(Indian Express
April 05, 2007)
BJP’s Temple Index
Why underplay Ayodhya in UP? Party’s reacting to popular aspirations
by Pamela Philipose
Point to be noted. It was not the BJP that attempted to raise temperatures on Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi in this Uttar Pradesh election campaign. It was a Rahul Gandhi desperate to get his party on the map that has all but rejected it since 1989.
This time, from all evidence, the BJP is agnostic about the virtues of flogging the Temple issue, and the party’s manifesto released earlier this week testifies to this. It is widely realised now that whipping up communal frenzy against a symbol that can be invested with hatred is far easier than whipping up communal frenzy for something — an observation that Christophe Jaffrelot has made in The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics. Election results bear this out. From its all-time high of 221 seats in the 1991 elections after the Ayodhya campaign, the BJP could manage only 177 seats in the first elections after the demolition in 1993.
L.K. Advani may have been the political sheet-anchor of the Ayodhya movement, but he was among the first to realise that the BJP needed to dilute its Temple tinge if it was to grow. Indeed, it was only after this was done and after Atal Bihari Vajpayee — the leader least associated with the Temple campaign — was projected as the party’s prime-ministerial candidate that the BJP could discard the ‘untouchable’ status it had acquired because of the demolition, strike coalitional deals and come to rule India. The Temple is still, of course, an intrinsic part of the BJP’s ideological and programmatic identity, as indeed are the demands for a uniform civil code and the scrapping of Article 370. It will be faithfully trotted out in election manifestos for a long time to come. But the party seems to have long ceded the campaign to more extremist outfits within the Sangh like the VHP and Bajrang Dal.
Yet while electioneering in UP, in contrast to campaigns elsewhere, the party had always maintained a stridency on the Temple issue. Its relatively muted treatment this time is therefore intriguing. There could be three reasons for this. The first, of course, is the abject failure of the card to bring in votes. The 2002 UP elections saw a lot of local political activity around the Temple. The BJP government at the Centre revived the Ayodhya cell mandated to clear all impediments in constructing it. The demand was also raised that the “undisputed land” around the Masjid be handed over to the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas so that work could commence, even as artisans were put to work on carving the pillars of a “grand temple”. Meanwhile, the Bajrang Dal announced its plan to train 10 lakh people in the martial arts and arm 3 lakh volunteers to overcome possible resistance to the project. But the 2002 UP elections saw the BJP lose almost half the seats it had won in 1996 — from 174, its tally came down to 88 — with its vote percentage declining from 33.31 per cent to 25.31 per cent. It was the BJP’s worst performance in 10 years.
The second factor is the transformation of UP. A great deal has happened in the 17 years since L.K. Advani’s first rath yatra, and perhaps nothing represented this change more eloquently than the response to the gravely provocative bomb attack on the Sankat Mochan mandir at Varanasi last year. In an earlier era, such an attack would have led to a blood bath. This time there was a unified voice of condemnation, and the BJP and VHP/Bajrang Dal were not allowed to make political capital out of the tragedy.
There has also been, meanwhile, the rise and rise of caste-based parties like the BSP and the SP. Their formidable presence indicates more than the mere resurgence of identity politics; it reflects the aspirations of the previously dispossessed to control power in order to transform their lives. Political mobilisation along caste lines is also about bijli, sadak, paani plus education, health and jobs — but at one remove. UP remains as always at the bottom of human development chart, but the difference is that today social expectations and general awareness are far higher in the state than ever before whetted by some social and economic progress. According to the World Bank and the Directorate of Economics & Statistics, Planning Department, UP, the number of the poor in the state has declined from 59 million in 1993 to 48 million in 2002, with poverty rates in rural areas falling from 42.3 to 28.5 per cent. It is the pressure from below that is forcing every political party in the current fray to go beyond its committed voter base; beyond talking to the converted; beyond pressing familiar campaign buttons. The SP wants the Rajput vote along with its Muslim-Yadav base. The BSP is wooing the Brahmins. The BJP is forced to do a deal with Apna Dal for its Kurmi-Koeri base, and project Kalyan Singh not as a Temple savant but as an OBC messiah.
Which brings us to the third aspect: there is by no means a consensus within the Sangh Parivar on how the Temple issue is to be handled, with the hardliners, convinced that a ‘Hindu Vote’ can indeed be consolidated on this issue, pitted against those who believe gaining power demands a broader appeal. The recent resistance within the BJP to allowing Yogi Adityanath to dictate terms when it came to seat sharing — even after he had threatened to field his own candidates under the Hindu Mahasabha banner — underlined this divide. It took the considerable weight of the RSS and saffron stalwarts like Ashok Singhal to bring about a compromise on the issue. Today, the hope of consolidating the ‘Hindu Vote’ is leading the party to woo Uma Bharati, whose party has plans to contest from a hundred seats in the state.
The results of these elections will decide how the BJP will play its Temple card in the future. But it is clear that the fallen domes of the Masjid and the imagined spires of the Mandir have come to acquire a whole new sub-text in the heartland today. Listen to what poet Jamuna Prasad Upadhyaya from Ayodhya has to say: “Namazi bhi nahin hain, pujari bhi nahi hain/ jo woh Masjid aur Mandir ke liye ghamgin rehte hain/ Ayodhya hai hamari aur hum sab hain Ayodhya ke/ phir kyon surkhi mein Singhal aur Shahabuddin rehte hain?” (There is nobody to read the namaaz, nobody to conduct the puja/ They remain bereft of the Masjid and Mandir/ Ayodhya is ours and we are Ayodha’s/ So why in the headlines do Singhal and Shahabuddin remain?)
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