Our politics is best done in regional languages. It allows a play for our poetic sensibilities, turns of phrases and aphorisms. But the linguistic spectrum through which we try and analyse political processes and elections remains both monolingual and mono-chromatic. One of the finest and most enduring explanatory frameworks was provided by Rajni Kothari through his study of the Congress as a party, and as a political organisation. The “Congress System”as he called it, explained the capacity of the Congress in the 1950s and the 1960s to both foster and manage contradictions of ideologies, regional aspirations and styles of governance. Its enduring appeal came from the fact that it did not view election as the end-all of politics. After Indira Gandhi imposed the emergency, it was again Rajni Kothari and CSDS who provided a framework to comprehend the political processes through the formulation of “non-party political processes,” reminiscent of Vinoba Bhave’s Lokniti as against Rajniti of political parties. We understood the social movements, the NGOs, the emergence of various civil society groups as engaged with non-party political processes.

But these explanatory frameworks failed us with the rise of the BJP, combined with the emergence of regional political parties, which could provide viable alternatives both at the level of political processes and governance. Our formulation of ‘the Sangh Parivar’ lacked both the empirical solidity and theoretical refinement of “the Congress system.” The Congress had become mono-syllabic, while the BJP and the RSS changed the very language of politics; through raths, yatras, and mastery over political prose. As the BJP successfully introduced deep cleavages in the political culture, we were forced to define our response in prosaic, sparse terms, reminiscent of the way in which we define properties of materials. One could either be a ‘soft’ Hindu or a ‘hard’ one; secularism could be ‘elastic’ or ‘plastic’, we even spoke of a plural state and more dangerously, we even believed that the state could, and should, be a plural one.

... contd.