Amar Singh’s braggadocio, which sometimes makes you wince, not Prakash Karat’s easy-on-the-eye gentility, is setting the tone of national politics. Bazaar bargaining is back. Deals are being cut again in the political marketplace. Ruthlessness, profiteering, greed and basic instincts are in view. It’s a bit ugly. And it’s very, very useful for this country.

If carrot has replaced Karat as the principal determinant of national politics, it is only because India’s policy-making system needs a politics that’s pragmatic, even if it’s not pretty. Four years of Marxist finger-wagging have made many of us forget how national politics has operated after the Congress ceased to be a natural winner — it has operated by handshakes between many apparently disparate parties. Marxist proscriptions on policy have also made us forget that these handshakes, frequently followed by unrepentant palm-greasing, have delivered the following immensely important political/policy paradigm shifts: the Congress was made to pay for political arrogance and then rewarded for humility, the BJP was shown as fit for governance and then made to pay for political overconfidence, the third front was made to pay for political fantasising, economic reforms happened, and foreign policy became rational.

Post-Rajiv Gandhi, Marxists and the BJP together at one point as well as other players kept the Congress out for long enough for the party to understand that its patent on governing India had expired. Atal Bihari Vajpayee built a tactical alliance that’s still the model of coalition governance. Then, post-Vajpayee, the Congress’s newly minted friends and the Marxists showed the BJP that even being a few seats behind its national rival could mean five years in the opposition. The Congress twice ruthlessly established that trying to run a national government by having a national party hold up a third front variation doesn’t work — the logic of national politics is against it.

... contd.