Why do BJP and Congress fear federal politics?

The Indian political establishment is conditioned by the history of the Congress to imagine the Union as the domain of the "national" parties, that is, big organisations that control not only the Centre but also a majority of the states, creating thereby a hierarchy of the grander and bigger and the humbler and subordinate. There is, of course, an obvious fallacy in this concept.

All political parties in India are, by definition, political organisations that work within the boundaries of the "national," even if the geographies within which they function are parts of the whole. Merely ruling at the Centre and in a majority of states does not make one or two political parties in any way distinctive. The difference is in size, and the awe parties that rule at the Centre have inspired over the decades since Independence as responsible for the bigger "national" problems. The Constitution has backed this notion by drawing up lists to divide responsibility by creating lists of Central, State and Concurrent subjects.

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How responsibility have been apportioned has long been contested by political parties, mostly "regional" in scope and national parties that have never held responsibility or controlled the Centre. The Centre versus states discourse has sometimes been heated and has exerted pressure on the dominant ruling party in New Delhi to change the ways in which it governs. But the inequality has persisted despite the Sarkaria Commission recommendations, suggestions of what used to be influential deliberations taken seriously between the Finance Commissions and the states and the several Opposition organised conclaves that tried to change the equation and restore balance to the existing order.

Tension is therefore endemic to the relationship of states and the Centre. The intensity of friction varies depending on the relationship between "regional" parties ruling in the states and the "national" party and whether it is a coalition supported by regional parties in the states.

Over the past four decades, the regional parties have developed a complicated equation among themselves, working unitedly at times and competing against each other at others. The alliances and fissures have a logic of their own. And national parties have sometimes preyed on a combination of regional parties or even one party and sometimes joined forces for obvious gain.

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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress have established a natural claim to the status of being national parties as a function of size, footprints, and history. The Election Commission rules have underscored the link between footprints and status. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the BJP and the Congress are the two parties that have reacted with strident attacks on the expansion drive by the Trinamool Congress into Tripura, Goa and even Uttar Pradesh. In UP, it has poached Congress leaders from the same family in what is obviously not quite a toe inside a deeply divided state with its multiple big and small regional parties.

Congress election observer for Goa P Chidambaram's assessment, "As far as the Congress is concerned, we consider it is best positioned to defeat the BJP and form a government. Smaller parties can help if they are so inclined," was entirely dismissive of the Trinamool Congress foray into Goa, regardless of the defections led by former Congress chief minister Luizinho Faleiro and Conceicao Peixote. BJP Goa spokesperson Sharmad Rautikar believes "no one from BJP will ever join the Trinamool Congress." And that the Trinamool Congress "is creating a buzz to be in the limelight."

The "smaller parties" in Goa or elsewhere have not attacked the Trinamool Congress for going ahead and spreading out into other states. It is significant that the Aam Admi Party (AAP), which planted its flag in Goa before the Trinamool Congress did, has not reacted at all. Nor have other regional-smaller parties rushed to create a chorus of criticism in line with the attacks by the BJP and the Congress against Mamata Banerjee and her party.

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The idea of a new era of federal politics, with regional–smaller parties leveraging their bases to weaken and so erode the BJP's support in the state, minus the paraphernalia of an incipient alliance, seems to be in the making. There appears to be a tacit understanding between regional-smaller parties that there will be a challenger to the BJP and that the Congress with its present leadership is not the answer.

Both the AAP and the Trinamool Congress have promised a new age of pro-people governance in Goa. While the national parties are stuck in the groove of labelling pro-people politics as populist and a snare to buy voters through handouts disguised as policies, the regional-smaller parties have over the years worked out what they can do differently and if the work is done well how that cements the relationship between voters and themselves.

National parties, by definition, have a grand design for development that is handed down from the top to the bottom to implement because there is an assumption that New Delhi can see things more clearly from a distance than the state capitals that are too close to the ground. Over the years, the centralisation of power through pan-India schemes that the Centre either wholly or partly funds to create assets or deliver benefits in the states has shaved off much of the capacity of the states to create programmes that connect a regional party in power to voters expecting to gain for having made a choice in favour of the smaller, nearer home party.

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Despite the enormous good that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act has delivered to the seriously stressed poor, it is a pan-India scheme, where regional differences cannot be incorporated. The premium paid health insurance scheme, the Prime Minister Jan Arogya Yojana, is also pan-India but has too many exclusions, probably necessary for a format designed in New Delhi. The Ujjwala scheme of free gas connections goes halfway to solve the problem because the recurrent cost of replenishment is not a problem the Centre can tackle. As halfway measures, the pan-India schemes are important but insufficient. There is a gap, and the states run by non-national parties have used it to create a connection with the population that is resilient and evolution of the federal system of government.

The centralising trend through national schemes for health, farmers, and food security has reduced how regional parties can create a buzz around what they do by themselves, independent of the Centre.

Striking out from where the overlords of development, namely the Centre, leave off, regional parties in the states have created a slew of interventions that connect them to the most fundamental of voters' problems within their domains. In Delhi, the AAP has designed programmes around building social capital through its extraordinarily successful drive to improve schools and education outcomes, mohalla clinics that deliver health care at the doorstep, access to water and electricity for the poorest. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has connected with the needs of the girl child and women through her extraordinarily successful Kanyashree-Rupashree, Sabuj Sathi and now Lakshmi Bhandar, a near-universal monthly income scheme for poorer women, on the one hand, and a universal health cover for all residents through the Swasthya Sathi programme.

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Tamil Nadu's schemes for the girl child, women especially working women burdened by the dual responsibility of running their homes and earning a living, were the pioneering efforts at striking out and doing the things that matter the most when the chips were down. In Kerala, the Communists, in particular, have designed and delivered programmes that have targeted fractions of the population in different ways. It has a separate department of social justice that in 61 different ways addresses the needs of the differently-abled, transgender people, senior citizens.

These are examples that outline how states have arrived at more granular ways of addressing people's expectations from governments headed by non-national parties to differentiate the quality of experience from the one size fits all policies of the national parties. When the pandemic lockdown happened and livelihoods, goods and services were plunged into crisis, the state governments stepped forward and created schemes for the poor, the migrants, and the migrants who came home. It is was an opportunity to show what non-national parties could do to alleviate the most urgent problems in ways that the BJP regime in New Delhi, and by extension, the idea of one party-one nation, the BJP-ruled states, could not effectively do.

The new age of governance that Mamata Banerjee is painting for Goa is also the new age that non-national parties have created for the populations of the states where they rule. It is a governance that addresses in detail the urgent issues of people in need or distress. The new age of governance is striking in the way in which it sees investment in creating social capital as a high-value option. In that these states seem to have converged on adopting a model that sees building human capital as a long term investment with high assured rates of return, of the order of around nine per cent if the investment has been in more years of schooling with better outcomes or even higher if access to education has been extended to the tertiary level.

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Stuck in calculating the cost of naturally increasing investment in building human capital that is almost always labelled as "populist" measures to buy voter loyalty, the BJP, in particular, is at a disadvantage when it comes up against the non-national parties with social justice-social capital investment programmes.

The 2024 election could well be the federal moment in Indian politics. When Mamata Banerjee says that the Centre should treat the states as federal partners and not as subordinate entities, she raises more than a rhetorical point. She addresses the gulf between two ways of governance: one top-down and the other more granular that addresses the last mile access to entitlement issues. The social capital investment strategy will, in the long term, create different kinds of demand and supply that would both democratise the politics of governance and accelerate development along with a new trajectory.

(The writer is a journalist based in Kolkata)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)