It would not be erroneous to speculate that these days, chintan baithaks at 6 Deen Dayal Upa­dhyaya Marg — the swanky headquarters of the Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi — tend to dwell on ways to cross the chaar sau seat hurdle in the ongoing parliamentary elections. At another address in the same city, 24 Akbar Road — the Congress HQ — the mood could well be that of aar ya paar: this, after all, is a do or die poll battle for India’s Grand Old Party that has been, for a decade, a mere pawn to the BJP’s dashing knight on the chessboard of power. But what could possibly be on the minds of the minders of the ‘political’ party located in Patna’s Khagaul Road?

At a time when India’s national and regional outfits are hatching plans to occupy Delhi’s kursi, The Plurals Party, which, Wikipedia says, is located on the third floor of the Sukhbaso Complex on Patna’s Khagaul Road, may well be thinking of Immanuel Kant. If this — it is an uneducated guess — makes it an oddity, it would be a pity. That’s because when Indian politics has turned its face away from philosophical values or vision, The Plurals Party pledges “Kantianism”, apart from “Progressivism”, “Liberalism” and “Decentralisation”, as the pillar of the ideological template that it wants the nation to embrace. Timing is of the essence in politics, and The Plurals Party’s evocation of Kant is well-timed — the German philosopher’s tercentennial birth anniversary fell only a week ago.

What makes The Plurals Party novel is not only its supposed philosophical bent of mind; but its uniqueness also rests on an identity that is one of Indian democracy’s seemingly whimsical, yet desirable, traits. Formed in 2020, The Plurals Party is, in the words of the Election Commission of India, one among the ‘Registered Unrecognised Political Parties’ that numbered close to 3,000 in 2022. RUPPs — The Plurals Party, Indian Lovers Party, Indian Believers Party, Indian Manush Party, National Tiger Party, Viro Ke Vir Indian Party and, quite aptly, in this season of IPL and elections, the Twenty20 party, among many others, make up this strange tribe — are either newly-registered parties or ones that have, unsurprisingly, not received enough votes in an assembly or a Lok Sabha election to attain the status of a state or a national party. Many of them have not even participated in elections since their inception.

It is not clear whether The Plurals Party is in the fray in 2024. But it did fight the Bihar assembly polls four years ago and lost in each of the seats it fought. (Bihar’s electoral battlefield, much like India’s, may not have been the ideal turf to explain the Kantian principle of transcendental idealism.) But keeping afloat the jhanda of RUPPs in this Lok Sabha polls is — you are reading it right — the Pyramid Party of India. With a professed aim of turning Indians into vegetarians and enlightened beings — the BJP, too, harbours shakahari dreams but, alas, can boast of only one vishwaguru in its kitty — the Pyramid Party of India has, according to the EC website, decided to fight from nine seats in Telangana. But the outfit, much like its cousin in Bihar, does not quite stand tall at the hustings. In 2014, it lost its deposits in almost each of the 106 seats it contested. Unfortunately for the Pyramid Party, the majority of Indians, despite steady assaults from politically-motivated vegetarianism, remain incorrigible flesh-eaters and are of a decidedly worldly disposition. Yet, the Pyramid Party, à la Giza’s structures, stands resolute in its conviction to spread the word about its leafy green mission.

Another lieutenant of the burgeoning army of RUPPs is the Right to Recall Party. This outfit appears to be more ambitious, having filed a total of 16 nominations from Rajasthan, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh for the Lok Sabha polls. Its manifesto is far from flippant. The party, as its name hints at, believes it has a rather radical ace up its sleeve to resolve the republic’s festering problems such as corruption and unemployment — empowering the people with the right to recall an elected representative on account of non-performance. But non-radical India has been rather tepid in its response to the suggestion, as is evident from the Right to Recall Party’s electoral harvest. In 2019, having contested 14 Lok Sabha seats, it managed to bag only 0.009% of the vote share, presumably that of India’s minuscule free radical constituency.

But poll reversals have not stopped the RUPP bloom in the strangely feral garden that is Indian politics. In 2001, RUPPs numbered only 694; in the next 20 years, the figure rose by an astonishing 300%. There is a cynical explanation for this. Two years ago, a number of RUPPs came on the radar of the Enforcement Directorate on charges of tax evasion and other financial irregularities. The same year, the EC took punitive action against over 2,100 RUPPs for their refusal to comply with some of the statutory requirements of the Representation of the People Act. Data suggest that 87 such parties were found to be non-existent; three RUPPs were guilty of using bogus donation slips as well as the facilitation of shell companies; over 92% of the then listed RUPPs did not file their contribution reports — a mandatory requirement — in 2019.

Do their moral transgressions, electoral debacles or esoteric manifestoes make RUPPs embellishments of or, worse, irrelevant to democracy?

Perhaps not.

Scale is often a common, convenient, but imperfect barometer of a democracy’s body and spirit. Thus, our obsession with the weightier — domineering? — parties on the electoral weighing scale. But democracy’s deepening, its fecundity and sustenance — indeed, its very future — can also depend on microcosmic spaces that, in India, are critical sites of conversations, engagements, exchanges — frivolous, educative or otherwise. The RUPPs can certainly stake a claim for not only these atomic spaces but also the processes that facilitate the dissemination and cross-pollination of views — dissenting, risible, radical and eccentric — in and across the subterranean sites of democratic encounter.

To the Indian voter, the media, the poll pundit, RUPPs may well be puppets dancing to democracy’s tune. But in their absence, elections in India would be robbed of colour and, more importantly, conversations that make Indian democracy argumentative and, hence, virile.

uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in