Commentary/Ashok Mitra

The agenda of national integrity has been substituted by the politics of coalition

The Union of India was built on myth. Today, with states becoming more assertive, the Centre is unravelling.

To contradict god is heresy. In these uncertain days, it may therefore not be altogether safe to contest edicts once authored by B R Ambedkar. Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee of the Constituent Assembly, had nonetheless his difficult moments. India, he readily admitted in the Constituent Assembly, was a federation of states. In case that was so, did it not follow that the Union of India drew its power from whatever was delegated to it by the states? No, thundered Ambedkar, India was a special kind of a federation, where the Union derived its power not from the states, but from a special imperium. Ask no questions, and you will be told no lies. Ambedkar did not bother to satisfy the waiting clientele on the mystique of this imperium.

His golden silence went to the advantage of Jawaharlal Nehru and others, who took total command of the Indian polity in the late forties. India was a Union of states, the Union, however, had no nexus with the states and was the off-spring of an imperium, detached from, and superior to, the states.

Developments over the past few weeks have demolished, comprehensively, the Ambedkar-authored myth. It has taken them a full 50 years, but the constituent states have finally assumed total charge of the country's political framework. The manner in which the new prime minister was chosen had an eerie echo of the manner a new pope is chosen in the Vatican by the congregating cardinals. They deliberate, names are proposed and eliminated; once an unanimity is reached, a tell-tale spiral of rising smoke announces the news to the world. What happened in New Delhi last month was strikingly similar.

The United Front steering committee was basically a conclave of regional powers. True, a few parties with a national outlook and a few others with national pretensions were part of the committee; but they too, however, were there because of the regional clout they enjoy here or there.

It has been an extraordinary transformation of the political landscape. The Indian National Congress, the party which till now had the most extensive network of strength spread across the length and breadth of the country, is a fast-fading phenomenon, left with isolated blotches of influence in a handful of states.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, flaunting an ideology with overtly Aryavarta coordinates, is discovering to its consternation that its aggressive harping on the theme of national integration is no advantage. It is actually a handicap, since its puts off regional formations who well know their own interests. Power will therefore continue to elude the BJP's grasp.

That apart, it too in effect has been reduced to the role of a regional party, resembling the role played out by the Left parties. The rest of the cast consist of unabashedly local parties with severely local aspirations. All told, it is a bizarre situation. At one end, the comfortably placed upper classes, occupying positions of power and influence in the metropolitan and quasi-metropolitan centres, are agreed that they must strive for a burgeoning unified market to ensure rising profits both for themselves and for their foreign collaborators. This market, besides, must be integrated with the global market at the fastest speed.

The political assumption underlying an economic transformation of this nature -- the existence of a strong Centre -- has suddenly tended to grow wobbly. Call them nationalities, or call them sub-nationalities -- nomenclatures hardly matter -- the outstanding emerging fact is the manifestation of regional assertiveness. Entities have entrenched themselves in different regions. Entities with their individual pride and hauteur, with their distinct hopes and ambitions, with their umpteen grievances and mounting charters of demands.

New hegemonic formations have bestirred themselves and occupied the space which was once undisputed territory of Indian nationalism. The agenda of national integrity, even as a cliche, has ceased to be legal tender, and has been substituted by the politics of coalition.

The ground reality as it unfolds is fascinating beyond belief. Mindsets of perhaps 20, 25, 30 centuries jostle against one another. Alternatively, they seek temporary accommodations with one another. Politics is the art of the feasible, but the limits of feasibility are getting stretched, successfully, to an extraordinary extent. Non-equations blend into equation, or is it the other way round?

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