Out of the big tent

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Out of the big tent

Saturday, 20 October 2018 | Nadeem Paracha

Over the years, most big tent parties in Pakistan have begun to shrink in their appeal, alienating voters and leading to political cynicism and apathy

Analysts often casually describe the ideological orientation of mainstream political parties. For example, in the US, the Democratic Party is seen to be a party of liberals and Left-liberals whereas the Republican Party is understood to attract votes from fiscal and social conservatives. Yet, ever since the 1930s, there have been plenty of occasions when many conservatives voted for the Democratic Party and the liberals opted to cast their ballots for the Republican Party.

During the 1964 US Presidential election, a large majority of conservatives voted for the Democratic Party. During the 1980 elections in the US and then again in 1984, many Democratic Party voters switched to vote for the conservative Republican Party candidate, Ronald Reagan. The same happened in the UK between 1979 and 1987, when the Conservative Party candidate, Margaret Thatcher, managed to attract an impressive number of former liberal and even some pro-left votes.

Most established mainstream parties are what are called ‘big tent parties.’ According to the anthology Making Sense of Political Ideology: The Power of Language in Democracy (Brock, Huglen, Howell) the term and concept of ‘big tent’ originated in the US. Holly M Allen in Class in America wrote that the Democratic Party was the first proper big tent party.

During the Democratic Party’s shift to the Left, soon after the onset of economic depression in the US in the late 1920s, Holly says that the party managed to defeat the increasingly conservative Republican Party by broadening the party’s appeal to attract votes not only from liberals but also from ‘Southern conservatives’, labour unions, African-Americans and farmers. The Democratic Party managed to coax voters from across classes and ideological, racial, religious and sectarian persuasions to back the party’s plans to resurrect the country’s collapsed economy.

The Democratic Party won all US elections between 1932 and 1952 until the Republican Party, too, transformed itself into becoming a big tent entity. For example, it retained its conservative core, but it did not (at least till the 1980s) do away with the many Left-liberal economic policies first introduced by the Democratic Governments. So, big tent parties are broad-based organisations which have Left or Right ideological cores, but these are malleable enough to absorb as many variants of the core as possible. This helps the party attract a lot more votes compared to the votes a party hinged on an inflexible ideological core would be able to.

Germany’s two established mainstream parties — the centre-right Christian Democratic Union and the centre-left German Social Democratic Party — have been big tent parties and so have UK’s Conservative Party and the Labour Party. Interestingly, the chief of the All-India Muslim League (AIML), Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was quick to learn from the Democratic Party in this context when, in his pursuit to make the AIML the leading Muslim party in India, Jinnah turned it into a big tent entity.

Till 1940, AIML’s appeal was largely restricted to urban Urdu-speaking middle-class Muslims. At the party’s core was a modernist and progressive understanding of Islam. In the early 1940s, Jinnah green-lit the entry of communist Muslim ideologues into the party as well as some prominent leaders of ‘lower-caste Hindus’. And just before the important 1945-46 general elections in India, Jinnah had also approved the admission of Barelvi spiritual figureheads (pirs) in Punjab and some conservative ‘Deobandi’ ulema. The party’s ideological core, however, remained entrenched in modernist Islam and a call for a separate Muslim-majority country. To turn the party into a big tent organisation, the ideological core was subtly refigured to absorb the sentiments of Muslims from across ethnicities, classes, sects and sub-sects to help it win the majority of India’s Muslim votes.

The experiment worked. But soon after Pakistan’s creation, the big tent did not hold and the party splintered into various factions. The experiment was not lost on a young politician, ZA Bhutto. The August 12, 1962 edition of Dawn quoted Bhutto, then a young Minister in Ayub Khan’s modernist regime, as saying that the country needed a “broad-based party.” He then went on to explain that Ayub’s Muslim League would be an inclusive party comprising a diverse group of people invested in “the national interest.”

But as Ayub’s League became identified more with authoritarianism and the economic elite, Bhutto launched his own party in 1967 — the PPP. The Press reported its launch as a socialist party. However, in the party’s Foundation Papers, Bhutto explained that the party was inspired by the broad-based structure formulated by Jinnah within the AIML. That’s why, right from the beginning, three lobbies emerged within the PPP. On the Left were staunch Marxist and socialist ideologues and trade unionists; in the centre were ‘Islamic socialists’ and social-democrats; and on the right were ‘liberal’ feudal chiefs, ‘moderate’ Islamists and the progressive bourgeoisie.

No matter what their ideological core, big tent outfits naturally settle in the centre, becoming centre-left or centre-right. The idea is always to remain inclusive and, thus, bag as many votes as possible from a varied mass of the electorate. In 1988, a big-tent from the right emerged in the shape of the Islami Jamhoori Ittihad (IJI). It was more of an alliance than a big tent party, enacted to challenge the PPP’s broad appeal. But the IJI was too invested in its rightest core and was torn asunder before the PML-N emerged from it as the right’s big tent version.

The PML-N appealed to big capitalists, petty-bourgeoisie traders and shopkeepers, religious conservatives and sections of the urban middle-classes. It was only natural that the party would begin to slowly move towards the centre. By 2008, it had become a centre-right big tent organisation which, by 2016, had also begun to appeal to segments of the ‘liberal’ urban middle-classes.

Imran Khan’s PTI is aspiring to convert itself into becoming a bigger tent by adopting the 1970s’ populist rhetoric of the PPP and the ‘pro-establishment’ sentiments of the IJI. But at its core lies an ideology which largely appeals to a ‘blocked elite’ and/or an urban bourgeoisie, which is economically empowered but politically frustrated by what it believes is the ‘corrupt’ hegemony of the two established big tent parties, the PPP and the PML-N. Most political scientists have insisted that big tent parties are vital for the health of democracy mainly because of their inclusivity. Recently, political observers in Europe and the US, while commenting on the rise of populist and intransigent outfits and personalities in the West, have pointed out that, over the years, most big tent parties in the region have begun to shrink their appeal, thus alienating a large number of voters.

These voters thus could not identify with the mainstream parties and have become vulnerable to political cynicism and apathy; or worse, have been bagged by dogmatic parties or by far right or far Left factions within what were once big tent parties.

(Courtesy: Dawn)

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