At the end of this month, Prashant Kishor will contest a bypoll in Bihar, in a renewed bid to claim some political space, months after his new party failed to achieve a foothold in the November assembly election. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s TMC continues to come apart at many seams, unresistingly, almost immediately after its electoral drubbing in April. In Uttar Pradesh, where the countdown has begun for the next electoral battle, speculation about the ruling BJP’s internal wrangles makes more news than the Samajwadi Party, its principal opposition party that remains frozen in circa 2017, when it lost power in the state. In Andhra Pradesh, Chandrababu Naidu’s son and working president of the TDP, Nara Lokesh, in an interview to this paper, describes “Namo” as Naidu plus Modi, a pairing of unequals, with the once larger-than-his-state regional player subsumed in Modi’s cult of personality willingly.AdvertisementThese images are of recent vintage — regional parties and leaders with long careers laid low, and even Jan Suraaj, the newcomer with a clean slate. But they are part of what seems to be a larger phenomenon of our time. The predatory politics of the BJP, backed by its “one nation” thesis and drive towards uniformity, its use of fear and favour to skew the playing field, has quickened the crisis of the regional party. But that is not the whole explanation.Regional parties have also conspired in their own crumpling and, in the process, in a larger undoing — of the gains made on federalism for nearly two decades from the mid 1980s. That was the time when Congress decline had begun (even as the 1984 mandate in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination briefly masked it), and the BJP was a long way away from taking its place as the dominant party. The Centre was not “strong” through the 1990s, and regional parties seized the opportunity to climb to the national stage, while the processes of economic liberalisation were also, arguably, encouraging a decentralisation of the polity.The unwelcome reversal of that process of decentralisation in a diverse polity, now framed in the implosion of the regional parties, has been long in the making. It can be traced back to the steady hollowing out of political parties organisationally. As political scientist KK Kailash has pointed out, the “mass party model”, which meant the primacy of the “party on the ground” over the “party in public office”, became outdated longago. Before Independence and immediately after it, parties were seen as “vehicles of movements attempting to extend the franchise to a broader section of society”. For a long time now, however, the “party in public office” is in command, the “party on the ground” has been made subservient to it.AdvertisementThis means, among other things, “a high degree of centralisation… a focus on holding public office and winning elections, where voters matter more than supporters”. For a party increasingly distanced from its roots, it also means a growing reliance on government and bureaucracy to push its agenda on the one hand, and on the other, on professional agencies for campaign strategy.It was inattention to internal organisational disrepair, for instance, that led to the TMC ceding vital decision-making space to the IPAC, the political consultancy. In no small measure, this has contributed now to TMC old-timers abandoning the party.The national parties, Congress and the BJP, are affected by the same corrosion. But the inability of the regional parties to hold their ground is more vivid arguably because their footholds and platforms were smaller and less layered to begin with — even those that have had links to larger movements and causes, like the DMK with the self-respect movement, or the RJD with social justice politics.But it is not just larger, impersonal or inevitable processes that have led to the regional parties’ current deshabille. The problem also lies in specific inabilities and abdications that have come to haunt them now in their confrontation with the aggressive pursuit of total dominance by the BJP.Travelling through UP last month was to be struck by how the Akhilesh Yadav-led SP, more than nine years out of power now, is so much a prisoner of its past image. He is seen, widely, as the leader surrounded by family, and the SP is seen as the Muslim-Yadav party that presides over lawlessness when it is in government. Many of those who feel angry or alienated from the ruling BJP are reluctant to see the SP as an alternative — for them, it is a party that has not budged from its standstill. The SP can blame these perceptions on the BJP’s whirring propaganda machine. But it must also ask itself why its efforts to look more inclusive and encompassing are dismissed by so many so easily.These are extraordinary times — the BJP as the ruling party intimidates and targets political opponents, labels and cramps spaces for opposition politics. But the SP, like other regional parties, has not been able to summon, in response, an extraordinary politics. In fact, it has fallen short even on a politics that is ordinary.It has not put forth a new political or economic model, only promised a tinkering. On the ground, its proclaimed shift from M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) to PDA (pichhda, dalit, alpsankhyak) is still seen as its inability to move beyond exclusionary caste arithmetic against an opponent that outmanoeuvres it by a wider social engineering at one level, and by claiming “sabka saath…”, on the other. Of course, the BJP’s social coalition excludes Muslims, but the SP dare not point to that exclusion because of its own timidity, lest it should forfeit any part of the “Hindu” vote.The inability to fight the BJP on terms that are not set by the BJP, politically and economically, the incapacity to climb out of the trap of family, and of one caste-one community, is common to many of the regional parties that are now seen to be fading — or hastening to the side of the BJP.If the older parties seem weighed down by their pasts, the newbie with the clean slate must not just contend with the high threshold for electoral viability, but also with the fact, as Prashant Kishor discovered, that even in the social media age, there are no shortcuts to the hard labour of politics.For now, even as cracks in BJP dominance begin showing, the parties that could have benefited from the opening up of political spaces, are unfortunately just not up to it.Till next week,VanditaRecommended Readings:S Y Quraishi: You vote, therefore you are: The hidden consequences of electoral deletionYogendra Yadav: Some democratic lessons from Global South that our Opposition needsPratap Bhanu Mehta: When corruption does not make a political noiseKaushik Dasgupta: For better cities, go with the water flowSurjit Bhalla: Lost in India’s celebrations of trade pacts, the big deal