coopting dissent- the indian way!

Game for an alliance anyone?
Picture this: Amar Singh questions the crony capitalism that occupies centre stage in UPA's rescue mission of the nuclear deal. This allegiance to national interest though doesn't require of him to hesitate when he implores Manmohan Singh to intervene in the tussle between the Ambani Brothers.
Shibu Soren threatens to withdraw support to the ruling coalition unless he's made Jharkhand's CM. Within a week, the Centre intervenes and photos of Madhu Koda placing sweets and the state before Soren's palate are splashed in all the major dailies.
It only takes a decade for BSP to change its slogan from "tilak,taraju aur talwar,inko maaro jootey char" to "sarvajan hitaya,sarvajan sukhaya" .
Championing land reforms & massive devolution of power through panchayats takes a backseat as the CPI (M) led Left front government in West Bengal becomes virtually indistinguishable from parties that follow the neo liberal agenda.
The study of political science tells you to view nothing in isolation. Weave these divergent threads together and you get a fabric called coalition politics of regional parties. As a narrative that combines the worst impulses of Indian society and the best of Indian democracy, the politics of coalition that these parties pander to, has truly catapulted them onto the national scene.

The roots of this uprising can be traced to the twin issues of the collapse of the Nehruvian consensus and the rise of the agricultural bourgeoisie in the late 80s.The consensus developed at the time, was over an import substituting economy, a broadly secular polity & a non aligned foreign policy which lost its legitimacy post the breakup of USSR. As the optimism of the 50s&60s faded into the disenchantment of the 80s, the Congress increasingly fell from power ushering an era where 17 years have seen 7 coalition governments at the Centre. However, the consequences of this instability have not altogether been negative. Some social groups found their voice and immense liberatory
possibiIities.
Take Dalit empowerment for instance; a community that faces socio economic oppression on a daily basis from all sections of the upper crust realizes that the ruling umbrella party is wanting in its cover. In steps a Mayawati embodying every Dalit aspiration in her being, & the 16.2% populace finally finds a credible vent. Trouble mobilizing support for linguistic reorganization of states? Create a TDP and garnering support shall become the last of your worries. Find yourself sharing funds with the easterners involuntarily? Stir up an Akali Dal & start dreaming of Khalistan - a place where Singhs gets to be kings. Worried that both Hindu & Muslim elites are paying lip service to emancipation of the backward castes? Send an SOS to Samajwadi Party in U.P. & Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar & they'll come calling. Started out with workers liberation but are rethinking strategy to favor capital accumulation through MNCs? Set up a trigger-happy youth cadre to secure your vote bank and just in case people question the reorientation, brand it as differences within the New & the Old Left. Troubled that the common man's problem of inflation might not give the kind of political leverage that the nuke deal debate can? Take sides across the board and gun for a trust vote.
Regional political parties should come with a warning label cautioning you, that for the all good that can come off them, it's going to cost you mate!
Sure the true meaning of federalism is brought into action but does it justify brushing 'the national' under the carpet? Should intolerance of 'the other' be allowed to breed so inexorably, that it shall take a Khairlanji to shake us off our seats?

The upsurge of the lower caste struggles is an extremely complex affair that has a dynamic that is specific to the lived experience of the different caste groups, especially the dalits. And if that's not enough, each state in India has a different dynamic & political configuration, separately reflected in the contests within them. Teaming up with the dominant right wing party then is too naively read as treason.
In backing the NDA coalition in 1998, parties were motivated to join the NDA not for ideological reasons but because of the logic of political configuration in their states; for instance the Trinamool Congress opposed the Congress & CPI (M) in West Bengal, Telugu Desam the Congress in Andhra & MDMK & DMK in Tamil Nadu were in electoral rivalry with the other Dravidian party in the State, the AIADMK. Thus, by the mid 1990s the logic of regional parties had come to be decisive in government formation at the Centre.

Also everything that is critical of secular politics need not be dismissed simply as communal. Actors outside of this secular communal polarity fail to be then seen independently of it. The three time alliance of the Dalit party, the BSP, with the BJP in UP is too easily read as opportunistic support for Hindutva when it is more centrally about the politics of caste.
The BSP needs to secure allies for Dalits against the dominant backward caste (pre dominantly Yadav) parties of the state since backward castes ratHer than Brahmins are their immediate oppressors in the villages of northern India. These parties are opposed by the BJP too, with its largely Bania-Brahmin support base; hence the alliance between the two.
Going overboard with the Hindutva ideologue may have cost the BJP an electoral victory but its certainly not shaping up as a vote against communalism. The party's Karnataka chapter has taken away a separate lesson from this defeat. Thinking people have not rejected Hindutva but its 'dilution', party MPs & MLAs have used the economic competition between Hindu & Muslim fisherfolk in coastal Karnataka, to whip up anti Muslim sentiments & consolidate their presence.

It is believed that if the base is secure, then the structure shall stand untarnished. India's adoption of the Mixed economy model in this case, became the foundation on which battle lines over access to resources were drawn. On failing to supply as many jobs as the land demanded, this economic frustration created a political structure, which favored the marginalisation of most to secure gains for some. Consequently, issues of reservation, communalisation, preferential treatment of certain states in the north, ignorance of the South and even a 'tunnel vision' that makes the DMK support the LTTE just because they happen to be Tamilians gain ground.
In the light of the above arguments, it is alarming to note how politics gets reduced to the numbers game & kingmakers emerge to cut deals across the board. Accommodative politics ends up paying obeisance to populist measures like supplying rice at the rate of 2 rupees per kg in areas that do not require activation of such poverty alleviation measures or providing free TVs to Tsunami survivors.

At the same time, it is unlikely that the prevalence of regional parties can do more harm than done and dismissing them as a political degeneration therefore is being unfair to their heroic survival against Congress hegemony. What redeems them is the greater levels of democratization that they brought about.
With the creation of a wider public space, one party dominance came to an end and the development of the Centre (majority) no longer necessitated the underdevelopment of the periphery (minority). So even though the strategy of putting together a 3rd front is unlikely to withstand the pressures of more than one general election (considering the varied ideological standpoints of the participant parties), an undaunted optimism in the vibrancy of Indian democracy obliterates the pessimism of the intellect.