The special session of parliament has two crucial takeaways for the opposition: first, they must hereafter be alert to scrutinise every move by this government to ward off trickery and trappings. Concealing crucial facts and giving misleading assurances have become its standard operating practice.Second, the session has also established that coordinated action by opposition parties could act as an effective bulwark against the deceit, stealth and oneupmanship by the big two. We are now told of the last minute moves by some ruling party leaders to use the north-south divide to wean away some north-based parties. As part of this, Amit Shah had made a last minute compromise plan but did not act on it as things failed to move as he desired. This was because the opposition had insisted on Shah’s written assurance for this. And for the first time since 2014, Modi suffered the humiliation of defeat of a bill in the House.The opposition’s stand was that the women’s quota bill was a decoy to pass the delimitation laws to redraw India’s electoral map for 2029 Lok Sabha polls.Incidentally, it was Modi’s former boss Atal Bihari Vajpayee who had first discerned dictatorial shades in him. While on a US visit, he had directed his junior minister Vijay Goyal to tell Modi to stop being so “brazen” on Gujarat riots. At least two of his senior ministers had since csswome on record to assert that Vajpayee had wanted to dismiss Narendra Modi as Gujarat chief Minister. According to Yashwant Sinha, L.K. Advani was the one who had stalled the move. Jaswant Singh, another senior minister, revealed that Gujarat riots had so disturbed Vajpayee that he had “almost resigned”. This was, apparently, to force Modi’s ouster. Vajpayee himself had told PTI that “if India is not secular, then India is not India”. He reminded Modi about his ‘Raj dharma’ as Gujarat chief minister and asked him to stand by this ideal.Realpolitik. Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyBut Modi did not show any gratitude to Advani for saving him in 2002. On the contrary, 11 years later, he conspired to frustrate his former saviour’s plans to become party’s PM candidate in 2014. Instead, he imposed himself as PM. Subsequently, all his senior leaders were sent to the ‘Margdarshak Mandal.’ Beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru, India had built a set of healthy democratic traditions. Consultation with the opposition parties on emerging developments was one of these. All prime ministers before Modi had genuinely sought the opposition’s views. They frequently called all-party meetings presided over by the PM. The Idea was to carry them along and establish a personal relationship. Take for instance, Manmohan Singh, who himself presided over the all-party meeting on the Bombay attacks and replied to queries from the opposition, not his home minister. This writer was witness to similar meetings by Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao, Chandra Shekhar Vajpayee, V.P. Singh and Rajiv Gandhi. Deliberations on such occasions continued in a cordial atmosphere, not for scoring confrontational points. There were occasions when the government agreed to hold closed-door meetings with a selected few on sensitive matters. Consider how Jawaharlal Nehru, bate noire of Modi’s BJP, had treated Vajpayee whom he described as “a talented young man of BJP”. When Vajpayee visited the US, Nehru’s aide M.O. Mathai had asked Rasgotra that he be introduced around. “Look after him,” was Nehru’s instruction. At a party, one of the participants had criticised Nehru’s non-alignment policy.Vajpayee flared up and responded: “You must never talk like that about Panditji. India had nothing when we gained freedom, we were a former colony, we were starving, we had no independent foreign policy. Nehru is laying all the foundations of everything we have today.”Such magnanimity is what differentiates our traditional prime ministers from those like Modi.At a time when the Modi BJP raised a controversy over celebrating Nehru’s birth anniversary as ‘Children’s day’, President Pranab Mukherjee said: “India is what it is today was because of Nehru. Let us celebrate his legacy and draw inspiration from his life.”Look how frank and forthright India’s first PM had been in parliament during debate on the 1962 attacks by China. Nehru sat through the debates and replied to the members on behalf of both the defence and foreign ministers. In 16 months before December 1962, Nehru made 32 statements and interventions in Parliament on China. He spoke over 1.04 lakh words on the India-China border dispute, running into well over 200 printed pages. Parliamentary records show that six decades ago, Nehru gave full opportunity to the Opposition to grill his government. Nehru sat through the debates and replied to 165 members. He offered to present ‘every scrap of paper’ before the House. Ranged against him were such stalwarts like Hem Barua, Nath Pai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, N.G. Ranga, Balraj Madhok, H.V. Kamath, Acharya Kripalani, Frank Anthony, Mahendra Pratap Singh, Brajraj Singh, Maniram Bagri and Mahavir Tyagi. They sought and got the details of the war preparations and progress of the talks with foreign governments.