Opinion - Leader Page Articles   

A tangled web called the Bharatiya Janata Party

Vidya Subrahmaniam

The BJP's Rajat Jayanti year finds the party bruised and bereft, and the Parivar at war with its own professed values.

ANALYSTS DOING the mandatory year-end post mortem did not have it easy in 2004. The year was crowded with headline-making moments. The rise of the Congress. The renunciation of Sonia Gandhi. And the ultimate shocker: the Bharatiya Janata Party in self-destruct mode. For all the dazzle of the Congress' victory, the BJP's defeat was a bigger, more riveting story. The swashbuckling architects of `India Shining' were woebegone in the Opposition. The chic vocabulary vanished as did the poise and self-assurance. Atal Bihari Vajpayee's dapper boys metamorphosed into a carping, cavilling bunch, inconsolable in defeat and vengeful towards what they saw as a usurper regime. As the months wore on, the veneer of unity broke and yesterday's winners turned on one another so viciously they made short work of party discipline and such. The abiding image of 2004, relayed live and replayed 24x7, was of Uma Bharti wagging an accusatory finger at mentor and party president Lal Krishna Advani.

But 2004 was a picnic compared to the cataclysmic events of 2005. In its Rajat Jayanti (silver jubilee) year, the BJP found itself bruised, and bereft much like it did 25 years ago. On a December day in 1980, Mr. Vajpayee captured the state of the new-born on the very Mumbai ground where the party's silver jubilee year is being commemorated with pomp and pageantry: "Standing on the shores of this ocean beneath the Western Ghats, I can say this with confidence about the future. Darkness will be dispelled, the sun will rise and the lotus shall bloom!" He might have been speaking of BJP circa 2005 rather than of a party taking its first tentative step against overwhelming odds.

The 1980 darkness was a metaphorical reference to the destroyed Janata experiment, an allusion to the Jana Sangh component's disgraced exit from the Janata Party. Rising from the emptiness and shame of the post-Janata period, and without the ideological sharpness of the Jana Sangh, the new party was a leap into the unknown. With Indira Gandhi returning to rule and the Opposition in tatters, there was no guessing the BJP's future. Yet the party remained united, save a few dissenting voices. Undoubtedly because it was still aeons away from power and power brokers. The BJP drew its strength from people who frowned on ambition and made a fetish of their spartan lifestyles.

This then was the new party's identity — "the party with a difference." The now overused and tragically ironic coinage has its origins in the founding president's first speech: "We can organise the people only if we are able to establish our credibility in their minds. The people must feel convinced that here is a party different from the crowd of self-seekers who swamp the political stage, that its aim is not somehow to sneak into office and that its politics is based on certain values and principles."

Words that have surely come back to haunt Atalji. A quarter century on, the BJP is every bit what it was not meant to be. It is packed with "self-seekers who swamp the political stage," who want somehow to "sneak into office." And its politics is a visible, graphic negation of the "values and principles" Mr. Vajpayee so earnestly spoke of. The darkness from which he sought liberation for the BJP all those years ago has returned — if in a deeper, more sinister form. On the threshold of a new year, the BJP is without the hope that attended its birth, without the righteous airs its founders assumed then, indeed without anyone in the party — and in the larger parivar — being able to claim that he or she would walk a lonely but principled path. Far from it.

Today's BJP is in the throes of a civil war that has pitted party against party, party against parivar and parivar against parivar. The saffron family's once proud planks stand demolished. Discipline and probity could be foreign words spoken on another planet. Invoked with much fury in the past, austerity is a virtue that sits uncomfortably with the lifestyle changes so visible in Jhandewalan. And ideology lies buried in Mr. Advani's discovery of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's and Pakistan's secular roots.

In his opening remarks in Mumbai, Mr. Advani spoke of the BJP having made history. History it did make — from two Lok Sabha seats in 1984 to six uninterrupted years in power is a mind-blowing achievement by any yardstick. Yet in the context of the current-day BJP, history has a different sound — a comically unintended meaning. History could be the new scandal emerging everyday from the labyrinthine corridors of the Sangh Parivar. It could be graft, it could be a plot to overthrow a leader and install a favourite, it could be the controversy surrounding a pracharak appointed to enforce morality among the wayward in the BJP.

