The BJP has spent the past year lurching from crisis to crisis. What has really been at issue is a stark political choice: whether the BJP is content to remain the party of the Hindu right that a section of its supporters would like it to be, or whether it wants to finally become a pro-market, socially conservative party with a broader electoral appeal.
The BJP?s difficulties with an extreme internal constituency are not unusual: Centre-Right parties in Europe and North America have all had to negotiate fraught relationships with sections of supporters who favour a nationalism based on a single ethnicity, colour or language group. Canada?s Reform Party collapsed in the 1990s after its calls to limit immigration, end bilingualism and eliminate Quebec?s special constitutional status relegated it to the electoral fringes. Britain?s Conservative Party has had similar trouble. The lesson is simple: parties that look to satisfy internal constituencies on the hard right fail to secure a lasting grasp on power at the national level. Some would argue that poverty means that a party of the Centre-Right cannot succeed in India. According to this view, only a strongly interventionist state can protect the poor from market forces, and any political vision that ignores this reality will suffer the fate of BJP?s ?India Shining? campaign.
The Indian social consensus on the need to protect the poor will mean that the policies of a centre-right party will have to differ in some respects from those of counterparts abroad. But this does not mean that there is no room in India?s political culture for a party that seeks to limit the state?s influence over interactions between people and broadly favours the market. Indeed, the very weakness of the Indian state in key areas?it has historically struggled to register its citizens, control and tax economic activity, and provide security against terrorist threats and insurgencies?provides striking strategic opportunities for a party of the Centre-Right.
The most important of these opportunities is the chance to transform the individual more fully from a subject of the state to a citizen. The post-1947 state has, for many, remained an institution whose functions are largely limited to punishing them for transgressions or arbitrarily granting them favours and resources. For these Indians, it has seemed that the best way of creating a sense of ownership of the state?s agenda was to influence and colonise it through and on behalf of class, caste or other communitarian interests. The usual explanation for this failure to create citizens has been to blame the state for failing to replace colonial structures and practices with new ones?in essence, to charge it with not being statist enough.
In successful Centre-Right politics, the state cannot make subjects into citizens; only individuals and communities can. An Indian Centre-Right party will not be able to argue for a stripped-down vision of the state in the face of poverty and the state?s failure to find consistent ways to tax, register its citizens and provide security. Instead, it will need to advocate politics that make the state better at some of its core functions at the same time as it seeks to place more of the onus for monitoring social services, infrastructure creation and development onto local communities and individuals. It will do this by opening up and devolving control of information?and by seeking to revive and strengthen the traditions of service and local organisation that created modern India.
While this might sound like just another reworking of Gandhian political thought, it is in fact essentially a version of the agenda that the European Centre-Right has adopted in the face of the drastic social breakdowns of the past few decades.
Even policies that have traditionally been understood as simply ways to extend the reach of the state can take on a very different colouring when their starting point is in the politics of the Centre-Right. Where today?s BJP presents national ID cards as an anti-immigration measure that will also reduce cross-border infiltration by terrorists, a genuine Centre-Right party might argue that their real impact lies in their ability to reduce transaction costs?and state intervention in markets?by making fraud harder. Equally, an India that is better at registering its citizens could even out more finely the imbalances created when the poor pay sales and transit taxes on basic goods and small discretionary purchases (which often means that they pay out a greater proportion of their income in indirect taxation than well-off citizens do in income tax). Many countries refund this money to the poor through tax rebates, an option that India has not had until now because so many of its citizens are outside the tax-registration regime.
But will the BJP rise to the challenge?
The author has taught Indian history at Oxford and Cambridge universities
