By Faisal C.K.

The Republican Party is known as the ‘grand old party’ (GOP) in the United States of America. The party was founded in 1954 by anti-slavery activists and opposed the expansion of chattel slavery in the USA. The party’s ideological plinth was classical liberalism. As early as the 1870s, politicians and newspapers began to refer to the Republican Party as the grand old party to emphasize its role in preserving the Union during the Civil War. The party stood for the virtue of liberty and the basic creed of the US.

Likewise, the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Sri Lankan United National Party (UNP) stood for liberty, equality, and fraternity in their respective countries. They have been epitomes of the composite culture and inclusive pluralism in their respective countries. In the past and present, these two grand old parties have been living a parallel life.

The splendid past and precarious future 

Historian Ramachandra Guha in his essay The long life and lingering death of the Indian National Congress underscores the unique significance of the Congress Party in India: “The BJP is a party of Hindu majoritarians many of whose members tend to suspect and even demonize Muslims and Christians. For their part, the regional parties use the rhetoric of caste and linguistic discrimination mostly to advance the wealth and power of their leaders. The case of the Congress is different. This was the party that led the movement for freedom, the party that united India and brought people of different religions and languages into a single political project. Its finest leaders were not confined by national boundaries; they had a universal vision. And they were men and women of high personal integrity.”

Leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru made the Congress a pan-Indian ecumenist party transcending regional, linguistic, gender-based, and to some extent, religious boundaries. The post-independence Congress sought to unite Indians to pursue the common goals of economic development, secularism, and equality.  The party remains the DNA of India.

But the party has now declined into a shadow of its splendid past. Dynastic politics and its attendant sycophancy ruined the party irrecoverably. The dynasticism is deeply entrenched in the Congress’ structure. During the Indira-era, the party was merely an extension of her will and whims. This pattern continued in the Rajiv and Sonia-eras too. Merit had been superseded by the blue blood of the reigning dynasty. Through the 1970s and the 1980s, the social groups, that were once the Congress’ solid vote bank, started deserting the party camp. The 2014 Lok Sabha election marked the end of the Congress’s umbrella social coalition across the country. The expanding leadership vacuum further undermined the party’s stature.

Lack of a compact ideology, factionalism, deinstitutionalization of the organizational machinery, and under-representation of backward castes and Dalits have been pointed out as other reasons for the party’s decline. The emergence of regional parties with centrist ideology shrank the Congress’ space. Due to these factors, election debacles became a quotidian affair and the party’s parliamentary strength grew weaker. Political scientist Suhas Palshikar rightly described the Congress’ defeat in the 2014 Lok Sabha election as an ‘electoral disaster’. The party’s tally nosedived from 206 in the 2009 Lok Sabha election to 44 in 2014. The recent state election fiasco in the Hindi heartland has dealt a heavy blow to the Congress.

The Sri Lankan doppelgänger 

In Sri Lanka, the UNP is more akin to the INC in the historical context. The prototype of UNP was the Ceylon National Congress (CNC) established in 1918. Like the INC, the CNC was formed by the Westernised intelligentsia. The UNP emerged victorious in the first general election held in 1947; but was ousted from power, in less than a decade, by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) led by S.W.R. D. Bandaranaike. Both the INC and the UNP are ideologically inclined to social liberalism. The UNP has maintained an ideological and policy consistency as Sri Lanka’s established ‘centre-right’ party as the Congress has done in India.

The UNP, like the INC, has generally presented itself to minority communities like Tamils and Muslims as a more tolerant and liberal political alternative to the SLFP and the BJP. While the UNP and the INC advocate inclusive plural secular politics, their rivals – the SLFP and the BJP – pursue a parochial ethnic/religious nationalism.

Like the Congress gradually lost its social base, the rise of militant Tamil nationalism in the late 1970s and the emergence of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress in the mid-1980s, led to the UNP’s electoral marginalization. Both parties supported free market economic policy and liberalization in recent times. However, they did not hesitate to manipulate and use governmental power in an illiberal and draconian fashion under their dictatorial leaders like J.R. Jayewardene and Indira Gandhi.

Like the INC, dyansticism has been a bane of the UNP. “The top leaders of the UNP have most often come from the extended wings of one of the two major ‘families/clans’ that have dominated Sri Lankan society and politics in the post-independence period. They have, thus, been selected on a loosely dynastic-nepotistic principle by the party elite, with their assumption of power legitimized by open popular elections. The founder of the UNP and the first prime minister of independent Ceylon, D. S. Senanayake, was succeeded by his son Dudley who resigned within two and half years in 1954, and reins of power were taken up by his politically ambitious cousin, Sir John Kotelawala.

“With the UNP’s defeat in 1956, Kotelawala retired from politics to Britain, and another politically ambitious and astute relative of D. S. Senanayake’s, J. R. Jayewardene, took control of the party along with Dudley. Following the party’s defeat in 1994, its leadership once again devolved to Ranil Wickremasinghe, a scion of the powerful Wickremasinghe segment of the family and Jayewardene’s nephew. Indeed, as local political humour has long had it, the party was perhaps better called the ‘Uncle-Nephew Party’”, Amita Shastri chronicles the dyansticism in the UNP in her essay Reproducing Hegemony: The United National Party of Sri Lanka. 

The UNP has served as the country’s ruling party, or as part of its governing coalition, for 38 of the country’s 75 years of independence. However, the 2020 parliamentary elections were a catastrophe for the UNP. While the newly formed Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna won a landslide victory with 59.09% of the votes and secured 145 seats out of a total of 225, the UNP suffered its worst defeat, receiving only 2.15% of votes cast. For the first time, it almost failed to win a single seat in parliament, having only gained one national list seat.

The INC and the UNP, like the Liberal Party in Britain, have almost exhausted their political longevity. But their diminution marks the erosion of inclusive pluralism, secularism, and liberal politics in South Asia.

-Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala and this article was originally featured on thewire.in