:: Inder Malhotra

Little chintan, mostly chinta for BJP

By Inder Malhotra

Aug 19 : WHAT kind of a chintan baithak — roughly translatable as "anxious thinking session" — of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is this from which all the articulate critics of the coterie currently ruling the roost in the defeated and demoralised party have been excluded? There is no invitation for former finance and foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, or for the outspoken Arun Shourie. Or, for that matter, for the former Rajasthan chief minister, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who created history of sorts, not so much by losing the state in the recent Assembly elections, as by sending 58 of the 78 BJP MLAs in the state to Delhi to tersely tell the leadership that, despite party president Rajnath Singh’s directive to her to quit, Ms Raje was their leader.

Over long years, I have witnessed and reported many bizarre political scenes. Few were so revealing as that of the visiting Rajasthan MLAs crowding the heavily-guarded gate of Lal Krishna Advani’s Prithviraj Road residence and being firmly denied entry. Which brings me to the painful fact that this elderly leader, a fine and courteous man, is fast becoming the saffron party’s principal problem. This sadly confirms the maxim that, like the fish, a declining political party begins to rot from the head.

Ever since his famous, if interrupted, Rath Yatra, combined with the hysteria over the construction of Ram Mandir at Ayodhya, boosted the BJP’s political fortunes, Mr Advani has made no bones about his ambition to be Prime Minister. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. However, when the moment for the BJP’s rise to power did seem near, all concerned realised that this could happen only under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee. He had the political stature and acumen none of his colleagues possessed, of course. His biggest asset, however, was the country’s belief that of all the votaries of then-fashionable Hindutva, he alone understood that India’s vast and complex diversity required an accommodative, virtually Nehruvian, approach. Even Mr Vajpayee disappointed his admirers occasionally as, for instance, when he failed to achieve his avowed objective of sacking Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in the wake of the unspeakable commu-nal carnage in Gujarat in 2002. Even so, it is no exaggeration to say that but for him the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance could not have ruled for six years. Today there is no one in the higher echelons of the party even remotely comparable to him.

Since public memory is short, let it be recalled that before the 2004 election — which the BJP, dazzled by its own propaganda about "India Shining", was confident of winning — the then party president, M. Venkaiah Naidu, an Advani acolyte, had declared that the BJP would contest the next poll under the "joint leadership" of Vikas Purush — Development Man, Mr Vajpayee, and Loh Purush — Iron Man, Mr Advani. The then Prime Minister was on a foreign visit at that time. On return home, Atalji (Mr Vajpayee) squashed the duality idea with consummate subtlety. Mr Naidu and his cohorts ran for cover.

The convulsions the BJP went through after the 2004 polls are best left out of this discussion. The pertinent fact is that only in 2009 did Mr Advani become the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate largely because age and ill-health prevented Mr Vajpayee from leading the party yet again. Be that as it may, until the forenoon of May 16, Mr Advani was convinced that his party and its allies would win and he would be India’s "strong" Prime Minister, compared with the "weak" incumbent. Only after his rude awakening did he realise that his constant harping on the strong-versus-weak theme had done him a lot of harm and a world of good to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Nothing became Mr Advani more than his announcement immediately after the electoral debacle that he was stepping down from the leadership of the parliamentary party. Was it a mere ploy? For, asked to stay on only temporarily until a new leader could be chosen, he has decided to stay put in the top job. Does he think that by hanging on he can fulfil his ambition in 2014? If so, what message will it send to the party ranks and the country at large?

By now it has become a cliché that what was once advertised as a "party with a difference" is now torn apart by differences. In the art of factional warfare, the BJP can now teach the Congress a thing or two. No wonder the saffron party is virtually leaderless. Then there is the major problem of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — a Freemasons-like bunch of un-elected individuals running the show from behind high walls in Nagpur, with occasional visits to Delhi’s Jhandewalan — having a stranglehold on the entire parivar of which the BJP is the political face. But, with RSS pracharaks (preachers) entrenched in strategic positions, the party seems unable to cut the umbilical cord with the parent organisation. A large section of the party cadres are likely to oppose any such move, in any case.

To cap it all, the BJP is now bereft of ideology, never mind idealism. Hindutva is now history. To try to capitalise on the Ram Mandir issue 17 years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid is to flog a dead horse. If the last election has proved anything, it is that the people have no use for a divisive agenda. Safety, development and stability are what they want. For this reason, other members of the Sangh Parivar, such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, and Ram Sene, all of them merchants of hate, have become millstones round the BJP’s neck.

To be sure, there are sensible people in the party who want it to abandon Hindutva and adopt a more constructive agenda that would appeal to the people outside the narrow constituency it has been concentrating on. But then the party’s lacklustre president himself leads the hordes that want to cling on to Hindutva regardless of consequences.

It would be tragic if the BJP’s manifest decline turns irreversible. For, the country needs at least two mainstream parties as against the plethora of parties that are "regional" in name but are, in fact, state-specific.