:: Nihal Singh

Vanprasth for Advani, yagya to find inheritor

S. Nihal Singh

Augest.27 : Beyond the infamous expulsion of Jaswant Singh from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lies its future. For the expulsion is but an episode in the continuing saga of the main Opposition’s travails. After two general election defeats, it is seeking a new direction to success that eludes it. The crisis is simple and complex, the former in terms of what needs to be done, and the latter because of the party’s umbilical link with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

The most difficult thing for a prima donna or her male equivalent is to take the final bow while acclaim is still ringing in her or his ears. To one Nelson Mandela to say goodbye when he did to notch a higher status for himself and his country, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others who stay on, often by amending their country’s Constitution, or otherwise.

Regrettably, Lal Krishna Advani belongs to the ranks of the latter by perfunctorily resigning as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha soon to withdraw it and later to declare that contrary to the assumption that he was biding his time for a smooth transition, he would stay the full five years. And here lies the rub because a chain of events flows from this decision.

In a sense, the Jaswant Singh expulsion came as a godsend for the principal beneficiaries of the status quo because Sushma Swaraj holds the office of the deputy leader of the Opposition and the other, Arun Jaitley, remains the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Mr Singh having been conveniently sent to the Lower House. In the furore caused by the expulsion, the weightier problems of fixing the guilt for failure and charting a road ahead in the Shimla meet receded to the background.

Yet it is crystal clear to party men, as to outside observers, that without Mr Advani swallowing the bitter pill of retirement, the drift in the party will continue. The RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, sought to give the BJP a nudge by asking for the anointing of younger leaders and pointedly distancing his organisation from the action taken against Mr Singh. It remains to be seen when, if at all, Mr Advani will come to the conclusion that the performance is over and the audience has gone home.

The more complex problem for the BJP is to decide what its relationship to its mentor, the RSS, should be because it is ideologically dependent upon Hindutva and the relationship between the two organisations is so intertwined that it is often difficult to tell one from the other. Even the much-missed Atal Behari Vajpayee paid obeisance to the RSS on occasion and Mr Advani makes a point of expressing his reverence for an institution that has moulded his life and political career. Narendra Modi was, of course, nurtured in the RSS laboratory.

As a political party, particularly after it tasted power at the Centre, the BJP’s compulsions are often different from the RSS’. During its six years of rule in Delhi, the BJP largely followed a coalition agenda determined in part by the pulls and pressures of its motley allies. Unlike in the states it rules, which offer a platform for promoting the RSS in various ways, governing a diverse country cannot be made subservient to an institution with distinct religious overtones. But it offered the RSS valuable crumbs in helping its allied institutions with cheap land and propaganda facilities and, most importantly, getting RSS men and women or their supporters in key positions in the country’s vast bureaucracy.

However, in the BJP’s political journey, the RSS link has often become an albatross. While Hindutva, like democracy, can be a flexible concept, it cannot be stretched indefinitely. Tactically, the BJP has soft-pedalled the hard edges of Hindutva for electoral profit and sheltered under the excuse of running a coalition government, but the compulsion of defining it more accurately grow each day as other Sangh Parivar organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal and the Ram Sene run riot.

Mr Singh chose to trod on RSS toes by seemingly denigrating the Hindutva idol, Sardar Vallabhhai Patel, lauded as the Iron Man of Indian politics as opposed to Jawaharlal Nehru, painted in Hindutva lore as weak and indecisive. In the process, the controversy raised by the veteran leader in praising Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, has further complicated the process of bringing clarity to the concept of Hindutva.

The lesson Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s Congress Party has learned from its recent election victory is that it should veer more towards left of centre in presenting a more inclusive platform. The BJP, which prides itself on giving the country a two-party system at the national level, is unable to fill the vacant slot of a right of centre party because it is confused over what its ideology should be.

The BJP needs to define how far to the Right it should go and how to tailor its Hindutva creed to the demands of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic country. Essentially, the party’s dilemma is that true Hindutva as understood by its proponents does not fit into the modern political structure. If it represents advancing Hindu interests, it cannot become the main creed of a national party, given Muslim and other minorities and the many divisions in Hindu society dramatically revealed in recent times by the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

The BJP misses Mr Vajpayee so much because he had the uncanny ability of reconciling contradictions in his persona. He was both an RSS devotee and a tolerant Indian. The demands of Hindutva sat lightly on his shoulders, his long pauses and ambiguous phrases with their double entendre doing duty for explanations. Western reporters found it frustrating to interview him because he seldom gave clear-cut black and white answers. Rather, he preferred to deal in indirect answers and ambiguities.

Mr Advani can still save the BJP, if he chooses to. First, he must decide to say goodbye to active politics and then set about scouting for a young leader who holds the promise of reconciling Hindutva to the larger national enterprise. Obviously, such a leader must come from outside the circle of politicians who have become enmeshed in factional quarrels. If persons such as Ms Swaraj and Mr Jaitley are ruled out, so is Mr Modi because of the polarising nature of his persona.

If Chinese Communists can embrace capitalism while chanting their traditional mantras, a future BJP leader with vision can pay lip service to Hindutva while consigning it to the back burner.