How Indian Politics Changed
Pre Sonia:
Governments carried the opposition with them unitedly on issues like National security, Defence, Foreign policy. A Rajiv Gandhi selected opposition leader AB Vajpayee to lead India in a world forum and parliament elected a true opposition leader as the Dy Speaker. Every Government had risen above petty politics and co-opted the opposition till the rules of engagement started to change in 1998/1999.
India had only Congress as a political party before 1947 and every politician post 1947 was a Congressman who had walked out. The DNA was intact across the political spectrum. Be it a Shyama Prasad Mukherjee who founded the Jan Sangh, now BJP or any of the others heading political party’s today – they were all Congressmen before walking away. They cherished a relationship above the differences. 1998 was a tipping point.
VP Singh breached a major redline and started the rot by derailing the Indian Defence industry with his Bofors crusade. Between 1991 when Rajiv Gandhi died and 1998, Sonia was considered an outsider, a dumb doll in politics, with no ethos of what India meant. When Indians born in India cannot fully understand the ethos and philosophy of India, she came from a western world, had no mentor and under these circumstances of vacuum she needed to create her own standing, leadership, and control. Sonia took over as the President of Congress, on 14th March 1998 and the Kandahar Indian Airline hijack happened on 24th December 1999. This hijack gave her that opportunity – to breach further redlines.
Post Sonia:
Her sole aim at that time was to come across as a strong leader and to stamp her presence so the nation sits up and notices. She stood up against the government and conveyed she was the strong person who could handle such a crisis better. The Government and Iron Man Advani in particular was shown as being weak. The opposition had just made a national crisis more complicated. In the ultimate analysis the government battling to save over 100 lives had to surrender. She plunged the knife in deep and within Congress her leadership was established.
This crisis broke the Government/ Opposition relationship irretrievably. Given that Congress used this incident as a stick till 2019 with scathing criticism the possibility of a bipartisan political establishment in a national crisis has all but disappeared. Covid politics is a case in point.
Let us recall what happened when the Iranians hijacked the USA embassy in Teheran. Then Democratic President Carter sent in troops, who were shot down, and USA was left red faced. Carter was a broken man, but he continued his efforts to free the hostages. He lost the election to Republican Reagan. Sometime after Reagan took over as President the hostages were freed. Guess what? Reagan sent Carter in Air Force 1 to meet, greet and welcome the hostages as they landed on USA soil and the entire spotlight of that moment was on Carter a Democrat who had failed and lost. THAT is called putting national interest above political interest and keeping the redlines in political relationships.
Here, the Congress wiped the floor clean with BJP on the Hijack.
The political discourse changed. Congress Party President Sitaram Kesari was locked up in a bathroom to prevent his attending the Congress party election. The gates of the Congress office were closed and refused entry to the body of PV Narasimha Rao, a lifelong Congressman, former Prime Minister of India, and the family forced to move the body to Hyderabad from Delhi with NO respects given to the dead. A group of MP’s sent USA a petition seeking/ endorsing the decision to declare an elected CM of a state as persona non grata. Language of political campaigns saw abusive words against respected senior leaders.
Meanwhile in Media:
A cursory look at communal riots in India will give you a mile long list. The Gujarat 2002 riots was portrayed as the first and only communal riot in India because, thanks to live Television every journalist wanted to be the bigger journalist than others. Death, destruction and even fuelling it became an adrenalin pumping strategy giving the channel fame and the journalists their bonus. The rookie journalists of 2002 are today’s celebs, media policy makers.
The media especially Television matured such that the Mumbai 2008 terror attack action was shown live. How much of the operation was compromised was never analysed and if so, never published! But talk to any of the men in uniform – compromised they say unanimously.
One journalist in a Freudian slip confessed how the terror attack on the Indian parliament was a career opportunity for him. Another journalist announced an Army coup in India. In a contrarian twist a political leader wept for the terrorist killed by the police, not the policeman killed. These are a few examples but given the kind of money made on death many in the media encouraged it overtly or covertly for the eyeballs they got, rather than douse the fires.
