Pentiah, I have been following some professional interests in my spare time, time which would normally have gone to hobbies/addictions such as BRF. So you are really witnessing me falling off the wagon for holidays
Soon it will be back to the old grind and away from BRF. Yogendra had asked why NM is the only brand that has arisen from Gujarat, and if he is really just a product why are there not others like him. It is a valid question, and the answer is that there ARE others who would have moved into the political space he so deftly positioned himself in. A very recent past example is Chimanbhai Patel, who, while being humongously corrupt, was recognized within Gujarat as being a formidably capable administrator and was very middle class friendly in his post-Navnirman political avatar. Closer to the present, Shankersinh Vaghela was all but certain to have occupied the same space/persona that NM now occupies, HAD he remained within the BJP fold. So it is sometimes a matter of being in the right place at the right time, as NM was.
But let's move beyond NM to talk about the true problem of creating a pan-Indian coalition. And a coalition does not merely mean a grouping of different parties, it really means a grouping of different interest groups. In the Indian context, INC was the first true pan-Indian coalition, and it was built (IMHO) by Gandhiji, who recognized that interest groups in the Indian context ment the existing community groupings represented by caste and relegion. He was the one who expanded INC from its original debating club ambience. But let's not go too far into that, except to say that for all these years the current Congress has been surving on that legacy and the other parties have been trying to break into it by making themselves regional clones of INC that try to cobble together winning coalitions based on caste and communal lines. And this is where you have successful power brokers like LP Yadav, MS Yadav, Mayavati, et al. Nitish Kumar is very interesting, because he is trying a soft Moditva approach if you will. He lays great stress on good governance, but below that veneer he also operates a skilled caste based operation.
So it is no surprise that he is receiving so much attention. Another politician I continue to have very high hopes for is Mayavati. I am very surprised no one is talking about her right now, but I would expect that NM, in particular, will be hectically trying to build an equation with her while she is weak enough to not demand too much. This might seem like contradicting what I said just one post earlier when I opined that it would be a really bad idea for him to get entangled in UP politics, so let me expand. If he gets directly involved, he is competing against Mayavati. If he brings her into his coalition, he outsources a very important political function to her. He is not yet big enough to transcend caste and communal politics, and IMHO a NM-Mayavati coalition is a winning ticket in itself.
As NM goes about his next steps, he will do well to learn the lessons from LK Advani's successes and failures. The ABV-LKA duo still remains a master case study in how an alternative force to INC was created. ABV was the coalition builder, and LKA the party apparatchik who tried to build up BJP. We all talk about ABV, but LKA is the real reason BJP got big and strong enough to be the nucleus of the anti-INC coalition. ABV, when he was the sole standard bearer back in the post-Indira assasination days, tried to peddle BJP as a mushy good-governance + socialist brand in the image of Jay Prakash Narayan, and failed miserably. It was Advani who seized the possibility of playing the same communal game as INC, only overtly so. No wonder the ire of the seculars was reserved for him.
But that was LKA's success. Where he failed, IMHO, honorably, was in remaking BJP sufficiently. Perhaps the task was too much for him alone, and the current national level BJP continues to be an INC clone in saffron clothing. But he still deserves great credit in nurturing the current crop of rising state-level talent, and I continue to respect him and his legacy. What NM needs to realize is that if he sticks with a reforming BJP and taking it to national power strategy, he will face some of the same challenges LKA did, plus he will face increasing competetion from his contemporaries within and outside for becoming the standard bearer of good governance. So he does need to move fast, and the only way he can do so is by combining the roles of LKA and ABV in himself. He will have to be a party builder as well as a coalition builder, or risk loosing the chance to do either.
. let that be known!
