. Vajpayee's aides admit there is no easy solution to the problems in Uttar Pradesh where assembly polls are due in 2000. The party's top leadership says that Kalyan has proved to be a tough nut to crack -- out of the party he can inflict even more damage to the BJP.

Meanwhile, the BJP is drawing comfort from the fact that it has consolidated its spread in the south and broken new ground in Assam. General Secretary Narendra Modi points to the party's win in Nagercoil and exults, "We can now claim to be a truly national party. We now reach from Kashmir to Kanyakumari."

The south has indeed taught the BJP some lessons about alliance arithmetic. There is the alliance with N. Chandrababu Naidu's TDP that has worked beautifully in Andhra Pradesh but in Karnataka the BJP has had to face losses because of its tie-up with the Janata Dal (United). Advani says the BJP's state unit had warned that the alliance would cost the party on the ground. "But we went along with the arrangement in the larger interest of alliance politics," he says. The lesson for the BJP is that the public would not accept an alliance between parties that were fighting till the other day. But with the BJP no closer to a majority on its own, verdict '99 can only increase its commitment to coalition politics.

It is a legacy in tatters. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi filled up four-fifth of the Lok Sabha with Congress MPs. Fifteen years later, under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi, the party has lost three-quarters of its strength, and would have sunk to a two-digit figure but for a windfall in Karnataka. After its collapse in the 1996 poll, the then Congress president P.V. Narasimha Rao was persuaded to resign. After a similar failure in 1998, Sitaram Kesri was evicted from his office for Sonia to almost muscle her way into it. Is that a uniform rule, applicable to all vanquished generals of the Congress?

Certainly not, if the incumbent hails from the party's ruling dynasty. Rather than owning responsibility, the drill has begun at 10 Janpath to find scapegoats. Last week, after it had become obvious that the Congress had little chance of emerging as the single largest party, the Congress Working Committee bigwigs got into a huddle to conjure up excuse after excuse.

The next day, the spin doctors were mouthing these in every possible forum -- television channels, media briefings and private discussions. The party had after all increased its vote share, it was claimed, so what if it had lost nearly 30 seats. The gain of 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh from a zero draw in 1998 was shown as the electoral equivalent of the Kargil victory.

For the unexpected humbling of the party in the three states where it had won the assembly elections in November 1998 -- Delhi, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh -- attempts were on to make the chief ministers carry the can. When Digvijay Singh reached Delhi from Bhopal, he was told that the poll results might have been rosier if only he had not hiked the electricity tariff in his state. In Delhi, where the party lost all seven seats, a group of MLAs became vocal demanding the resignation of Chief Minister Sheila Dixit. In Rajasthan, where the party halved its 1998 tally of 18, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot stood in the dock for having alienated the Jat community on the job reservation issue. His supporters claim he doesn't take a step without consulting the party president.

However, for Sonia, the situation has been partly alleviated by her double victory in Bellary and Amethi, with a large margin in the family's pocket borough, and the emergence of her daughter Priyanka as the more effective legatee. The Congress president has stated that the results call for "introspection, frank discussion and determined action". But no introspection is expected on the efficacy of her leadership. For its part, the only "frank discussion" may centre on whether the grooming of Priyanka should begin right away, by gifting her the seat her mother decides to vacate.

Left in the Margins
The Marxists exercised undue influence in two successive Lok Sabha. Now they find their fortresses under siege.

On October 5, a day before the counting of votes for poll '99 was to begin, CPI(M) General Secretary H.S. Surjeet was a picture of confidence, "I won't bet on one seat more than 200 for the so-called National Democratic Alliance, all allies of the BJP counted together." On October 7, as the BJP and its allies crossed the 290 mark, the untiring advocate of a "secular front" against the BJP was visibly off-colour. "I can't comment until the full results are declared," came the loser's usual response.

The CPI(M)-led Left Front, having enjoyed a disproportionate role on the national political stage since 1996 because of a repeatedly splintered Lok Sabha, is surely losing out on its manipulating ability. In the 11th Lok Sabha (1996-98), it was one of the ruling United Front's powerful backseat drivers. Even in the previous Lok Sabha, its 48 members could rustle up strength to pull down the A.B.Vajpayee-led government and then attempt, unsuccessfully, to foist an alternative Congress-only government. Now, with the strength of the Congress hitting a historic low, Surjeet's skill at grouping parties together against the BJP cries for a halt. A member of the CPI(M) politburo admitted that there could have been "room for manoeuvring" if the BJP's own tally had been close to that of the Congress. With the Congress way behind the BJP, there isn't much chance of a replay of the toppling game.

The left parties are therefore taking a break from the intrigues in the Capital to concentrate on their citadels, Kerala and West Bengal. In Kerala, where the CPI(M) tally has come down and the CPI hasn't won a single seat, the Left is facing an identity crisis as it is cosying up nationally to the Congress, its main rival locally.

In West Bengal, the Left Front has lost three more seats compared to 1998. What rankles the most is the doubling of the BJP score in the state to two, including Krishnagar, far out of the Calcutta belt that has been the red coalition's traditional Achilles' heel. The CPI(M) Central Committee will be in session this week to analyse the results. But few expect the senior partner of the front to find a way out of its slow but inevitable erosion in the states where it still matters. With Jyoti Basu's retirement again becoming the subject of speculation and with the West Bengal assembly elections due in a year and a half, the comrades are reaching for their thinking caps.

-Sumit Mitra