“If we scrap the Five Year Plans, we scrap India, surrender to China,” Nehru told Susheela Nayyar of Congress. The Debates were long and winding and the government side did not rush through with bills and resolutions. Unlike today, the PM made it a point to put off other official appointments to be present in the House. As against this, during the last monsoon session, the incumbent prime minister was present only on the first and last day.In pre-Modi years, whenever the nation faced a national challenge, the ruling parties had sought and got cooperation from the opposition. In December 1971, leaders of Communist Party of India, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham, including Jan Sangh’s Pitambar Das and Congress (O)’s Morarji Desai, vied with one another in praising Indira Gandhi.On her part, she profusely thanked the opposition for the cooperation. Similar happened during the Pokhran blast and Kargil war. Political adversaries never allowed their working relationship to break down. “India has to run on consensus,” Atal Bihari Vajpayee repeatedly asserted. Unlike Modi, his predecessor from the party was always ready to engage with opposition.Compare this disarming openness with the arrogance of the Modi-Shah regime. The duo treated parliament as another forum to harass the opposition. They have been keeping an increasing number of subjects away from parliament. Members, even the leader of opposition, are stopped midway their address.Today’s Bharatiya Janata Party is not the one founded by Advani-Vajpayee-Manohar Joshi combine in 1980. It retains its old nomenclature and its organisational bodies such as the central executive committee, national executive and parliamentary party executive. They also meet periodically as per the constitutional requirements. But in reality, all those bodies remain on paper. Before Modi took control in 2014, the Chief Election Commissioner and parliamentary board which had senior leaders as members discussed and decided party policies. They debated policies and programmes from different angles and arrived at final conclusion. The RSS had its own political commissars – a practice borrowed from the early years of the Soviet Red Army when it had a communist official in each army unit to maintain ideological control – in the CEC and parliamentary board. The last of the commissar was RSS strong man Sundar Singh Bhandari. After 2014, Modi realised that since the CEC itself was turned redundant there was no need for such a post. Moreover, he disliked any outside control over his decisions. His sole testament became the spin dictators tool kit as modified and indigenised by him. Under this, the real decision makers became the Modi-Shah duo, not the CEC or parliamentary board. They consulted their advisers technocrats and strategy planners before announcing the policies. The endorsement of the CEC at its formal meetings is only for records. Remember, all ‘elected’ members of these panels are in fact the ones nominated by the top duo. ,Like the spin dictators elsewhere, Modi also makes use of the communal base of the RSS as his springboard. So what has been happening is this: top duo crafts a policy or programme and with the ready help of their political aides enforces them on the system. Then this becomes the official policy. Bodies like CEC and parliamentary board are called to formalise the duo’s programmes. Under the new system, the CEC members’ only role is listen to the homilies of the of the leaders, not to make any comments. Decisions ‘taken’ and resolutions ‘adopted’ are released to media by the designated office-bearers. Every one willingly accepts this procedure as now normal. We must not ignore another disturbing trend: institutionalisation of the Modi-Shah doctrine down the line. Earlier Amit Shah’s aides used to instruct the officials and party leaders what to do at different occasions. This seems to be changing. A auto-generating response system based on total loyalty is emerging at all levels. Party leaders and the bureaucracy know what the ‘high command’ wants and act accordingly. In an age of fractured mandates, personality cults and transactional alliances, P. Raman brings clarity to India’s shifting political equations. With Realpolitik, the veteran journalist peers beneath the slogans and spin to reveal the power plays, spectacle, crises and insecurities driving India’s politics.