In all of this, the BJP has been the leader by far. The Congress has followed — barely and poorly. Though single-party dominance collapsed at the political centre in 1989 and was never put back together again, the Congress is yet to land on its feet in the more competitive political terrain. Most of all, it has still to learn to tell stories about itself and package them attractively. The BJP, on the other hand, has relentlessly and expertly used the media in taking the fight to its more entrenched opponent. Of course, strategists have far more room to package the party — and themselves — in the BJP. In the Congress, all victories are naturally to be attributed to the high command, only failure needs to be explained.

The rise of the strategist in our political parties has its ironies. We still don’t have a strategist in the sense of a Karl Rove or a James Carville, a professional who has sensed an underlying trend that few others have noticed, and is adept at tailoring political messages to electorally encash it. Be it Mahajan then or Jaitley now, it is still the politician in our country who is turning his attention to finetuning the campaign and its message, which may or may not have anything to do with the politics or position of the candidate or party. The professional help that they hire as they go along remains mostly anonymous.

As political parties in India try to catch up with their more organised Western counterparts on this specific count, their deliberate cultivation of incoherence in all other respects stands out even more. Parties in India — with the exception of the Left parties — still refuse to lay down settled and predictable procedures for almost everything that they do, from the selection of candidates to the framing of an agenda. They are run in wholly arbitrary and opaque ways, by one or a few leaders at the top, who manipulate factional strife to their advantage.

... contd.