Terms of Trade: India’s democracy needs a bonfire of the alibis

WBiddy the Bharatiya Janata company (BJP) failed to untroubled a legal age on its possess in the 2024 elections, many enthusiastic commentators described it as a social-democratic ideological tide that marked the beginning of the BJP’s end. In every state election since then, except Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP has won the contest where it was either the incumbent or the primary challenger.For those watching objectively, the BJP’s post-2024 victories were brute Machiavellian politics at its best. Economic palliatives, local level alliances, exploiting the might of the state where needed, all tools were deployed to win and correct mistakes that led to Lok Sabha reverses. What made the job easier in most places was a completely inept and complacent opposition, which was eager to partake the perks of power without capturing it first.When losses occurred and seemed to contradict the ideological victory narrative immediately following the 2024 results, the opposition’s commissars offered a convenient alibi: elections are no longer being held fairly in the country. The Haryana and Maharashtra results were attributed to fictitious voters on the elector rolls. Bihar, until the results came, was already declared stolen on account of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of elector rolls. Assam was attributed to delimitation, even though the Congress lost two elections before delimitation happened.West Bengal was the only state where the SIR actually wrongly disenfranchised a significant number of electors, most of them likely Muslims. This author and his colleagues have done a number of data-based stories to show that, exclusions notwithstanding, it is patently wrong to attribute the TMC’s loss in the state to just SIR. What mattered much more was anti-incumbency and communal polarization which has existed since at least 2019, and the TMC’s failure to address growing fault lines.Also Read: Terms of Trade: A colonial club and the art of political schadenfreudeMany commentators, self-proclaimed adjudicators of democracy in India, have now shifted to finding metaphysical reasons for the TMC’s loss in the state, such as SIR even if the numbers do not add up.All of them should first explain a more acute problem facing the TMC. Despite losing to the BJP, the TMC polled a formidable 26 million votes in West Bengal, just about three million short of the BJP’s 29.2 million. This is not very different from the six million vote difference between the TMC and the BJP in 2021, when the results were almost the mirror image of the 2026 results, but in favour of the TMC.The BJP did not perish in 2021, but the TMC seems to be headed towards atrophy right now. It first failed to even get its candidate to remain in the fray in Falta repoll, a constituency it won with a 56% vote share in 2021. Now, 60 of its 80 MLAs have staged a coup d’état against Mamata Banerjee and her heir apparent Abhishek Banerjee by electing a legislative party leader who has lodged a police complaint that the TMC leadership forged signatures to complete legislative formalities. The process and logistics are immaterial. It is a coup d’état carried with the blessing of the BJP.Also Read: Terms of Trade: Reforms, reality and rationalityThe larger point, as far as the TMC and West Bengal politics is concerned is not that democracy failed the TMC in these elections. The democratic mandate, as seen in the difference between votes polled by the BJP and the TMC, was for a strong opposition to the incumbent. It is the TMC’s leadership which has failed democracy, as the party atrophies and leaves the state with an emaciated opposition for the next five years.The alibi peddlers will eventually blame the BJP for this as well. But you cannot really blame a hegemon for expanding its hegemony, can you? Many political parties, including the TMC and Mamata Banerjee at the peak of their political power, have played such tricks. The question to be asked is simple. What is the core politics of the TMC and what are the odds of it surviving against the BJP today?Mamata Banerjee’s rise to power in West Bengal was thanks to the communists destroying themselves by trying to forcefully acquire land, first in Singur and then Nandigram. The grassroots rage that followed such ideologically bankrupt high-handedness, especially after the police firing in Nandigram, gave the last mile ballast to a rainbow anti-left coalition to dislodge the three-decade old communist government in the state. The man who led the effort on ground zero, in Nandigram, is the first BJP Chief Minister in the state today. His break from the TMC was perhaps triggered over a succession battle where Mamata chose Abhishek Banerjee over Suvendu Adhikari.Once the left was dislodged from power and the TMC delivered on its historical role in this politically significant task, there was never much of an ideological raison d’être for the TMC in the state. To say this is not to diminish Mamata Banerjee as a politician, but to take a historical view of her larger politics.The TMC would have continued to flourish in the political void that existed in the state after the communists went into a limbo after Singur-Nandigram, but the rise of the BJP as the national hegemon in 2014 changed that for good. Right-wing politics in the state did not have to be wedded permanently to its subaltern lumpen form in the TMC. It now had the option of embracing the national right-wing hegemon in the BJP. That the TMC was not even invested in preserving law and order and allowing normal electoral competition under its dominance, only made the political appeal of the BJP stronger among the non-Muslim electorate of the state -- and it has also added to the backlash which has come after the TMC’s loss.Also Read: Terms of Trade: And then there were noneThe Muslim question, going by the split in the TMC, was perhaps always an electoral convenience rather than some principled commitment to safeguarding minority rights against a majoritarian political dispensation. The Muslims perhaps knew better, as can be seen from their attrition form the TMC in the Muslim dominated districts in even this election.What happens to the TMC now is not the point anymore. Politics is a cruel game. Loss of power often leads to the realization that most of your allies were fair weather friends rather than sincere fellow travelers. The first, you can acquire when in power, the second you build in ideological grassroots struggles. The job of a good politician is to differentiate the first from the second. But you can only do that if you are also engaged in an ideological struggle along with enjoying power and not just pretending to be ideological.The protagonist-in-chief of the coup d’état in the TMC is a former leader of the CPI(M). He began his politics with the CPI (M) when it was in power in the state, shifted to the TMC while it was in power and is now in cahoots with the BJP after its victory. That is as fair-weather friend as you can get in politics. The joke, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” in this case is on Mamata Banerjee.Almost all of India’s opposition can be indicted on this count. It likes enjoying power or longs for it without a coherent ideological framework and a struggle to further its ideology. Say what you will about the BJP, but it has remained committed to its core ideological worldview even as it continues to strengthen its hold over Indian politics.Also Read: Terms of Trade: Can the Opposition reinvent itself?Some delusional commentators want so-called institutions to mediate this ideological offensive by the BJP and keep offering institutional alibis for the opposition’s abject failure against the BJP.If Indian democracy is to remain a level playing field, where the opposition does justice to its democratic mandate rather than renege on it, it must do a bonfire of the institutional alibis (and their peddlers) which do nothing but obfuscate the lack of ideology in the opposition’s ranks. Given the current state of politics, the opposition will have to resurrect its ideology in the streets and not the corridors of power. The TMC’s implosion is just a useful opportunity to make this point.(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa)