Ideas, not narrow self-interest, drive our politics - Livemint

As a consumer of news, you could be forgiven for thinking that Indian elections are ideology-free. Pundits are always saying that votes are bought, coalitions are constructed out of caste fractions, politicians defect, political parties switch sides with frictionless ease and the policies contained in party manifestos are irrelevant to the democratic process because they’re never seriously discussed. Add up these defects and what India seems to have by way of elections is the mechanism of representative government without the large ideological contestation that is, or ought to be, a democracy’s reason for being.

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This is wrong in so many separate ways that you would need a scroll the length of a toilet roll just to list them, but let me try. Let’s start at the top, with the great political coalitions that have ruled India in recent times. The received wisdom about coalitions is that ideology matters less than pragmatic accommodation and it’s true to say that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has cohabited with parties that aren’t hectoringly “Hindu” to cobble together governing majorities both at the Centre and in the states. But if you, as a voter, were to examine the composition of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), its ideological coherence would become apparent. Its main constituents are the BJP, the Shiv Sena, the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) and the Janata Dal (United), or JD(U). The first four of these five parties are natural ideological allies because their politics is founded on a common premise: the belief that religious majorities should be hegemonic in their home territories.

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