Scripting the BJP meltdown

By Harish Khare

IT WAS left to the little-known Mr. Rashid Alvi of the Bahujan Samaj Party to put his finger on the nature of the increasingly irreversible meltdown of the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr. Alvi was participating in the Lok Sabha debate last week on the UTI scam, and was responding to the argument - made earlier rather cogently by the Law Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley - that Mr. Yashwant Sinha was not guilty of any wrong-doing because he had done nothing different from his Congress predecessors. Addressing himself to the BJP, Mr. Alvi reminded the treasury benches that the voters had banished the Congress to the Opposition corner precisely because it could not stand up to the corporate crooks, and if the BJP was not prepared to do things differently, then the next time the same voters would inflict the same retribution on the BJP.

Mr. Alvi could be dismissed by the smug BJP benches as a partisan voice. But only a few days earlier the BJP leadership itself had heard similar sentiments from its own National Executive. The leadership's response was an admonition from Mr. L. K. Advani, exhorting the BJP cadres to graduate out of their own `opposition mindset' and to start learning to appreciate the Government's difficulties and achievements. And when it looked like Mr. Advani's admonition had not worked, the Prime Minister threatened to walk away from the job. Well, Mr. Vajpayee may be entitled to his tantrums, but the threat cannot reverse the BJP meltdown.

It is obvious that even after three years of rule at the Centre the BJP has not come anywhere near fulfilling a task it defined for itself in the Chennai Declaration: ``the obligation to give a new direction to politics and governance in India''. The tehelka episode earlier revealed that the crooked impulses that once were the Congressmen's calling card had been easily internalised by the BJP deshbhakts;now, this US-64 business reveals that the linkages between the venal elements and the Finance Ministry have been working overtime. Within 18 months, the Chennai Declaration has become a dead letter.

No other judgment is possible. The Shiv Sena feels no ethical diffidence in complaining that while it was the second largest party in the ruling coalition it did not have a single `lucrative' Ministry. Nor is there any remorse that the UTI investor community is the very core of the BJP constituency - upper caste, upper slice of income, educated. This constituency has been palmed off with a lawyer's defence.

After all, the BJP's promise to its constituency was that it would redefine and recast three basic sets of relationships in a wholesome manner so as to take (a) the corrupt out of the state- citizen equation, (b) the crook out of the economy-consumer transaction, and (c) the criminal out of the society-individual interaction. The party has betrayed its cadres and its constituency on all three counts, because the top leadership has wantonly given in to expediency and opportunism of the commonest kind. The only tangible achievement is the fact that the terms of electoral mobilisation have been so redefined that the Muslim underworld, by and large, no longer enjoys the kind of political patronage and protection available during the Congress years of ascendancy; otherwise, the promise remains unfulfilled as life in the small towns as in the big cosmopolitan cities remains precariously hostage to the criminals and lumpens, in and out of uniform.

What is more, the party opted for status quo. It would not make any attempt to rearrange the institutional parameters. Its record suggests that it lacks the moral rigour and the ethical vision and the individual perseverance to rescue the institutional arrangement from its stagnation, leave alone re-energise the instruments of the Indian state. Only during the Kargil crisis did it show flashes of creative brilliance when some bright thing must have stumbled upon the idea to send the soldiers' bodies to their native villages for patriotic funerals. The 1999 electoral victory, unfortunately, only reinforced the cynical manipulator's clout within the decision-making apparatus.Consequently, it is no surprise that the adverse judgments in various States have been comfortably attributed to the inexorable anti- incumbency factor. This has induced a morally debilitating thought process: it does not matter what you do or do not do, the voter is out to throw you out; hence, why make any extra effort to produce good governance. This mindset - and not the `opposition mindset' that Mr. Advani keeps lamenting - has produced policy paralysis, moral indifference and political unimaginativeness.

Nor is it a surprise that there is no synergy within the BJP. Mr. Vajpayee, the liberal; Mr. Advani, the hardliner; Mr. Jaswant Singh, the Americans' favourite; Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, the RSS-Hindutva favourite; and, that loose cannon, outsider-insider Mr. George Fernandes, all have been content to pursue solo agendas, each happy with his ordinariness.

This ordinariness is depressing enough; but what is bizarre is that each of these principals is prodding and egging on their apologists to argue that the other fellow has prevented their principal from making a fundamental breakthrough; this inspired name-calling continues to define the sangh parivar and its drum- beaters' discussion of the Agra summit; nonetheless, this unredeeming preoccupation with individuals has only prevented the party from collectively addressing its basic existential problem.

Not only that, power and office have not enhanced anyone's stature; Mr. Advani has been found out to be not exactly the tough man he has been marketed to be. The bright stars like Ms. Sushma Swaraj, Mr. Pramod Mahajan and Mr. Arun Jaitley have used their energy and cunning to stay just one step ahead of administrative embarrassments; except making effective telegenic apologists they have not been able to break out of the institutional inertia. Otherwise, the non-entitles like the Kashiram Ranas and the Joel Orams remain non-entities. Expediency has become the opium of the ruling ministerial masses.

The crisis is deeper and goes beyond Mr. Vajpayee's failing health or the presumed skeletons in the PMO's cupboard. It has to do with the total irrelevance of the Hindutva/BJP ideology to resolving our collective ills. Instead of trying to understand this irrelevance, the official line is to downgrade any talk of `ideology' and instead extol ideals and idealism of the leader(s). The Hindutva/BJP agenda, rooted in medieval animosity, has proved helpful in winning votes, but it is of no use in devising an agenda of governance. The Jhandewalan crowd - all nice men, all good deshbakhts - is hopelessly ill-equipped to provide ideas, leadership, inspiration for a world that is increasingly more complex that the simple Hindu versus Muslim dichotomy. For example, the search for a peaceful solution of the Kashmir problem and the Prime Minister's peace offensive are at odds with the theology of hatred and recrimination that the Jana Sangh/BJP have nursed all these years.

In democratic polities, the leadership has a moral responsibility to educate cadres on how things work. The BJP leadership has neither used the craft of politics nor the pulpit of the state nor the resources and reach of the Government to exorcise the party cadres of their simple-mindedness. If the BJP has to become India's natural party of governance, it must begin to imbibe the abiding value of a centrist, accommodative, pluralistic, inclusive politics as the basis of order in our continental polity. In other words, it must find the courage to exorcise itself of its Hindutva mindset. But individual ambitions prevent the top leaders from undertaking that task; in the process, they are scripting a BJP meltdown even before the party can take off.

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