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Wednesday, Jun 09, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

The BJP's past is not its future

By Harish Khare

Hindutva once paid electoral dividends because it answered the needs of the moment. And that moment has passed.

ON APRIL 9, 2004, a Bharatiya Janata Party delegation led by its general secretary, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, presented a memorandum to the Chief Election Commissioner with a prayer that electioneering be allowed at least till 11 p.m. during the ongoing Lok Sabha elections instead of the existing time limit of 10 p.m. Pray, what was the sudden provocation? Two nights earlier, the then Deputy Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, had been prevented in Patna from carrying on his speech after 10.00 p.m. by the Returning Officer for the Patna parliamentary constituency. Mr. Advani was not amused. "Outrageous ... this is something that can happen only in Bihar," he is reported to have fumed. The officer was simply enforcing the law of the land but in the BJP's collective self-view, Mr. Advani stood above the law. The least that could be done was to see to it that the law that was cited to his disadvantage was changed.

The voter rebuffed the BJP because its leadership had moved away from the voter. How far it had moved away and why it had done so can be understood from the party's uncritical use of the "feel good" slogan in the elections. Rather gamely, Mr. Advani has confessed that it was he who first used the slogan some months ago at a corporate gathering. This most innovative political strategist was borrowing from an advertisement for clothes; but curiously enough, that was probably the most un-Indian of advertisements. Like any other commercial advertisement, it is an exercise in subtle manipulation of emotions; the only problem is that the emotions it seeks to tap are not Indian emotions. There is not a single Indian face, all you see are European faces.

Something must be terribly amiss in a man who falls for the "feel good" advertisement and seeks to replicate it as a slogan of a national political party. Not long ago, a Cabinet colleague of Mr. Advani remarked in exasperation that "there was no core" to the Deputy Prime Minister. Mr. Advani's inadequacies and strengths are a matter between him and his party. The country, however, has an interest in understanding how soon the BJP is willing to come to terms with the redundancy of the priorities and preferences that Mr. Advani represented all these years.

In his first detailed analysis of the 14th Lok Sabha elections, Mr. Advani has argued: "We remain firm and unapologetic about our espousal of Hindutva. We shall continue to wage an ideological battle against those who portray `Hindutva' as `communal' for their narrow political ends. As far as the BJP is concerned, `Hindutva', `Bharateeyata' and `Indianness' are synonymous. We care for every Indian, irrespective of their caste or creed."

As a partisan sound-byte, this is fine. The trouble is that these six years when Mr. Advani played Sardar Patel at the Home Ministry, he was often accused of departing from the Sangh Parivar's ideology; and his repartee invariably was that what was of supreme importance was not some doctrinaire approach to canons of ideology but a continued commitment to "idealism" and "ideals." This was nothing but a clever way of rationalising all the compromises that the NDA Government was making in the name of coalition dharma. Now voted out of power, Mr. Advani proclaims: "The BJP has not abandoned, and will not abandon, its ideology."

This rhetorical overstatement, too, is understandable. That is between Mr. Advani and the BJP. What is of larger interest is this so-called ideological commitment to "Hindutva". In the Sangh Parivar's collective memory, Hindutva, Ayodhya, Kar Seva, Babri Masjid, December 6 and cultural nationalism all represent a set of intellectual and political preferences and how these preferences propelled the BJP from "a mere two seats" in 1984 to the centrestage of Indian politics. So much so that the BJP was, until the other day, claiming to have replaced the Congress as the principal political party in the country.

For some strange reason, the BJP has collectively refused to see that its quantum jump from a "mere two seats" to 86 seats in 1989 was not so much an endorsement of the Hindutva plank as a rejection of Rajiv Gandhi's politics and priorities. A man in whom the country reposed total faith in 1984 turned out to be incapable of understanding the demands of wholesome governance. Total and absolute control over the Congress party only made Rajiv Gandhi a prisoner of the "high command" syndrome, rendering him incapable of dealing with the venal, the criminal and the communal masquerading as Congressmen.

It was in this context of total disillusionment with the Rajiv Gandhi type of political dominance that the BJP's slogan of "Ram Rajya" acquired an appeal; it became even more appealing when Vishwanath Pratap Singh was painted as cynically unleashing caste antagonism. The BJP simply appealed to the same set of emotions and fears that Indira Gandhi addressed in the 1980 Lok Sabha election against the "casteist" leaders of the Janata Party. It is true that in the 1991 general elections, the BJP made considerable electoral advances by openly playing the Hindu vote-bank card. But once its cadres demolished the Babri Masjid, the party deprived itself of a visible symbol around which it could work up the Hindus' sense of disquiet. Its leadership was astute enough to realise that Hindutva was a response to a certain historical situation and needed to be repackaged.

In 1996, 1998 and 1999, the party had to move away from its pronounced anti-Muslim sales pitch. Instead, it tried to reach out to those Indian groups and voices that were getting confused and concerned in the face of globalisation. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was positioned as a mascot of nationalism of a reassuring kind.

The 2004 vote is the first time since 1984 that the BJP's aggressive march has been halted. Yet the party leadership is unwilling to see the nature of the electorate's rebuff. The BJP has been rebuffed because it failed to live up to its own "obligation to give a new direction to politics and governance in India" (Chennai Declaration). It has thus far refused to see its failure in Gujarat; whatever happened, or more precisely, did not happen in Gujarat generated massive disquiet not only among Muslims and other minorities but also among Hindus who, as the majority, have an abiding interest in the rule of law. Perhaps the reason the BJP leadership failed to act wisely in Gujarat was it thought it could get away by reneging on its promise of a Ram Rajya. Earlier, it deeply disappointed its middle class constituency by re-inducting George Fernandes in the Union Cabinet even before he could be cleared by the Commission of Inquiry and also by supping politically with the BSP leader, Mayawati, in Uttar Pradesh. The party was squandering away its moral political capital. Unfortunately, even now it chooses to remain a cheerful prisoner in Mr. Fernandes' company.

Political expediency aside, the party moved away from the demands of wholesome behaviour that an ancient civilisation expects from its rulers. Some Cabinet Ministers flaunted their expensive habits and undesirable company on Page Three of dailies and in glossy magazines. It was this creeping enfeeblement of spirit and body that made Mr. Advani and others fall in love with the "feel good" advertisement. For better or worse, the RSS brass too came to imbibe the heady brew of extra-constitutional power and could not provide any correctives to hedonist impulses. To such a lot, India was indeed "shining."

If the BJP wants to remain relevant, it must re-invent itself to suit the needs of an India that it has itself helped change. Today the country is quietly confident about dealing with a demanding world, including some troublesome neighbours. India moved away from the BJP because it could do without the party's distorted preoccupation with the grammar of cultural nationalism. Hindutva once paid electoral dividends because it answered the needs of the moment. And that moment has passed. Hindutva will no longer work. The post-Vajpayee, post-Advani leadership must begin attending to the task of making the BJP a normal, conservative, Right-wing political party.

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