Mail Today, June 9, 2009
SPLIT IS THE ONLY OPTION
By Jyotirmaya Sharma
The ideological confusions and contradictions of the Bharatiya Janata Party defy any rational solution
IT HARDLY requires the wisdom of failed spin doctors to tell us that all is not right within the BJP. The electoral defeat of the BJP and the BJPled NDA alliance is not reducible to election results alone, but also has serious implications in terms of the party being split wide open by a multitude of ideological and leadership questions. There are several reasons for this internal unrest. All these reasons can be reducible to five fundamental confusions within the BJP that have come to haunt it and produce nightmares that it seems unable to cope with.
The first is in the realm of economic policy. The BJP has for long carried the weight of being identified as a party that favours the urban middle class and big business on the one hand, and espouses some version of the RSS- inspired swadeshi ideology as well. The party now needs a serious re- evaluation of the direction its economic agenda is likely to take and the ways in which this new agenda can be communicated effectively to prospective voters.
Hindutva
The BJP cannot afford the spectacle of corporate heads endorsing Narendra Modi as prime minister while putting forward a manifesto that claims a social democratic high ground and an emotive spin of its collective heart beating for the toiling farmers of the country. The confusion on economic issues is a legacy of the 2004 ‘ India Shining’ campaign and the party does not seem to have learned any lessons from it.
Next, the BJP has to seriously look at several elements of its security and defence policy. Beyond windowdressing of the obvious kind, its hysterical preoccupation with Pakistan as the central feature of its policy is too transparent not to be noticed. In articulating this policy, its prejudices regarding Muslims and Islam often get conflated with certain legitimate concerns about Islamists.
In domestic politics, it presents a confused picture of castigating the Congress and the Left on appeasing the Muslims in order to create a Muslim vote- bank, and simultaneously unleashing the ‘ wisdom’ of the likes of Sudheendra Kulkarni to argue that Golwalkar had an abiding love for Muslims. At this juncture its talk of a common civil code — something that many other parts of the political spectrum support — begins to transform itself into a bloody minded targeting of the Muslims.
Thirdly, the BJP has to give up its espousal of Hindutva, whether of the Savarkar variety or of the Golwalkar kind, and abandon its quest for a Hindu Rashtra and an Akhanda Bharat. It cannot do so till such time that it redefines its relation to three important, but related elements: Indian modernity, Western modernity and the West itself. The BJP’s thinking at the moment is a curious mixture of pre- colonial ideology and post- colonial rhetoric. Neither the aggression of a pre- colonial era, nor the designer victimhood of a postcolonial nation is likely to take it very far. Its inability to delineate the place of the West within India manifests itself in instances of moral policing and violence in the name of protecting Hindu culture.
Another element that the BJP has never been able to come to terms with is its blind parroting of the RSS’s preoccupation with India’s glory being safe only when there is a strong centre. It has supported small states and mistakenly believes that this is its answer to problems of Indian federalism. In order to survive, the BJP has to seriously rethink its model of a functioning federal polity.
In turn, this means that any political party today has to cut through a vast web of regional aspirations, identity politics, sub- nationalism, linguistic and cultural diversity and also a general disenchantment with existing political structures.
Even the advocacy of Hindi as the national language comes in the way of appreciating the federal diversity of India, especially if the Hindi offered by BJP and RSS leaders happens to be one that makes the ears of the hearer bleed and the tongue of the speaker go numb. It ought to take the Hindustani propagated by cinema as the model and not bother about pushing any version of it down people’s throats.
Conservative
The fifth reason is the inability of the BJP to transform itself into the conservative party of India. Swapan Dasgupta has suggested this over a long period of time and it is a suggestion that the BJP ought to very seriously consider. As I understand it, in order to undertake this transformation, the BJP will have to sort the four problems that I have mentioned above. It can remain a party that works for the welfare of Hindus, mindful of the fact that there is nothing called a Hindu vote, a unified Hindu community and no putative Hindu Rashtra lurking in the corner and about to become a reality. But there is another factor that the BJP ought to keep in mind if it were to contemplate a serious genetic engineering as suggested by Swapan Dasgupta.
If the model for the BJP’s transformation is, for instance, the conservative party, the latter is driven by either a strong constitutional element or a Burkean Whiggish adherence to tradition and customary law.
Conservative parties in continental Europe, on the other hand, have learnt to live happily with republican constitutions and work within their structure. The BJP, on the contrary, has never taken either the constitutional tradition very seriously, nor does it conceal its impatience with liberal democracy. All it is often left with is desperately clutching at the anachronistic straws of an illiberal, undemocratic version of Ramrajya.
Parivar
The only way to solve these ideological confusions is for the party to split. This is an indigenous device that the Indian polity and party system has perfected. The departure of Bajraj Madhok from the Jan Sangh hardly counts as a split. In its current version, the BJP has to perforce split.
Those who still turn their face towards Nagpur and the Mahal and Reshembaugh localities of that city can go their way, while those who have despaired of khakhi shorts and dandas as well as the unlovely, deep and dark corridors of the RSS headquarters in Nagpur can get together to build a new political force within Indian politics.
Indian democracy is strong and generous enough to accommodate yet another proliferation of parties, though it would be interesting to speculate what the party flags and symbols of these two parties would be, were the BJP to split vertically.
A prospective split will also for ever solve the festering leadership crisis within the party, something that seems impossible at the moment. An RSS brokered truce on the leadership question is hardly the solution and is bound to cause secondaries in the future.
The BJP must help Mohan Bhagwat go down in history as the last sarsanghchalak who presided over something called the Sangh Parivar.
The writer teaches politics at the University of Hyderabad
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