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PLEASURE IS ALL MINE

How defeated parties stay in contention

SHAH HUSAIN IMAM
THE cases in point are paradoxically the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). The only similarity between the two parties is that both are down but not out, as the cliche goes. And the common challenge between the two is to reform. They both
appear to think that 'dynasty is the binding factor and dynasty removed, all the beads in the chain will split and disappear' and the parties may lose their existence.
The same goes for the ruling Awami League party in Bangladesh. Its top leader will have to allow leadership to grow from ground upward right up to the helm.
Practically, three structural changes need to occur in the major political parties: one, inner-party elections of office bearers at all levels; two, party and government leaderships should not combine in a single person; and three, these will lay the foundation for a culture of inter-party communicative relationship based on mutual accommodation and tolerance.
In truth though, parallels cannot be drawn between current situations of Congress and BNP. The Congress' drubbing has come through a properly held election but the BNP's came through a different route.
BNP would have us believe that Congress-led UPA government had helped the Awami League to go to power for the second term. Going by BNP's perception, India should have pressured the AL to pull back from election until such time as the two parties agreed to a mutually acceptable pre-poll time government formula to oversee elections. India could argue that it didn't want to meddle in Bangladesh's political affairs. In effect, what stands out is the BNP's reluctance in seizing the offer of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to be part of an interim government clearing the deck for a participative national election.
Having said that, Congress' predicament in India may have only begun. The grand old party with its 44 seats in the Lok Sabha is pitted against three regional parties which can deny the Congress the main opposition space in the Lower House. Jayalalithaa's AIADMK bagged 37 in Tamil Nadu, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress (TMC) 34 in West Bengal and Naveen Patnaik's Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha 20 making for a total of 91. If they combine and unify under a common platform they can function as a 'bloc' in the new House projecting a stronger profile than the Congress.
The TMC is aiming at the post of Leader of the Opposition, the Deputy Speaker and the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, a rather tall ask. Jayalalithaa and Naveen Patnaik may demand their share of what will be on offer.
Alternative equations may be worked out between Congress and one or the other regional parties, who knows!
At any rate, Congress may have to go it alone in the Lok Sabha but it will need more than the communication skills of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi to make its voice heard. Priyanka may take her place in Lok Sabha perhaps through a by-election when due. As a fallen party with rich background it will surely receive courtesies but it needs the flair of the likes of Tharoor perhaps to mark a meaningful presence in Lok Sabha. What the Congress lacks in quantity will have to be made up for by quality of the messages delivered henceforth.
Not all is lost for it as the Congress-led UPA has a majority in Rajya Sabha for which it will be approached by BJP whenever any serious business of legislation requiring the passage through the two Houses would be involved.
The Congress had seen worse days through post-emergency electoral rejection, stripping Indira Gandhi of her seat in parliament, her arrest on corruption charges, her release and finally on the back of weak unstable coalition governments, she staged a huge comeback on 'stability' plank in 1980.
The objective conditions then and now are very different. Modi's resounding victory promises a strong government. Confident of meeting the people with a 'report card' in 2019, he is apparently looking to a decade-long leadership.
If Narendra Modi stresses the Sang Parivar's philosophy and parampara (evolutionary inheritance) over the collective historical ethos of pluralism and secularist diversity India has grown up through, then he will be unleashing forces he wouldn't be able to contain.
Morning, hopefully, shows the day and Modi's tenure has been launched with the right sensibility shown to the vanquished party and to countries in the neighbourhood, something people would expect to see flourish throughout his tenure.
Recall a wallop of an entry a Bangladeshi listener made into his Facebook for BBC Bangla Service: 'BJP had first planned to stage the oath-taking on 21st May but realising that death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi fell on the day, the party rescheduled the ceremony for 26th May.' Then he regretted that among Bangladeshi leaders such 'humility' (consideration) was sorely lacking. Came the punch line: 'When our opposition leader slices her birthday cake on the day marking the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman along with most members of his family, where is the humility gone?'
The Congress has five years to reorganise the party with aspirational links to the youths and connect with the grassroots spearheaded, fostered and sustained by a strategic think-tank with a new alternative vision.
Apart from the track-record of UPA2 riddled with scams, bureaucratic red tape topped up by undefined power equations between UPA chief and Congress President Sonia Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh, a weak campaign strategy misreading public mood scripted the electoral drubbing of the Indian GOP.
Before the economy tumbled from the high growth rate to a single digit, employment opportunities shrank, cost of living spiked, the party should have called a mid-term election with the prospect of a decent showing. Elderly Congress leadership should have been circumspect to identify the tipping point and gone for testing popularity when the performance plateaued rather than started declining irreversibly.
Maybe there is a message for Awami League here. Into its second term by an unrepresentative election, a big deviation from the Indian paradigm, the AL would do well to put an immediate stop to internal criminalisation of the party, complete some major infrastructure works, improve radically on governance and rule of law, revamp security and then hold a mid-term election.
The party must remember the latest buzzword: 'Engaging is leveraging' - against dealing with unknowns. This is to suggest that the AL and the BNP should engage each other and not confront each other as though caught up in an ancestral blood feuding DNA.
The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.
E-mail: husain.imam@thedailystar.net