The Hindu : The task of repackaging the BJP

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Wednesday, Jun 11, 2003

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The task of repackaging the BJP

By Harish Khare

Sooner or later, the BJP will have to move beyond the Vajpayee-Advani age.

THE BHARATIYA Janata Party leaders are gathering next week in Mumbai for a chintan baithak, an elaborately structured brainstorming session. About time. The last time such an exercise was undertaken was in September 1995. Since then, the BJP has become a ruling party at the Centre and has accumulated ideas and experiences of what it takes to run a continental polity. These experiences have necessarily made the BJP leaders question some of their cherished ideas. Hence, the organised confusion within the BJP. And, then, power has its own mesmerising effect; five years of office and its temptations are enough to make sinners out of most saints. It is time for the BJP to change.

As a matter of fact, last year it was claimed that the BJP had indeed effected a generational change. The change of presidential guard, from the ancient Jana Krishnamurthy to the middle-aged Venkaiah Naidu was tom-tommed as an inspired organisational overhaul. We all heard L.K. Advani characteristically overstating the induction of two Cabinet Ministers, Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh, into the organisation as evidence of the BJP's superior political morality. A year later, Mr. Naidu has over-talked himself into a meaningless byte-machine. Mr. Jaitley and Mr. Rajnath Singh are back in the Government. And the BJP is getting more and more mired into rites of status quo; its split personality manifests itself in daily confusion.

And worse. The BJP in power has come to internalise the demands of second generation economic reforms and globalisation. Not long ago, the party leadership was instigating its cadres against these very policies. Same is the case in other areas of polices. Two years ago, Mr. Advani was berating the BJP cadres for their inability to grow out of the "opposition mindset"; now, Mr. Naidu is daily regaling us how the Ministers would be attending to the cadres. The reality has simply caught up with these leaders. Nonetheless, the gap between promise and performance has been staggering, both for the cadre and the voter. The party has consistently lost out electorally and politically in State after State. Gujarat and Goa are the only exceptions.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of the BJP has been the weakening of its nationalist will. The party has diluted the 50-year-old curious mixture of national arrogance, pride and self-assurance that defined India in its dealing with the external world. The BJP regime began with an assertive expression of that nationalist will by staging Pokhran II; now the pendulum has swung the other way. Mental concessions have been made to the ever-demanding Americans, even before a physical surrender has taken place. A party that four years ago invoked our national pride against a "foreigner" is now preparing the ground to send out troops to serve under another nation's flag in Iraq.

Those who gather at the chintan baithak would expectedly discuss ideas and slogans to recapture the country's imagination. In other words, how the BJP can repackage itself as a selling proposition. This is the job that every party has to necessarily perform from time to time. But the success of any such exercise depends on the availability of "leaders" around whom new ideas and slogans can be made to come alive. During the 1991 election, for example, Mr. Advani became the perfect face for the Hindutva voice; there was credibility, conviction and courage in his words and actions. In 1998 and again in 1999, Atal Behari Vajpayee became the eminently marketable name that a confused India could trust. Five years later, the leadership finds itself having to work overtime to regain the attention — and confidence — of a country it has helped change.

Unfortunately, the BJP, like any other party, has to sort out its profile within the constraints of existing leaders, their assets and limitations. In reality, no party has the luxury of ejecting or injecting a new leadership to suit the requirements of the moment. In the BJP's case, there is the additional complication of the powerful political mafias such as the RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal. The BJP remains the prisoner of the Vajpayee-Advani duality. The recent "leadership controversy", created and stoked by Mr. Naidu, was an unwitting manifestation of the party trying to adjust itself to the strengths and weaknesses of the two supreme leaders. Irrespective of all the disclaimers from the BJP establishment, the tone and tenor of the Vajpayee Government is determined by the conflicting leadership orientations of the Prime Minister and his deputy.

For now, the BJP's strategic problem is how to keep its core constituency sufficiently propitiated while navigating between the contradictory demands of Mr. Vajpayee's quest for statesmanship and of Mr. Advani's impatient pursuit of prime ministerial ambitions. Take for instance, Mr. Vajpayee's latest peace initiative. The whole exercise is premised on the assumption of bargain and compromise. Bargain and compromise are normal political processes, which deny the inevitability of a confrontation (with an intractable "opposite" interest/individual).

If Mr. Vajpayee is seeking peace with Pakistan, he is, in effect, exploring the possibility of bargain and comprise; in the process, he is denying an irreconcilability in the India-Pakistan relationship, and, by extension, between the Hindus and the Muslims at home. Mr. Vajpayee's penchant for statesmanship, in other words, is at odds with the Sangh Parivar's liturgy of hate, anger, and animosity towards Pakistan and its presumed silent column, the Indian Muslims. Peace demands dilution in their politics of animosity; the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the RSS thrive on perpetual confrontation.

Solution? Either the BJP 's collective leadership helps Mr. Vajpayee tame the Parivar's preference for primal hatred or helps Mr. Advani fulfil his prime ministerial ambitions. The chintan baithak would have to find the imagination and courage to discard some of its old mythology if India has to get aligned with the 21st century. This will require summoning attitudes and ideas becoming of what the Prime Minister has called the "problem solving phase.'' The BJP cannot be seen promoting the Uma Bharatis and the Praveen Togadias and yet exhorting the Indians to experience the joys of live and let live.

The most obvious challenge is to ensure that the die-hard Sangh Parivar elements do not acquire clout by enlisting Mr. Advani on their side by gently stoking his prime ministerial ambitions. This precaution needs to be taken against many other players. Divisions at the very top are invariably exploited. We are already witnessing how Washington is adroitly exploiting Mr. Advani's penchant for the limelight and headlines to make him almost agree to the stationing of Indian troops in Iraq. The much-saluted deshbakht is even game for an American stratagem that is against our declared policies and our self-evident national interests. Washington, like most other national and global players, has sized up Mr. Advani correctly. The Deputy Prime Minister is desperate to become acceptable to one and all, as moderate as the "moderate" Vajpayee; this is an extremely dangerous vulnerability in a self-appointed Prince of Wales.

However, Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani do not represent diametrically opposite ideological or political profiles. Nor do they represent the BJP's future. But the two are prisoners of their past images and their present company. These two septuagenarian leaders cannot be allowed to stop the party from thinking about the future.

If the BJP believes that it has replaced the Congress as the country's principal political party, then it has to start acquiring ways and habits of thinking like a pan-Indian party, responsible in its behaviour, responsive to new urgings and representative of a continental polity. Sooner or later, the party will have to move beyond the Vajpayee-Advani age.

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