Unwilling coalition

: If only the BJP and the Congress could bury their differences and get together to fight poverty, “in no time India will be a superpower”. Similar ideas have been expressed in the past by academics like Meghnad Desai, but this time it comes from a practitioner of politics, former Lok Sabha speaker P.A. Sangma. There is no great difference between the economic and foreign policies of the Congress and the BJP, and if only the BJP could be persuaded to junk that sticky inconvenient “religious agenda”, just imagine the possibilities. Sangma cites the German cooperation pact between Angela Merkel’s CDU and the Greens to counter a steadily rising Left, and the Pakistani deal between the PPP and the PML(N), united against Musharraf — both coalitions of sloppy compromise — to suggest that a stable marriage between the Big Two could undermine the growing influence of regional parties in India.

Remarkable idea, though it’s politically fanciful. The differences between the BJP and the Congress are not just in rhetoric and degree, but principle and instinct — and one of the bigger misapprehensions of the end-of-ideology, managerial governance that people like Sangma advocate is that it undervalues this clash of ideas. Sharply differentiated political formations help individuals find “a choice, not an echo”, to borrow a phrase from Barry Goldwater. And if Sangma had looked up from his Agatha Christie instead of dismissing deep disagreements of Parliament as mere din, he might have a keener appreciation for the vital fractiousness of Indian politics.

But Sangma’s statements have some value as thought-experiment at a time when the two major national parties have been unnecessarily adversarial on issues they could constructively take forward. A workable consensus on matters of national interest they already agree on would be the sign of mature decision-making in a democracy. As we have suggested earlier in these columns, the BJP and the Congress would be capable of forging rational policy on matters like the nuclear deal or pension reform, if only they were not frozen into mutually antagonistic postures.