If the BJP wants to make a come back, it is important that the party take up the challenge of re-orienting its thinking and action and not merely genuflect to the wishes of the RSS.
Where does the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) go from here? This is a question that the BJP must attempt to answer at a time when the party is being hijacked by its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). With the Congress party on the upswing and the only national alternative is floundering, it is imperative that both the RSS and the BJP introspect on what has gone wrong and chart out a road map for the future. The BJP can bounce back only if it empowers itself and not simply submit itself to the will of the RSS.
The change of guard in the BJP is more or less settled now, only to be made official. Hand-picked by the RSS, Nitin Gadkari will be the party chief after Rajnath Singh steps down by the yearend. Sushma Swaraj will succeed LK Advani as Leader of the Opposition, and Arun Jaitley will be the leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha.
Advani has given enough indications to his friends in recent days that he will step down as LoP after the new party president takes over. He would not like to continue even from a tactical point of view, for, if he does, any mistakes by the new party chief would be attributed to him, as he would be seen to be pulling the strings from behind the scenes.
Though Advani is expected to step down only after the winter session of Parliament, there are those who believe that he could quit before if he is indicted by the Liberhan Commission report on the Ayodhya demolition which has been submitted to the government, and is expected to be tabled in Parliament along with the Action Taken Report. This may in fact give Advani a high moral note to exit, on an issue that has been close to the BJP and the RSS.
The BJP expects the government to table the report if only to divide the Opposition ranks. Just as the Opposition parties made common cause on the sugar ordinance, compelling the government to climb down, they are expected to join hands on a host of other issues in the coming days. The Liberhan Report would however break their ranks and this may be the card Congress decides to play.
Those close to Advani say the BJP leader does not think it was a mistake to take his resignation back following the rout of the party in the May 2009 polls. He was easily persuaded as he saw sense in the argument that had the party won he would have been Prime Minister. Since the party had lost, he should be leader of Opposition.
The Advani camp has also let it be known that it was he who had proposed the name of Nitin Gadkari, once it was clear that the Delhi Four – Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Venkaiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar – would not make it to the top post. There was little scope for manouevring once RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had publicly declared that the Fab Four were out of the race.
Even as the Sangh zeroed in on Gadkari, Advani did make a feeble attempt to have Narendra Modi installed as the next BJP President– as the only leader in the BJP today who could galvanise the party. But the gambit did not work. The Sangh, it was said, had “no objection” to Modi, but it was Modi who turned down the proposal. So far the buzz had been that the Sangh considered Modi to be too much of a loner and a maverick to head the party. He has also established the fact in Gujarat that he can win without the Sangh cadre, and has sidelined the local units of the RSS, Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, much to their chagrin.
Modi’s supposed refusal was mystifying since he was expected to seize this opportunity, instead of turning it down. Unless his refusal is part of a deliberate strategy – Modi feels it would be bad timing to head the party at these uncertain times and would want someone like Gadkari to make mistakes and hoping that the party would root for him two three years down the line, nearer to the next general elections.
In recent days there has also been speculation on whether one of the Advani children – Jayant or Pratibha – would enter active politics. But those close to the senior BJP leader rule this out. It will not have Advani’s approval given that the party has taken such a strident position against dynastic politics.
Sushma Swaraj has already declared that Nitin Gadkari was not the first choice of the party. The Sangh has had its way in the selection of the next BJP president. With his Maharashtrian Brahmin credentials, the wheel has come full circle with the leadership reverting to someone from Nagpur. This sends out a clear signal after the party’s brief experiment with “social engineering.” It now remains to be seen whether the new leadership of the BJP takes back Kalyan Singh and Uma Bharati, both Lodh leaders, with the two keen to return to the party.
The question facing the BJP today is whether it can grow as a full fledged mainstream entity, faced with the prospect of being micromanaged by the RSS at every stage. The Sangh’s imposition of the new BJP president shows that they would like to call the shots in the party from now on. The relationship between the BJP and the RSS need to be debated for mutual good. The RSS is a nationalist organisation, and there are valid reasons why India needs a non-communal pro-Hindu organization committed to the ideal of Hindu unity and renaissance. RSS leaders must ask themselves, and answer the question honestly and earnestly, “Why is the acceptability of the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad limited in Hindu society itself?”
The BJP has never cut its umbilical chord with the Sangh. It was the issue of its “dual membership” which had brought down the Janata Party government in 1979, of which the erstwhile Jan Sangh was a part, leading to the birth of the BJP in 1980.
Whenever the Sangh leadership walked in step with the senior leadership of the BJP, things were fine. In the eighties and nineties, when Balasaheb Deoras was the RSS chief, Advani enjoyed rare rapport with the Sangh particularly as Balasaheb’s brother Bhaurao Deoras oversaw relations with the BJP.
Things however began to change when younger men took over the Sangh leadership and it was K Sudarshan who first publicly asked Vajpayee and Advani to quit and make way for younger leaders.
The BJP’s six years in power brought it face to face with the imperatives of ruling the country. The Sangh leaders saw it only in terms of power having corrupted the BJP and taken it away from core values.
What has made the situation worse is the public humiliation of BJP leaders by the Sangh, such as giving Advani the marching orders and ruling out the four GenNext leaders from the top post. This may be excused as “naiveté” on the part of the Sangh, but the truth is that no party can hope to strengthen itself by humiliating its leaders.
Nor can it hope to emerge as a mainstream force, if it is going to be micromanaged by an entity which does not understand the political ramifications of issues. It is one thing to want the BJP to return to its moorings and to conduct value-based politics, but quite another to decide on the party’s affairs on a day to day basis or decide its political line.