by Mahesh Rangarajan
(Mail Today, 22 June 2009)
MUCH of the country’s politically acute media and public are glued to the new round of debate in the premier Opposition party. Senior leaders who had held onerous posts in the Vajpayee government are locked in bitter battles with those anointed to lead in the legislature.
It is tempting, all too much so, to see this as a clash of cultures. At a time many observers are obsessed with age, it is also natural to see this as a generational conflict.
Such a view ignores how crucial “ older men” have been at turning points in India’s recent history. It was a septuagenarian, PV Narasimha Rao, who took the leap for economic reform. It was another, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who crossed the nuclear Rubicon in the summer of 1998. Yet another, in July last year took India into the international nuclear community.
One might differ with these decisions but no one can deny their import. What matters is not the age of a leader, but what he or she stands for. One measure of this is by looking at the quality and timbre of the second line leaders that are mentored by them.
Few now recall it but Vajpayee in one of his last party conclaves as prime minister had referred to two men as the Rama and Lakshmana of the party. One was Advani, who had a five decade long equation with the PM; and the other was Pramod Mahajan.
As it turns out, Mahajan was snatched away by fate and an assassin’s bullet. Advani took on the mantle but fell short of it on most if not all counts.
Icons
He did more than read the mood of the voters wrong in the run up to the polls. His stance was far too aggressive for a society that had had enough of strife, conflict and division.
It was in the handling of defeat that he had tripped up. In 2004, the shock of defeat took a while to set in, with the chief leader insisting that it was a mere aggregate of state level results that had done them in. Perhaps he took as an axiom the comment he was fond of repeating in the early years of the decade when he claimed his was “ the natural party of governance.” The facts indicate otherwise.
India’s polity entered a phase where Congress was no longer hegemonic in 1989. In the ensuing period of some twenty two years, the BJP has governed as head of alliance governments for only six.
It is the premier non- Congress formation and no such alliance can but reflect its predominance. But it is now sinking in that the party is playing for the second spot.
There is — despite my hesitation on ascribing views as per a protagonist’s age — a leap in terms of generations.
Arun Jaitley was the elected president of the Delhi University Students’ Union who emerged to a hero’s welcome from jail in 1977. At the time Sushma Swaraj was to contest and win an MLA seat in Haryana as a socialist in the Janata Party.
This was the year when Vajpayee, Advani and Brijlal Verma served as cabinet ministers in India’s first ever non- Congress government. If 2004 marked the end of the Vajpayee era, then this year surely will be the curtain call for the Advani period.
At the time it was in power, the party saw itself as a harbinger of modernity. It would be an assertive India, with nuclear weapons, and first rate highways. It even dusted off the old plans of Colonel Dastur and KL Rao and proposed linking India’s rivers.
Looking back, it seems it was obsessed with what were icons and emblems of power in the mid- twentieth century. It was the world where the young Vajpayee and Advani cut their political teeth taking on no less than the Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru.
So enamoured were they with their opponents’ imagery that Atal was modelled by admirers on Nehru.
Advani settled for Sardar Patel as his role model. These were almost caricatures, but still they did matter.
It did not occur to them that the Congress itself has moved on as any mature political formation must. In doing so, Congress retrieved a great positive virtue of the Nehru period, the ability to access ideas and projects from the intelligentsia. For large sections of the modern and traditional literati, the aftermath of Gujarat and the Sangh Parivar’s association with its own icons ( from Ram Mandir to Ram Sethu), made Congress under Sonia appear like a breath of fresh air.
Lacking any taint of past associations with the Emergency or with the Babri Masjid demolition, she and then Rahul Gandhi scored over the BJP. It was not simply an issue of age. It was also one of having an ideology that sought to blend the competing claims of enterprise and equity, development and ecology, state building and local identity.
Hindutva
Jaswant Singh, who served as Finance, External Affairs and Defence Minister was right when he said he was not sure what Hindutva meant any more. And so was Shivraj Singh Chauhan who said simply that Hindutva meant vikas or development.
But if this were so, what is to be special about the party of cultural nationalism? In any case, the poor did not turn to the BJP as their party.
The Opposition party promised more grain per poor family per month and at lower price. It still did not fare better than Congress. Obviously, the memory of the Vajpayee period rankles among the poor. It was not seen as a sarkar that was with the aam aadmi.
Modernity
Conversely, there is the line of Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, closer to the heart and soul of the Sangh than the other two members of the old trinity.
But it was under his tenure as HRD Minister that 23 universities got to list karmakand ( Hindu rites of sacrifice) as a humanities subject. To add to it astrology was to be listed as a science subject.
There can be no objection to the study of sacrifice or astrology, but funding these from the exchequer cannot be a modern project. In either case, it hardly seems a vision in keeping with a 21st century India.
Nor can denying the massacre in Gujarat work any more. Where it really needed to learn from a Nehru or a Patel in cracking down on violence, it failed to do so. If the older leadership was too imbued with the ideas of state building of the Fifties, today’s top echelon is unable to even come close to that.
The party and indeed the entire project of cultural nationalism is at a cross roads. It cannot for reasons of history and its very structure walk away from its parent, the RSS. The latter is not too pleased about the party being so remote from power.
Even the Gandhi family, its bête noire since Motilal Nehru’s days, has resurrected itself.
Without a serious rethink about what it stands for and who it represents, it cannot move forward. It is here that it is in a crisis. Who heads it matters less than what ideas it comes up with.
The writer teaches history in Delhi University
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