I should have sensed this change after a conversation with H.D. Kumaraswamy last year. He said his joining hands with the BJP has no ideological betrayal. Nor did it show any lack of gratitude on his father’s past. Father Gowda, he said, made a mistake by accepting prime ministership in such an arrangement and merely weakened his own party in his state, he said. Regional parties, he said, have to learn from the DMK. They should strengthen their local clout and leverage it at the Centre, irrespective of who leads the ruling coalition there. This, he said, requires clear political focus and ideological nimbleness.

Congress old-timers and their ideological godmen of the Left would obviously dismiss the Gowda-Gujral phenomenon as the capitulation of two former prime ministers desperate to fight off irrelevance. But if the Congress looks around the UPA partners, the picture would look different. With the exception of Lalu Yadav and his RJD, none of the UPA partners treats the BJP or the NDA as untouchable. Almost all have shared power with them, and will do so again if that opportunity presents itself. The kind of communal-secular divide that leftist ideologues believe in and the political untouchability that the Left forces on the Congress and the UPA have, therefore, been overtaken by this change. Except the Congress refuses to see it. It is still so deafened by the rhetoric of the Left and so blinded by the slogans of its own disastrous ’70s that it has chosen to use a ‘minority-ist’ idiom in its political discourse, hoping to win its Muslim vote banks back, while our voters and political parties have moved overwhelmingly towards an ideological centre. The voter now sets much greater store by the quality of governance and the regional parties are fundamentally driven by the ideas of political accommodation and power-sharing. And in the midst of this fascinating change, the Congress is allowing the Left to run not merely its economics, but even its politics. The result is ruinous. From the cities of Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh (both of which had local polls) and Punjab, Congress has faced a wave of urban anger. The MCD election in the Capital next month will produce an even nastier result in spite of this government notifying a master plan that will ruin the capital. The Congress’s veteran losers and Rajya Sabha spin-doctors can keep whispering to gullible reporters that it was all due to inflation. But it is all the result of lousy, unimaginative, static, lazy, trench-warfare politics. Today’s politics is changing and a party with stakes in more than two states (unlike the Left) has to look at it differently.

... contd.