In the nineties, Tony Blair stormed into 10 Downing Street on a chariot called “New Labour”. After a string of defeats, Blairites mapped a “Third Way” for the party that would allow a middle path between Margaret Thatcher’s Right-wing conservative politics and the conventional socialism of the Left. British sociologist Anthony Giddens coined the phrase to talk about a political paradigm that could break the Left-Right binaries in any otherwise increasingly polarised age. Blair moved the party towards the centre and delivered a landslide win.
India’s Opposition is in desperate need of both a third way and a “New Congress”.
Before you respond with a volley of examples of Blair’s many stumbles, including the most egregious mistake of launching a war in Iraq, this is obviously not a literalisation of the United Kingdom parallel or the championing of an individual.
In fact, in 1998, Bill Clinton, who had recast his party as the New Democrats, co-hosted a global meeting of world leaders, alongside Tony Blair, precisely to ask the most existential question of all: How should traditionally centre-Left parties reimagine themselves in a changing world?
And today, Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader who is most likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, has borrowed from Blair in trying to catch the zeitgeist of the time. Note, as an example, his careful framing of the response to the Israel-Hamas war, despite intense pressure from within his own party. Starmer is trying to navigate his party out from the morass left behind by his kooky predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Giddens, whose books include Beyond Left and Right, argued for the politics of what he called a “radical centre”. In the Blair years, he argued that “New Labour” should not be concerned with embracing some policies of the other side as it created its own political cocktail for the time.
In the age of social media-driven polarities and extremes, centrism, let alone “radical centrism”, is often dismissed as fence-sitting or a lack of courage. Politicians, who have to operate in the real world, should ignore this noise. They should understand that while academics and public intellectuals and yes, even trolls, can smear and name-call and create the impression that they represent “the will of the people”, that voluble self-righteousness often has nothing to do with realpolitik. And if you keep losing elections, you can’t bring about any meaningful change, in any case.
In fact, Indian politics has always been dynamic and elastic. Contemporary history is replete with examples of Left-leaning public figures borrowing from the centre-Right, whether in their embrace of the markets (think Manmohan Singh) or hard nationalism (think Indira Gandhi). Conversely, Right-leaning politicians have sometimes lurched further Left on contentious issues simply because their capacity to do so without backlash is greater (Think Vajpayee on Kashmir or Narendra Modi’s invitation to SAARC leaders for his first swearing-in). The essence of the “third way” is to smash status quoist models of politics and challenge all prior assumptions.
This is precisely what the Congress today — and indeed most of the Opposition — has failed to understand.
Reflexive criticism of Modi on everything from his snorkelling in Lakshadweep to his commiserations with the Indian cricket team is not adding any votes at booths. If anything, it will boomerang. Framing the opposition to Modi as an ideological fight, as Rahul Gandhi recently did, doesn’t mean much when it is not evident what that ideology is, apart from opposition to the BJP. In any case, the ideological contradictions within the INDIA bloc are visible for every voter to see, be it differences on the Kashmir 370 abrogation, whether to celebrate or denigrate Vinayak Damodar Savarkar or how to respond to the consecration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
More than anything else, however sincere and substantive concerns about democracy, pluralism and civil liberties may be, expressing those feelings in a near autopilot language, wins the Opposition no new voters. It’s like preaching to the choir.
Political communication, in the end, is about storytelling. And like all good tales, you need a compelling character, a solid script and the embellishments of camera, sound, lighting and editing. You need both form and content. And you need an original idea.
Someone needs to tell the Opposition that instead of targeting the Prime Minister for his PR skills, build your own. Instead of benchmarking yourselves against the Bharatiya Janata Party and how you are different from it, tell the voter what you stand for. Instead of resenting the iconography around Modi, create your own.
Rahul Gandhi attempted some of that in his Bharat Jodo Yatra but squandered the effort all too quickly. He borrowed from the Modi playbook in using the power of the image and the power of social media. But when it came to building on the goodwill that was generated and presenting the country with a new party and a new set of ideas, he fell back on the same old.
India is churning.
The Opposition, especially the Congress which is the only pan-India party in the mix, needs to find a third way or face the prospect of being blown away by the winds of change.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author. The views expressed are personal
