'Collapse of party system is threat to democracy'

The vast resources of the Union government and of the ruling party have been devoted to the burnishing of the image of the prime minister, presenting him as a semidivine being who carries in his person the past, present and future of the Indian nation and of Indian civilization itself — Ramachandra Guha

NT Correspondent

New Delhi: Ramachandra Guha, one of the country’s highly re garded historians and political commentators says “the collapse of the party system is perhaps the single greatest threat to India’s democracy.”

In an Interview with The Wire, Guha said “This is a more telling sign of how far Indian democracy has fallen than the attacks on press freedom, the suborning of independent institutions, the opacity of electoral funding and so on." Guha says there are two principal reasons why political parties in India have collapsed. The first is the transformation of political parties into what he calls “family firms”.

This has happened to a very large number of parties including the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Akalis, the Shiv Sena, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Biju Janata Dal. Although dynastic succession happens in many spheres, including cricket, the legal profession, medicine and, per - haps, most particularly the film industry, Guha believes it’s worse when it happens in politics.

“Dynasticism in politics is far worse, because it is a violation of the democratic principle itself, and because it affects many more people.” The second reason why political parties have collapsed is what Ramachandra Guha calls “the subordination of parties to a single leader”.

The classic example is the colossuslike dominance of Narendra Modi over the BJP and the personality cult that surrounds him. Guha makes a telling distinction between the BJP under Vajpayee and the BJP under Modi.

“A.B. Vajpayee did not dominate his cabinet in the way Narendra Modi does, while state chief ministers from the BJP never sought to speak in cravenly sycophantic terms of their prime minister as they now do.

Since May 2014, the vast resources of the Union government and of the ruling party have been devoted to the burnishing of the image of the prime minister, presenting him as a semidivine being who carries in his person the past, present and future of the Indian nation and of Indian civilization itself.”

Finally, Guha asks: “What does this signify for the wider political culture?” His answer is: “If a leader wants only praise from his party colleagues, would he ever be inclined to promote a free press? If a leader demands unquestioning loyalty from party members, why would he, when in power, not then demand unquestioning support for his mala fide acts of policy from the bureaucracy, the police, the media, or the judiciary?”