Mr. Advani's farewell presidential address had an unreal, spoofy feel to it. Take this passage: "With the kind of pulls, pressures, posturing and blackmailing that the UPA has experienced since its inception, nobody expected the ruling coalition to be an epitome of homogeneity. But a modicum of morality is certainly required of any government that runs the affairs of the world's largest democracy ... Here is a Government in which as many as four Ministers had to be sacked because their hands had been soiled by criminalisation ... one high-profile Minister who held the important portfolio of External Affairs had to be shown the door because of his involvement in a corruption scandal the like of which India has never seen ... The Volcker Report has only reinforced the Congress party's utter disregard for probity in public life. It is the responsibility of every member of the BJP to carry this shameless tale of sleaze to every corner of India ... "

Backdrop of scandals

Shameless tale of sleaze? Could it be his own party the BJP chief was talking about? The Mumbai meet commenced in the backdrop of successive scandals involving Members of Parliament, the bulk of whom came from the BJP, a good number in fact connected to the RSS. The silver jubilee festivities kicked off to another bombshell — the resignation of RSS pracharak and BJP organising secretary, Sanjay Joshi, following the circulation of a CD allegedly featuring him with a woman. Sex scandals are not the stuff that agonises India, and rightly so as they fall in the strictly private domain. Yet the incident drew attention to the hypocrisy of the Sangh that preaches asceticism and self-denial, on the one hand, and swings to the defence of such of its members who have allegedly compromised, on the other.

The Sangh mouthpiece, Organiser, editorially defended the BJP-RSS MPs caught on camera in the cash-for-query sting operation: "The poor MPs, mostly backbenchers, did not get even the usual chance that our democracy generously grants to even the most despicable criminals like Abu Salem and Shahabuddin ... The collective disdain of the bribe-scarred MPs sets one thinking of the famous Biblical caution. "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone" (New Testament, John VIII, 7) ... It is easy to join the crowd that crucifies the sinner, but tough to Christ-like stand apart and search one's own conscience."

Perhaps taking a cue from this, Mr. Advani took up strongly for the stung MPs in the Lok Sabha. Opposing the majority decision to expel the first batch of 11 legislators caught on camera, he said: "I only plead that if unbecoming conduct merits, what in Parliamentary parlance can be called capital punishment, is it right? ... I say that I could see that it was corruption which was there. But more than that, it was stupidity. It was stupidity that they accepted that these are NGOs. At least in some cases, it seems plea of stupidity that they fell for the lure, they fell for the sting operation ... They have committed an offence but it [the punishment] is not commensurate. Therefore, I cannot associate myself with the final adoption of the motion." (Source: Parliament web site.)

Speech over, Mr. Advani led a protest walkout. The party that on its founding day promised to stand apart from the "crowd of self-seekers" and practise "certain values and principles" did indeed stand apart — not to fight corruption but in the seeming defence of it. The MPs were unarguably "stupid" to have fallen for the bait. Yet as life-long champions of probity and cleanliness in politics, the RSS and the BJP should have been the last to say so. The unwitting suggestion was that corruption conducted outside the public gaze is fine.

Barely months ago, the RSS-BJP battle seemed tilted in favour of the former. Sarsanghchalak K.S. Sudarshan was all sound and fury, first over the allegedly unbecoming, un-Sangh-like conduct of the BJP's big two, and then over Mr. Advani's Jinnah-appreciation. Today in the aftermath of the Sangh's defence of the stung MPs and the allegations of un-Sangh-like conduct of one among its own pracharaks, who is to say which is superior — the BJP or the RSS?

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

New targets of terror
Wise King Jigme Wangchuk
A tangled web called the Bharatiya Janata Party
Chance to lobby Putin
Concern in Russia over Chinese toxic spill
Air traffic management foggy
Of holocausts, past and future
How the Web will link us all
Terror attack
Security lapse

Copyright © 2005, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu