The Daily Times
January 07, 2006
End of a BJP era?
by J Sri Raman
Singh, from Uttar Pradesh, may be expected to promote the party’s cause in India’s most populous state and elsewhere by playing Bihar-type caste politics. This, however, won’t come in the way of a prodigal BJP’s return to RSS-run communal fascist politics. The party, under the new president, has already committed itself anew to its “core issues”
The end of the year, if you believe some media experts, was also the end of an era for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It was, in fact, nothing of that sort. Sure, it was the end of Lal Krishna Advani’s term as the party president; and also of a career in parliamentary and power politics for Atal Bihari Vajpayee, if his declaration to that effect deserves more than due credence.
Advani’s exit from the party post and Vajpayee’s from electoral politics both came at the end of the three-day silver jubilee celebrations of the BJP on December 31, 2005. To equate the departure from official party leadership of the two best-known BJP luminaries is to ignore a distinguishing feature of the party’s politics. It is none of the individuals, but the parivar, (the far-right ‘family’) that has always dictated the BJP policies.
The proposition is none the less true for the tactical roles that the personalities of party titans might have been assigned. The assiduously built images of Vajpayee as a wise man of consensus and of Advani as the ‘iron man’ of Ayodhya-style Hindutva may have helped the party on its course to power and to coalition rule. This, however, made little difference to its ideology or to its organisational loyalty to the parivar, headed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Advani’s exit was accompanied in Mumbai by enthronement of Rajnath Singh as his successor. Permit this columnist to pat himself on the back for predicting this outcome to the presidential race (‘After Advani, who?’, October 31, 2005), long before Singh figured as the front-runner in the Mumbai-eve shortlist. This is, however, no claim of a prophecy of great political significance.
Singh, from Uttar Pradesh, may be expected to promote the party’s cause in India’s most populous state and elsewhere by playing Bihar-type caste politics. This, however, won’t come in the way of a prodigal BJP’s return to RSS-run communal fascist politics. The party, under the new president, has already committed itself anew to its “core issues”.
On the top of the list of issues, alarmingly, figures the parivar and party’s old demand for abolition of the special status Jammu and Kashmir enjoys under the Indian constitution. While the party’s pursuit of other issues, like a ban on cow slaughter and a uniform civil code, will help its divisive politics domestically, its planned campaign on Kashmir will run directly counter to the India-Pakistan peace process, which Vajpayee is supposed to have initiated and the RSS has opposed with the utmost vehemence.
The rhetoric heard in Mumbai did not serve to conceal the fact that the resignation of Advani was, actually, his removal from the post by the RSS. The change at the party’s top was its return to its “roots”, through the ideological path of religious-chauvinist politics charted out by the RSS as the patriarch of the parivar.
This is the basic and broad reality which ideology-free analyses ignore. Pundits talk of an erstwhile “party with a difference” turning into “a party with differences”. It was a party “with a difference”, when it was seen as different from the Congress. That is, in the days when the Congress was seen as the natural party of governance and the BJP or its parent, the Jan Sangh, as doomed to the status of a secondary opposition. The “difference” was quick to disappear as the party acquired the status of the main opposition, ascended to power and has now lost it without being marginalised and lost. Now that the BJP and the Congress are widely seen as the main players in the brand of bipolar politics that India did not know before the nineties, the “difference” is a dim and distant memory.
The “differences”, which are supposed to have replaced the “difference”, are nothing for the BJP’s opponents to delight over. The “differences” are a tribute to the fact that factions in the party see it seriously as a means to power.
The possibility of the party’s return to power in not too far a future has also apparently prompted Advani’s resignation in response to a campaign based on the ‘one man, one post’ principle. He has preferred to retain the post of the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of Indian parliament), from where his elevation as the prime minister will be easier. The controversy, created by some of his statements in Pakistan, has widely been seen as a cunning ploy to lend him a Vajpayee-like image and qualify him for the leadership of a coalition including parties that swear by secularism for their constituencies’ sake.
This won’t be the first time the BJP dons two faces — one for the parivar and the other for its allies in pursuit of power. It was precisely such a two-faced policy that the party pursued for over the past decade and more with Vajpayee as a larger-than-president leader. No, the far-right extravaganza in Munbai did not mark the end of an era — only its extension.
The writer is a journalist and peace activist based in Chennai, India
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