Anikendra Nath Sen Managing director, APCA

It’s the end of an era I

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that has lasted 20 I years. Verdict 2009 has I put paid to very many factors that have retarded India’s progress to moder nity. It has hopefull ended 20 years of coalition politics, which saw a cou ple of minority govern ments and a number o others based on unwork able coalitions leading to either collapse or compro mise. More importantly, i has signalled the end o Mandal versus Kamandal the politics of ethnicit based on religion, and caste made so famous b the Bharatiya Janata Part and various bastardised offshoots of old Lohiaite formations. It has also hopefully spelt the end o the politics of extremism whether from the right in the shape of the BJP or from the left in the shape of the Left Front.

The Congress, which many had written off two decades ago, has once again risen Phoenix-like to transform the political landscape of the country.

Nobody can deny that Verdict 2009 is significantly in favour of the policies and trends followed by the government of prime minister Manmohan Singh, particularly so in the last year of its existence when there was an acrimonious parting of the ways between the Congress and its Left Front supporters over the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Left should now understand clearly that it faces a permanent place in the “dustbin of history.” The BJP that ran a negative campaign and thrives on negativity of all sorts, largely ethnic, has also come a cropper and needs serious introspection or risk joining the Left in the same dustbin. Finally, there are the casteist cohorts of Mayawati, Mulayam, Lalu and Paswan, who have been handed a resounding thrashing that will hopefully spell the end of their noxious presence in Indian politics.

Indian inclusivity has triumphed. Inclusivity, in the shape of Congress, that has sought to make poverty, not caste and creed, as the cornerstone of its development strategies.

Inclusivity in the shape of Naveen Patnaik, who chose to part company with a political tendency that condoned, even applauded, the killing of Christians in Kandhamal.

Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has performed very well in Orissa. Inclusivity, in the shape of Omar and Farooq Abdullah and their National Conference (NC) in Jammu and Kashmir which, together with Congress, triumphed over the forces that sought to divide the state between Muslim separatists and Hindu fanatics.

While inclusive regional formations such as the BJD and the NC have triumphed, the same cannot be said about their counterpart in Maharashtra where the Shiv Sena was trounced because of its genetic ethnic negativity Even that Messiah of the more naïve sections of the corporate world, Narendra Modi, has not preformed all that well in Gujarat leave alone spreading his wings elsewhere in the country purely because he has still failed to pass the inclusivity test. On the other side, Nitish Kumar who made it clear that he was uncomfortable with Modi, won a resounding victory in Bihar despite being part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

Verdict 2009 should be an object lesson for India Inc. You cannot run a modern industrial state on the basis of exclusion After all, choosing customers on the basis of caste, creed and colour does not make business sense. Then why should it make political sense? Having won a famous victory and come in from the cold, the Congress is unlikely to give ground at the present juncture. It does not need to have any truck with the Left.

It is fairly clear that it will also try and steer clear of the likes of Mulayam and Lalu Prasad. Rahul Gandhi’s gambit of going it alone in Bihar and UP has begun to pay off, so why retrace that step? Also, why invite further obstacles to economic reforms? That much said, it is clear that the Congress will need a few more seats to make for a comfortable majority. This would be best served by tapping the wealth of “others” available to it, some in the shape of recently estranged friends such as Bhajan Lal in Haryana or even the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka. If all else fails, it would be better to engineer a split in, say, the Bahujan Samaj Party than ally with one or the other of the discredit ed lot among casteist formations.

Finally, a word about Manmohan Singh. He was responsible in no small measure in winning the election. It is his economic policies that include the nuclear deal in the larger context that signalled the arrival of a modern India.

Having won a second consecutive term, the only Indian prime minister to have done so after Jawaharlal Nehru, Manmohan Singh needs to perform much like a US President does in his second (and final) term: for posterity rather than for the populist present. He needs to make the rupee fully convertible and open up the retail, insurance and construction sectors among others.

He will need a lot of guts for that and can well do without naysayers in the government, which should automatically decide his allies for him.

Fortunately, he has the numbers that allow him to pick and choose.