A brief note on big tent which I have been meaning to write as a follow up to the earlier centre right post. In short, I am not really fond of the term. However this is not because it is borrowed from lexicon of American politics, but because it is more or less irrelevant for India. Now big tent in US refers to accommodation of divergent viewpoint within a loose political framework, allowing tolerance of some deviation from the ideology. This means the resultant political alliance is moderate compared to the individual component. For example Republican Party is considered a alliance of three groups, fiscal conservative (people who hate poor), social conservative (people who hate gays) and defense conservative (people who hate Muslims). Now obviously these groups have some overlap, but it is not enough to win a majority on basis of a limited agenda (of hating poor, gays and Muslims). This results in adoption of a more accommodating platform to cobble a majority. The reason this concept can not be transposed to Indian right wing politics overlap is dynamic is different in three ways. One though bloggers are deceived by selection bias but broadly speaking in India social conservative >> security conservative > fiscal conservative. Second the overlap between these categories is much greater than US.
But the most significant reason which renders the above irrelevant is the fact that in India the politics follows a different dynamics, an inherently socialist one viz. patron client model, and this is the reason I have no use for ”Big Tent”.
