By Amitava Mukherjee Great interest is likely to be generated all over the country as K Chandrashekhar Rao, the Chief Minister of Telangana and the founder of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (now BRS), launches his own national party. It may act as a trendsetter as no other regional party of the country has so far […]
By Amitava Mukherjee
Great interest is likely to be generated all over the country as K Chandrashekhar Rao, the Chief Minister of Telangana and the founder of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (now BRS), launches his own national party. It may act as a trendsetter as no other regional party of the country has so far attempted to go national in spite of the fact that some of them carry names that have national connotations.
<KCR’s move has come at a time when the country is in flux. The BJP government of Narendra Modi, though starting on a different note, is now faltering. Modi started on a ‘development’ narrative but his developmental concept has always hinged on capitalist ideas leaving the common people of the country in the lurch. Soaring inflation and unemployment and the Central government’s apparent apathy towards it are telltale signs of the real ‘development’ ideas that the Modi government is trying to sell
KCR’s decision will be keenly watched all over the country because hardly, in the recent political history of India, a regional party has decided to transform it to a national one. True, there are the Janata Dal (United), the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, etc., are there in the field for a long time. But none of them has been able to rise above their State-wise character. Akhilesh Yadav is bogged down in Uttar Pradesh. Mamata Banerjee is more interested in becoming the principal face among opposition leaders. Her actions suggest that in doing so she is prepared to sabotage the overall opposition unity also. Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi Yadav cannot think about anything outside Bihar. Even Sharad Pawar’s shadow is confined within Maharashtra.
If KCR moves along the right way, he might be a real challenge to Modi. It is not hyperbole or paean but KCR’s concept of development stands in stark contradistinction to that of Modi. While the latter’s Bills on agrarian reform led to huge protests from farmers the former’s different types of endeavours in the same arena did not lead to any social unrest. As the BJP is desperately trying to gain a foothold in Telangana these two types of developmental concepts are likely to clash with each other.
Will KCR be able to set up a motion of change in our national political course? The 1980s and the 1990s saw the heydays of regional parties which coincided with the weakening of the Congress. Richard Mahapatra, a serious commentator on Indian politics, informs us that “ … in the first Lok Sabha election in 1952, of the 55 political parties that contested 18 were regional parties. The number went up to 36 in the 2004 election. In the 1984 general election, the regional parties got 11.2 percent of the votes; in 2009 their share went up to 28.4 percent. In the past 20 years, the share of regional parties in total votes has consistently increased…”
This was quite natural because the concept of regional aspirations is there in the Indian political psyche. This was the reason behind reorganisation of States in the 1950s. Only there is no real contradiction between regional and national aspirations. The job is to synthesise the two. The 1967 General Election saw the sprouting of regional parties on a great scale. This period saw the rise to power of the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) in Uttar Pradesh, .the DMK in the then Madras, etc. The National Conference in Jammu and Kashmir predated these two parties and fell into a different class. But it is difficult to say whether these outfits have been able to discharge their responsibilities as political parties. The DMK lapsed into sub-regionalism. The BKD and its later day offshoots like the Samajwadi Party took shelter in the cocoon of caste-based identity.
In his new role as the leader of a new national party, KCR will have to perform several roles in different arenas, the three most important of them being the questions of federalism, authoritarianism and economic sustenance. The founding fathers of the Indian Constitution knew about the ingrained propensity of India towards federal concepts. True, in the Congress regimes this concept came under attack on several occasions and the worst example that comes to our mind is the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi. Happenings in previous years however throw up a question as to what extent the Modi government has respect for this time-tested concept. Opponents of Modi hurl the accusation of authoritarianism against him. BJP denies it. However, inner party equations lend credence to it.
Marginalisation of Nitin Gadkari inside the BJP points out such a possibility. The nation will be eager to know KCR’s view on these aspects. Then of course there is the type of development that Modi is determined to push through. It is basically a piggyback ride on the shoulders of a few chosen capitalists. Narendra Modi’s idea of development is basically developments of infrastructures – roads, bridges, ports, metro rails, etc., which hardly touch the lives of millions of poor, underfed and often hungry rural folks living in villages. Pitifully the RJD, the Trinamool Congress, the Samajwadi Party, or the NCP have not been able to proffer any worthwhile better model in all these years.
Dangling before the country the prospect of a digital India, as the BJP government at the Centre is now doing, may seem to some people a laudable objective. But India lives in many moods, many ages and it is extremely important that this time differential is narrowed first. Narendra Modi has certainly erred on this touchstone. The country, or a large part of it, will look to KCR whether he can give a new dimension to our national politics.
(Amitava Mukherjee is a senior journalist and commentator)