The June 23 edition of The Statesman had a news item under the caption: “Prez poll a fight of ideology: Opp.” As a matter of fact, the month-long dilly-dallying by the Opposition to find a common candidate showed starkly the lack of clear ideology of the parties. Everyone supporting the Opposition candidate, Meira Kumar, for the presidential contest in July are unanimous in their judgment that she is the best candidate for the post. Why then did they fail to announce her candidature before the BJP stole the show by announcing an unknown Dalit and former RSS pracharak, Ram Nath Kovind, as their nominee for the President of India?

The BJP’s announcement immediately broke the Opposition ranks, with the regional parties making their electoral calculations for supporting the BJP nominee. The ideology that the Opposition supporting Meira Kumar boasts of is the same old vague idea of secularism that has been cynically used for votebank politics for decades. Only Mamata Banerjee used this thin ideological plank to consistently criticise the BJP for forcing their medieval form of Hinduism down the throats of all Hindus.

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But then what is ideology? It has been introduced relatively recently by the Frenchman Destutt de Tracy during the intellectual ferment around the time of the French Revolution. According to him, ideology consisted of ideas based on our own experiences. It, therefore, belongs to the theory of ideas as in metaphysics or theology, but more in the realm of empirical philosophy characteristic of the British school. However, the way ideology is understood today is due to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as set out in a series of manuscripts written by them, which were later published by Engels as the German Ideology. According to them, ideology was a set of ideas shared by the ruling class in their own self-interest that was projected as the ideal social system.

This was the start of a vast array of research on ideology with focus on all areas of social sciences. The most prominent were political ideologies that depended on Marx’s starting point of a critique of economics, but went further by formulating ethical principles that should form guidelines for how the society ought to function.

Ironically, Marxism is itself an ideology in this larger perspective. Marx was right in his narrow interpretation of ideology if one were to look at the ideologies of the Tories and the Whigs for centuries in England, the cradle of modern democracy. They represented the feudal-capitalist ruling class there. The French Revolution changed all that with the total victory of the capitalists, and new ideologies sprang up to challenge this hegemony of the bourgeoisie from the left, and later more viciously from the right. This one hundred years of ideological struggles, from the mid-19th century inspired by Marx to the mid-20th century with the defeat of fascist regimes in Europe changed the West forever. In this period we witnessed the dismantling of European empires and the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia. These violent experiences led to the dominance in Europe of political parties with less extreme ideological positions, but there remained clear ideological differences among the right-wing, centrist and left-wing political parties in Europe. All parties had transparent democratic structures and leaders were routinely replaced during party congresses or after electoral setbacks.

As the halfhearted campaign for our forthcoming presidential election shows, our political parties boast of their ideologies on all occasions and there is hardly any effort to bridge the ideological divide, whatever that may be, when the Opposition tries to get together to thwart some plan or the other of the ruling coalition. This is because, in my opinion, there has never been any clear ideology adhered to by any political party in India barring the Hindu Mahashabha/Jan Sangh/BJP and the Communist parties of all hues. We’ll come back to BJP and the Communists later. Let us start with the Congress. During our struggle for Independence under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the Congress was an umbrella organisation accommodating a large spectrum of ideologies. Gandhiji’s core beliefs throughout were of non-violence and truth. He must have derived them from our traditional Indian religions, but they formed the core of Christianity as well. This confused the English rulers as their violent suppression of demands for self-rule by Indians using non-violent means caused a serious problem with their own Christian beliefs. But these beliefs were not political ideologies, they only worked well as a tactic to confront the English. The conflicting ideologies of various factions within the party caused no problem to the Congress as Mahatma Gandhi’s pronouncement at any given time was official Congress ideology at that moment. Netaji had to pay a heavy price for challenging this system. After Mahatma Gandhi’s tragic assassination, his chosen successor deviated radically from his idyllic vision of smallscale industries and the village panchayat, which could be construed as ideologies in the modern sense we discussed at the beginning. Jawaharlal Nehru went ahead with the heavy industrialization programme and increasing centralisation of power. Nehru’s dependence on state planning and control was never in conformity with the ideology of Gandhi’s other favourite disciple, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but they were miraculously patched up. There were two leaders with clearly different ideologies from Nehru who broke away from the Congress soon after Independence. One was Rajagopalachari who formed the Swatantra Party on the model of the liberal free-market believers in the West. The party met its eclipse in the late Fifties. The other was Ram Manohar Lohia who formed the Socialist Party on the model of the social democrats in the West. That party also effectively died, but from death arose the ghost of narrow caste politics that became the dominant feature of Indian politics during the last three decades. The solidarity and class consciousness of the socialist movement has always been sabotaged by the caste divisions masterfully played by the ruling elites. But how could a socialist movement undergo a metamorphosis and transform itself into narrow caste movements is not clear to me. In any case, two political parties with clear ideologies became defunct in no time.

Regional parties, that came up since 1967 as defections became commonplace in the Congress, never pretended to have any ideological anchors. The case was different with the Communist Party of India that was started in 1925. The party with no possibility of a proletariat revolution started behaving as social democratic parties elsewhere. The Naxalite splinter group has possibly more support among Indians, albeit mostly the subalterns, than the CPI-M and its Left partners put together. All these leave us with the current rulers, the BJP, and their ideological base, the RSS. Their declared purpose is to make India a Hindu nation. This is neither a political nor an economic ideology as understood in the West, but a form of religious nationalism that is now threatening the liberal consensus of Europe and America as well. This idea of Hindu Rashtra found natural adherents among the Brahmins and the baniyas and their number increased as Congress hegemony started to falter in the Indian heartland. The economic interests of the traders initially formed the economic ideology of the BJP. This was too narrow a base for coming to power and the BJP started to seduce the lower castes and Dalits to join their great Hindu family by downplaying the caste conflicts and emphasising conflicts with the minorities. The Ayodhya Ram Temple movement was a classic ploy for this purpose and led to the swelling of the ranks of BJP adherents. As the BJP grew, big business joined them and the party tried to mimic the Congress by being everything to all people. Thus they are now claiming that their heart is bleeding for the poor, the farmers in distress and the Dalits for their maltreatment by the caste Hindus.

The BJP leader Arun Shourie has put it most aptly: NDA = UPA + Cow. BJP’s ideological contradictions are camouflaged by Narendra Modi, one of the greatest master communicators of all times, and the clever political instinct of Amit Shah. But the party seems to be the natural party of power in India also in the long run. The Opposition claim that the forthcoming presidential election is a fight of ideology rings hollow. With Hindus comprising 85 per cent of our population and the BJP’s masterly effort in bringing as many of them as possible under their fold without overturning the applecart of conflicting caste interests, ‘secularism’ has no hope of replacing the ‘cow’ in India. The Opposition needs to find a more effective substitute.

As Swami Vivekananda repeatedly told us, politics is not our forte, religion is. Ideology does not seem to excite us. That is why democracy has become a ‘money grabbing game’ for politicians and a ‘fair at periodic intervals’ for the common man.

(The writer is former dean and emeritus professor of applied mathematics, University of Twente, The Netherlands)