Ramachandra Guha, an historian of modern India and one of the country’s highly regarded political commentators and authors, says “the collapse of the party system is perhaps the single greatest threat to India’s democracy.”
“This is a more telling sign of how far Indian democracy has fallen than the attacks on press freedom, the suborning of independent institutions, the opacity of electoral funding and so on,” Guha adds.
In a 32-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, where he discusses and considerably expands upon an article written for the Kolkata newspaper The Telegraph on Sunday (January 15), Guha says there are two principal reasons why political parties in India have collapsed. The first is the transformation of political parties into what he calls “family firms”. This has happened to a very large number of parties including the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Akalis, the Shiv Sena, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Biju Janata Dal.
Ramachandra Guha writes:
“It is my contention that…(this transformation of political parties into family firms) would not have happened if the oldest and most storied of Indian political parties had not, under Indira Gandhi’s leadership, become a family firm.”
In contrast he cites the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s four sons. He says:
“All went to jail several times…none became members of parliament, let alone ministers”.
In the case of Devadas Gandhi he writes:
“He was asked by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to enter formal politics, he refused…Nehru offered to send Devadas as India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union…Nehru invited Devadas to join the union cabinet…(but) mindful of the precedent it would set, (he) declined each time.”
Although dynastic succession happens in many spheres, including cricket, the legal profession, medicine and, perhaps, most particularly the film industry. Guha believes it’s worse when it happens in politics. “Dynasticism in politics is far worse, because it is a violation of the democratic principle itself, and because it affects many more people.”
Of course, dynastic succession in political parties is not limited to India. It’s equally common in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. However, as Ramachandra Guha points out in the interview, perhaps its worst manifestation is happening in India.
The second reason why political parties have collapsed is what Ramachandra Guha calls “the subordination of parties to a single leader”. The classic example is the colossus-like dominance of Narendra Modi over the BJP and the personality cult that surrounds him.
Guha makes a telling distinction between the BJP under Vajpayee and the BJP under Modi.
“A.B. Vajpayee did not dominate his cabinet in the way that Narendra Modi does, while state chief ministers from the BJP never sought to speak in cravenly sycophantic terms of their prime minister as they now do. Since May 2014, the vast resources of the Union government and of the ruling party have been devoted to the burnishing of the image of the prime minister, presenting him as a semi-divine being who carries in his person the past, present and future of the Indian nation and of Indian civilization itself.”
Of course, the subordination of a party to a single leader is also true of many regional parties. Guha discusses Arvind Kejriwal’s impact on the Aam Aadmi Party, Mamata Banerjee’s impact on the Trinamool and Naveen Patnaik’s impact on the Biju Janata Dal.
This, I think, is Ramachandra Guha’s conclusion: “The degradation of the Indian party system is more or less complete, with one set of political parties becoming family firms, and another set becoming quasi-religious cults exalting their leader as a living God.”
Finally, Ramachandra Guha asks: “What does this signify for the wider political culture?” His answer is: “If a leader wants only praise from his party colleagues, would he ever be inclined to promote a free press? If a leader demands unquestioning loyalty from party members, why would he, when in power, not then demand unquestioning support for his mala fide acts of policy from the bureaucracy, the police, the media, or the judiciary?”
Watch the full interview here.