Meanwhile - Cricket, Bollywood, and TV:
Voyeuristic reality TV programs, cricket as entertainment meant that a society with young aspiring millionaires, glamourous TV, competitive cricket and competitive politics – they all merged into a whole. Politics merged with an equally cutthroat world of TV, films, sports, and media and a new brand of no holds barred, take no prisoners, no rules exist system was born. One large incestuous club was formed that believed in nothing except total victory. The system had been taken over by this new culture with media as cheerleaders. The economy was booming not because of what we were doing but in spite of that. The nation was not building any edifice for posterity in Healthcare, Infrastructure, Clean/ Alternate Energy, Manufacturing, etc but flowing in a flood thinking we were master swimmers. It was all about spending money, largesse, and little investment.
All political leaders were caught in a classic generation gap. They still believed in the old-world grace, behaviour but the new brash and upstarts, upended them, and they had no choice but to tag along or in some cases like Mamata do one better than them in street politics. Aggression was no longer frowned upon; it was a proud label to wear. Corruption was cheered – Dabangg had arrived.
Each of these are what I call as rank bad behaviour.
When bad behaviour happens, If you reward it by staying silent, you open the door wide. Once this happens someone else will change the argument, raise the bar, change the rules because now the age-old rules and redlines have been breached.
Not one called out one incident, comment, as bad behaviour! The message was these are “good behaviour” that Indians accept. While the victory of Congress in 2004 can be attributed to many aspects, Indian media, Opinion makers, the voters, rewarded the bad behaviour with thumping back-to-back electoral victories in 2004 and 2009 – thus legitimising such no rules, no holds barred politics.
A cursory look at the political management of terrorism and other events bears testimony to how a certain political class and society seemed to normalise it, gloss over it, sugar coat it and then blame those who complained for politicising it or worse for being intolerant, war mongers. An incestuous media cheered. The audacity of this confidence reached a stage where a deal was stuck with Pakistan to vacate Siachen, a PM indirectly confessing India was meddling around in Balochistan and agreeing to discuss Kashmir as an issue. Fantasy and delusion merged reaching utopian heights.
A Mulayam Singh called rape as youngsters being naughty and TV anchor Sreenivasan Jain called terror attacks as chota mota bomb blast, implying society was unnecessarily getting worked up. As regards corruption - it was there, is there and will be there, but what happened during this period was - having corruption within corruption itself. The rot was complete for the edifice to crumble. THAT is the extent to which rules were changed, bad behaviour normalised, and media conveyed it was acceptable with selective silence.
The new Post Sonia era of politics and glamour eco system had come to stay. Here, if they called for a game of Football, they brought a Hockey stick and beat the opponent that had come prepared for Football, hurt them, and laughed.
Post Modi:
People change rules, did I say? Modi came in and changed the rules, challenged the status quo and suddenly people were uncomfortable. The genie was long ago out of the bottle. The society, media, intelligentsia, nobody complained for years that there was bad behaviour. Modi and team said – we are fully prepared for a brawl in the field, with no rules. Social media amplified this message.
Modi changed the rules. If they called for a game of Hockey, his team came with Baseball bats and pulverised the opposition. Be it Surgical strikes or Balakot, the new India called the Pakistan Nuclear bluff and ignored them as if they did not exist. They stared China eyeball to eyeball backed by hard decisions. Every action of team Modi was a surprise, unexpected, unpredictable and information leak was non-existent. This was a Government that made everyone uncomfortable and depending how incestuous one was, you either screamed or cheered.
Suddenly two are playing a game where there are no rules and wanting total victory. The language, behaviour, attitude, tactics – you can clearly see rules changing constantly, breaching new redlines. Remember the famous TV interview asking Pakistan to get rid of Modi or the suggestion that USA must intervene in India, the midnight clandestine meeting at the Chinese embassy? Sleeping with the enemy could be the final logical step.
Nothing said here is a justification or judgement of any decision, act, strategy but an analysis of how the change happened. Like the virus, when you mutate a national political system, a counter mutation will take place. We now see a Post Sonia era clashing with a Post Modi era and 2024 will settle this argument at least for the near term. Till then the pot will keep boiling.
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