Political Affairs

IT NEED not just be in affairs of the heart but also in political matters that opposites attract and likes repel. Take Karnataka where the avowedly non-communal Janata Dal (Secular) or JD(S) and the Hindutva-toeing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have come together to give the state a coalition government. That the BJP has spoken out against dynastic politics while the JD(S) is increasingly becoming a Karnata family affair only makes the whole thing more piquant. Or take Uttar Pradesh where the parody of Indian politics is underlined by the fact that the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Congress are going hammer and tongs at each other despite both claiming to be secular, socialist and progressive. It’s almost as if the Congress, the SP and the JD(S) have to fight for the same secular space while the BJP is on the other side of the fence and now having to contend with splinter groups led by Uma Bharati and Madan Lal Khurana, each claiming to be the real Bhajpa.
And it’s not as if the Congress party is always secular and the BJP totally against dynastic politics. In the wake of the riots in the communally-surcharged Gujarat of 2002, the state’s Congress leadership tried to play a soft Hindutva card but only to be trumped by the hard line adopted by the BJP’s incumbent chief minister Narendra Modi. And, more recently, the BJP leader of the Opposition L K Advani tried to cash in on the Gandhi brand name by projecting Indira’s grandson Varun as the face of the future. That Varun does poetry and not cocaine makes the task easier in the wake of the ongoing trial under the Narcotics Act of the BJP’s Rahul! The late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was Kennedy’s envoy to India in the early 1960s, may have anticipated the shape of things to come when he wrote in his Ambassador’s Journal that “politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”


-- The Economic Times Editorial