The Primary Problem

In recent times, primaries in the US and UK have thrown up extremist politics and leaders. This has led to the polity being distorted in favour of rigid views. India needs to keep this mind when Indian leaders talk of primaries in their parties.

The vacuous nature of India’s mainstream media debates was on display in full might during the coverage of Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the United Kingdom. In their search for the delicate balance between TRPs and ideological loyalty, the media gave boundless coverage to the Prime Minister’s meetings and speeches while also making sure all discussions of the trip were anchored around the Bihar verdict and the sporadic protests against PM Modi that took place in UK. As a result, there was very little conversation around substantive topics like how the visit of the Prime Minister and his tremendous popularity among British Indians would influence the local politics in the old colonial country.

Political junkies tuned to the politics of Britain would have noticed the rather over-enthusiastic efforts that the British Prime Minister put into courting the Indian community during his Indian counterpart’s visit. While part of the reason for Cameron’s exuberance would have been the economic outcomes that could benefit his government from engaging with an emerging economic superpower and its diaspora, an equal – if not larger- reason is the fact that, for the first time in decades, the British Indian vote has shown signs of swinging away from Labour and towards Cameron’s Conservatives.

In fact, the general unease within the Labour party and its British-Indian supporters during the Prime Minister’s visit was a bit too obvious to ignore.

Then again, this cannot be termed as much of a surprise since post the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour has experienced many such uncomfortable moments.

For those who may not know him well, Jeremy Corbyn, the current darling of the international radical-left coalition, is the new leader of the British Labour Party and as such, the de-facto Labour Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2020 elections.

Corbyn, who swept the internal Labour leadership elections held after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was one of the signatories to the 2013 parliamentary petition asking the British government to reinstate its diplomatic boycott of Modi, “given his role in the communal violence in 2002 [in Gujarat] that claimed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Muslims”.

Corbyn’s policy stands have been termed to be too radical even for his old-Labour partymen. Some of his more prominent ideas include the introduction of a national ‘maximum’ wage cap, state control over schooling, nationalization of Britain’s railways and gas companies, the unification of Ireland, imposition of an arms embargo on Israel and doing business with militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah whom he has called his ‘friends’.

Over and above this, in a Britain growing increasingly discomforted by the rise of radical Islam amongst its citizens (a viewpoint shared by a huge majority of British Indians), he has the reputation of being an appeaser. In an Indian context, think of him as Arvind Kejriwal, Sitaram Yechury and Mulayam Singh Yadav rolled into one.

Yet, however worrisome Corbyn may be for British Indians, he is an even greater bother for the Labour party itself. The rise of Corbyn has resulted in a great deal of unrest amongst most moderate Labour members and supporters, who realize that Corbyn’s ultra-leftist views and policy ideas will alienate most centrist, swing voters in Britain and result in the party going back to its pre-Blair status of being ideologically radical-left and hence, completely unelectable.

The irony of the situation is that it is exactly these radical views – along with his anti-establishment image – which helped Corbyn win over the ideologically hard-leftist supporter base of the Labour party during their internal elections and take over the leadership mantle in the first place.

This sort of uncomfortable situation is not limited to Labour or the United Kingdom alone. Across the Atlantic, as the US Presidential race heats up, both the mainstream parties – the Republicans and Democrats – are faced with similar, prickly situations as well.

Of the two, the Republicans are faced with the more serious problem. The current leader in their primary race is megalomaniacal billionaire, Donald Trump – who began his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and since then, has run a campaign characterized by name calling, misogyny and blatant racism. His policy stands can only be defined as vague machismo and some of his grand plans – like building a wall on the US-Mexico border and getting the Mexicans to pay for it – seem straight out of a comic book. Yet, he has managed to dominate the Republican polls, towering over more established candidates like Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush.

On the Democratic side, the Hillary Clinton applecart seems to have been upset – at least slightly – by Bernie Sanders, the junior Senator from Vermont. A self-proclaimed ‘Democratic Socialist’, Sanders prescribes a non-interventionist Foreign Policy, no college tuition fees, raising the minimum wage, universal healthcare, taxing all financial transactions, moving away from a globalized economy and the elimination of the cap on payroll tax for high incomes.

While the well-meaning Sanders does have the right ideas on some of the issues – particularly healthcare and minimum wage – the bulk of his social spending schemes are clearly unsustainable for the US economy and has the potential to eventually push the country into a Greece-like economic crisis. More importantly for Democrats, Sanders – like Corbyn in the UK – will almost certainly alienate voters in crucial swing states which the Democrats desperately need to win in order to keep their hold on the Presidency.

While the more centrist, Hillary still manages to lead the polls by a fairly healthy margin, the increasing popularity of Sanders and the resonance of his ideas with the Democratic base has ensured that this will be far from the cakewalk that most people had predicted. The Sanders surge has also left Hillary more politically vulnerable than anyone would have imagined. With another candidate winning over the party base and looking increasingly formidable, even the slightest of controversies now has the potential to derail her campaign at the Primary stage itself.

The rise in popularity of the likes of Corbyn, Trump and Sanders in two of the world’s most mature democracies cannot be attributed to a mere coincidence. The factors driving their popularity are primarily their anti-establishment image and their pandering to their respective party’s ideologically rigid bases. While the former factor need not be much of a concern to the general population, the latter certainly is.

Across the political spectrum, wherever political parties have the Primary system in place, prospective candidates are increasingly faced with the challenge of not being ‘loyal enough to the cause’. Because of the fact that most voters during Primaries are those who are more ideologically rigid than the general populace, moderate candidates are increasingly losing out to the more extreme ones. In the US, the Tea Party and their loyal supporters in the ‘Red’ Republican states have virtually caught moderate Republican candidates by the throat, forcing them to take more and more radical stances on social and economic issues. The rise of Sanders is sure to push Democrats further to the left come the next round of elections.

The end effect of such a state of affairs would be the crippling effect on the legislative process. As candidates swerve more and more towards their party trenches, discussion and compromise on legislative matters would become almost impossible. The legislative struggles that a centrist President like Barack Obama has had to face post the rise of the Tea Party is a case in point.

While such a grim view of their political system is now common in most Western democracies, the sentiment towards the same system is quite the opposite in India. In the run-up to the 2014 General Elections, the English media and its loyal constituents were chock-a-block with discussions and demands from the two major national parties to move towards the Primary system of candidate selection. In fact, this idea formed the cornerstone of Rahul Gandhi’s botched efforts to ‘democratize the Youth Congress’ – another example of how holding primaries really doesn’t change much in a political party.

While the glitz and showmanship of the ‘Primary season’ would have made for great entertainment and TRPs, the experience from the West shows that it does not throw up anything better than what we have in India currently. It also prevents us from looking at other areas of concrete electoral reform – like fixed Government tenures and simultaneously conducted state and national elections – which India desperately needs.

In any case, at least currently, most major Indian political parties have leaders who cover the widest spectrum of their party’s support base as opposed to ones who just pander to the lunatic fringe. Also, had the BJP and the Congress conducted their own Primaries, does anybody doubt that the eventual winners would still have been Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi?

This writer can be contacted at prafulshankar@gmail.com or at the twitter handle @shankarpraful