Comment

Critiquing the ‘new’ state party bosses

THE rise to prominence at the national level of leaders like Nitish Kumar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, much talked about prime ministerial candidates-in-waiting, draws attention towards a critical need to explore the nature and forms of leadership at the state level. Leadership as a subject, unlike in the West, has largely been neglected in India by political scientists, with the scant literature available being more often than not in the form of political biographies or worse, hagiographies.

Also, for a long time the focus of study has been on the ‘national’ leaders; ‘lesser’ ones from the states continue to be neglected. This despite the fact that even during the ‘Congress era’ preceding Indira Gandhi, India witnessed a host of powerful state level leaders playing a significant role in giving concrete shape to the policies shaping the polity and economy of a nascent democracy, many of them like G.B. Pant (1887-1961) and K. Kamaraj (1903-1975) actually moving to the national stage. Congress chief ministers like C.B. Gupta, B.C. Roy, Pratap Singh Kairon, S.K. Sinha, S. Nijalingappa, D.P. Mishra, Y.S. Parmar, M.L. Sukhadia and Ravi Shanker Shukla wielded long-term power and influence. Some of them did not even hesitate to take up cudgels with Nehru, playing the role of kingmakers as members of the ‘Syndicate’ for a brief period after his demise.

Besides these state party bosses, Congress also had powerful factional leaders at the local level within the party organizations, both keeping the social coalitional support intact and playing an important role in party nominations. One could say the same about non-Congress parties having regional leaders with a national presence like E.M.S. Namboodiripad, C.N. Annadurai and much later, Jyoti Basu.

A fixation with national leaders could be attributed to the perception about state politics being too narrow and unimportant, besides merely being a ‘carbon copy’ of national politics, given Congress dominance. It is only in recent times with the newly exalted position of the states and state parties, that the considerable autonomy being wielded by states and state leaders is drawing attention. There is a realization that a study of the actions, policies, idioms and values of state leadership can go a long way in a better understanding of the distinctive nature of change and development in the concerned state.

Since this new set of powerful state leaders draw their power and influence from state parties they consider their ‘own’, it is useful to explore their rise. The state parties, most ‘ethnic’ in nature, have benefited from the fact that political articulation and mobilization in the electoral arena increasingly veers around identity politics based on caste, language, dialect and kinship which are regionally located. Also, the fragmented nature of the party system under a single plurality electoral system is advantageous for state parties as they originated and continue to thrive on the support of a ‘core’ social constituency consisting of a single numerically and economically significant caste/community, or alternatively a cluster of them. The narrow victories of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) in the last two assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, or the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) victories in the 1990s in Bihar, demonstrate the effectiveness of such a strategy of nurturing a caste based coalition by promising patronage and protection. To their disadvantage, polity-wide parties like Congress and BJP, perforce have to play the ethnic card in a stealth form, whether in selection of candidates or in distribution of patronage.

Significantly, the ascendance of a patrimonial model of electoral democracy also enables the state party leader to ensure personal loyalties of kinsmen who cling to their ‘own’ leader, irrespective of the party, in the realistic hope of being favoured as clients. States like Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar routinely witness a marked surge in a particular caste members’ share in public employment, government contracts, lucrative postings, service delivery and police protection, if a leader belonging to that particular caste succeeds in becoming the chief minister. Wary of facing a challenge from within the party, these leaders have deliberately kept their parties institutionally weak. Even the much older, cadre based and ideologically rooted parties like the Akali Dal, Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) and National Conference (NC) have fallen victim to dynastic politics, with all levers of power remaining within the ‘ruling family’. Among the newer parties, mainly offshoots of the Congress or socialist parties, one finds leaders like Lalu Yadav, Sharad Pawar, Naveen Patnaik, Ramvilas Paswan, Ajit Singh, Jayalalithaa or Mayawati, who as founder-presidents or ‘natural heirs’ have astutely cultivated their personalized rather than party based support base.

Depending more on their personal charisma and sphere of influence, these leaders are quite capable of making and unmaking the parties on their own terms. What helps them also is their complete control over party funds, critical for financing elections and running the party. Parties act as channels through which personal wealth and party funds are accumulated, almost like personal property, that needs to pass on to family members for safe custody as also to run the ‘family business’. Lording over the states, most of them comparable in size to European countries, these leaders, when in power, automatically gain access to huge political resources, organization, money and the official machinery. This partly explains the reluctance of leaders like Nitish Kumar, despite their ambition, to move to the national stage, as they may well be recalling the dismal fate of H.D. Deve Gowda, the powerful Vokkaliga chief minister of Karnataka. Come elections, the ‘national’ leaders ensconced in Delhi, even belonging to the polity-wide parties, depend on the goodwill of powerful state leaders to secure ‘safer’ constituencies for themselves and their kin.

So how do these ‘new’ state leaders differ from the ‘old’ ones? Though the ‘old’ party ‘satraps’ of Congress also partly drew their support from the powerful landed peasant castes and communities, the difference lay in terms of the hierarchical positioning of the castes. Earlier it was always the upper/forward castes; now newly mobilized middle and upper backward castes have also joined in, thereby expanding the social base of leadership. However, the old generation state leaders’ politics was not governed so starkly by narrow considerations of caste and community as is the case with the newly emergent state party bosses, who are comparable to factional leaders of the Congress of yore. The ‘old’ state party bosses’ active participation and ideological grounding in the secular modern idioms/ values that informed the nationalist movement, in part enabled them to rise over and above the partisan interests and to recognize and accommodate the differences that would arise due to the heterogeneous support base of the Congress.

In contrast, the new crop of state leaders and the parties they lead, have come up in the backdrop of an assertion of narrow identity based politics, devoid of ideological content or activism, in the wake of Congress decline. They continue to thrive electorally on patronage based sectarian politics, even as they sprout the modern language of development and governance. Their proclivity to resort to neo-patrimonial political practices make them susceptible to regional and parochial interests even when they undertake the responsibility of being lawmakers or running the government at the Centre. Aspiring to a ‘national’ status, these leaders must believe and work for compromises and conciliation rather than accentuating them when dealing with conflicting regional or identity based group interests. Stitching together an opportunistic electoral alliance by the state party bosses for the purpose of building a ‘power bloc’ capable of capturing power at the Centre, as being attempted by Mulayam Singh Yadav, has ominous portents for a federal polity which is already under considerable strain.

Ashutosh Kumar

Professor, Department of Political Science,

Panjab University, Chandigarh