W(h)ither BJP?

Mr. Lal Kishen Advani has announced his resignation from the position of the President of the Bhartiya Janata Party and, this time, it seems to be for real. The jockeying for the leadership has begun and the new year will see a new leadership taking over the party. It is yet to be seen whether the new leadership will come from the old guard of the likes of Jaswant Singh or Murli Manohar Joshi, or from the newer generation of someone like Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj or Rajnath Singh. However, the crisis in the BJP is more than the crisis of leadership and will require a full-fledged surgery.

The crisis, which erupted after Advani’s now-famous Jinnah statement, merely brought to surface the subterranean tremors that the Bharitya Janata Party (BJP) had been experiencing for some time. While the immediate crisis might have been patched over with Advani’s resignation, the problem will not be solved with the election of a new leader.

It would be instructive at this stage to try to see the underlying causes of this crisis, what it means for the future of the BJP and the politics of India. Advani is no ordinary political leader. He is someone who changed the political landscape of the country. With a slogan of “pseudo-secularism”, he caught the imagination of the educated Hindu elite and communalised Indian politics in a way that only Muslim League had been able to do in pre-partition India. He was correctly perceived as a hard-line Hindu nationalist and a darling of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), the progenitor of the BJP, and was the man responsible for steering the party from the doldrums in 1984 to the seat of power in 1996. It is therefore ironic that he has to resign for becoming a persona non grata of the same organization. It would be like Jinnah being forced to quit Muslim League after his famous speech of August 11, 1947, which is interpreted by many as a call for a secular Pakistan. It is instructive to note that even Jinnah’s controversial speech was not reported by the Pakistani media and the offensive parts of the speech were expunged from official records for decades.

Let us try to charter the spectacular rise of the BJP in Indian politics since the 1980s. Besides being a shrewd politician, Mr. Advani is also known to be a film buff; he used to be a film critic for the RSS mouthpiece, Organizer, before formally joining the BJP. During the 1980s he used to compare the BJP with the character actor Dr. A.K. Hangal; everyone admired his acting but he lacked star value. And there was quite a bit of truth in this comparison. The BJP won few seats but even its opponents admired the party for its steadfast commitment to its ideology, its tight organization and its disciplined and dedicated workers. I remember the election of 1957. Then, as now, the BJP’s predecessor, Jana Sangh, and the Congress were the main rivals in Delhi, although the Jana Sangh rarely won a parliamentary seat from the city. On the election day, at every polling booth, one could see a grand Congress shamiana (Tent) where its workers were brought in jeeps and other vehicles while the Jana Sangh workers came on foot or on bicycles and set up a table and chair in the sun. The Congress workers were plied with halwa poories while the Jana Sangh workers brought their own dried chick peas for lunch. Whether one agreed with them or not, one couldn’t help but be impressed with their dedication to their cause. It was this dedication and commitment which made a political pariah, Jana Sangh, acceptable as a partner to the likes of Jai Prakash Narain, George Fernandez and Morarji Desai after the Emergency in 1977. Inside the Parliament, Atal Behari Vajpayee was admired as the most effective speaker and voted as the best parliamentarian by his opponent.

Until the 1980s, Jana Sangh/BJP members and leadership came mostly from the RSS. The RSS would “lend” its ‘pracharaks’ (full-time missionaries) to the political wing. This is how both Vajpayee and Advani came to the party. Vajpayee was sent to be a secretary to Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the first president of the Jana Sangh. All this changed with the parliamentary elections of 1989 when the BJP won several states and became a supporter of the Vishwanath Pratap Singh government at the Centre. Now, many outsiders saw the party as a rising star and joined it. This trickle turned into a flood when the BJP won the largest number of seats in the 1996 general elections. The party formed a government which lasted only ten days, but its leader A.B. Vajpayee’s departing speech won him a lot of supporters. The BJP government fell but its star kept rising. Many ambitious politicians hitched their fortunes to that of the rising party, including some Muslims.

The short-lived 1996 government also signalled to the BJP leadership that its self-proclaimed “splendid isolation” could not bring it to power. The Party had reached as high as it could with its extremist agenda. To expand its appeal to a broader audience, it had to dilute its strident Hindu nationalism. It therefore entered into coalitions with regional political parties. These parties did not share the Hindu nationalist agenda of the BJP. So, when the Party formed the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), it had to abandon those ideas which formed the core of its agenda. These were:

- Building of a Ram mandir in Ayodhya
- A Uniform Civil Code
- Abrogation of Article 370 with special status for Kashmir

This dilution of its agenda was, and is, the basic cause of the fissures in the Party. To attract new members, it had to jettison the ideas that appealed to its core group. But the core group, which is highly organized and enjoys the support of the RSS, could not be expected to take this change lying down.

Problems came to surface soon after the initial euphoria of power was over. The first to rebel was a relatively minor RSS outfit, Swadeshi Jaagran Morcha. The BJP had used the Morcha against the economic reforms launched by Rao-Manmohan government with the slogan of computer chips versus potato chips. Its leader, Gurumurty, was the first to leave the BJP ship when the Vajpayee government not only accepted the economic reform agenda of the earlier governments but decided to pursue it with renewed vigour. The RSS was willing to swallow this reversal of the party’s initial distinction between foreign investment in potato chips and computer chips. What it found harder to swallow was the party’s virtual abandonment of its pet projects like the Ram Mandir and an even softer approach towards Kashmir and Pakistan than that adopted by the Congress governments. The Vajpayee government even increased the Haj subsidy to Muslim pilgrims. To the RSS, the BJP government had merely become a B-Team of the Congress government it replaced.

The RSS is an ideological organization to which power is merely a means to an end, the end being the establishment of a Hindu Rashtra in India. The more Vajpayee became popular with the moderate elements of the Indian polity, the more unacceptable he became to the RSS leadership. The breach between the Party and the RSS became irreparable with the Gujarat massacres in the aftermath of the Godhra train burning. To Vajpayee and other proponents of realpolitik in the Party, Modi undid whatever they had achieved with their moderate policies while in power. To the RSS, however, Gujarat represented the successful culmination of its experiment in a muscular Hindutva. Vajpayee waffled beween condemning Modi and supporting him. In the process, he lost the respect of both moderates and hardliners.

What kept the differences within the RSS and the moderate wings of the Party in check were the fruits of power. The results of the 2004 election changed all that. The BJP fought the election on the basis of its economic and political achievements and not on a Hindutva plank. Unfortunately for moderates, the approach failed. On the other hand, Modi succeeded in retaining his hold on Gujarat on the strength of his handling of the Gujarat “riots”. The lesson for the hardliner was that the BJP’s softening of its image had not won him any new supporters but had, instead, lost the support of its core group of supporters.

Advani is a shrewd politician who would trim the sails according to political winds. He sensed the opportunity presented by Rajiv Gandhi’s capitulation to the communal Muslim sentiments after the Shah Bano case and the resulting anger among Non-Muslims. He now also understood that his Party cannot win elections if it starts an election by losing 15% of votes even before the polling starts. His departure may placate the RSS apparatchiks in Nagpur but it will not resolve the internal contradiction in the BJP. These contradictions will be resolved only by a split in the party.

The BJP, as it stands now, will remain a sick party. There is a need in the country for a centre-right party. It could even champion some form of cultural nationalism or Bhartiyata, as long as it does not mean a supremacy of Hindu identity over other identities. The new BJP will be similar to the Republican Party in the United States which can compete against a Democrat-like Congress Party. The RSS-wing of the BJP can go back to its Jana Sangh incarnation and provide a safety valve for those elements whose real aim is to replace a secular India with a Hindu Rashtra.