BJP: Only Hindutva To Fall Back On

THE BJP has decided that it must return to Hindutva and its moorings in the RSS parivar if it is to recover from the defeat it suffered in the recent Lok Sabha elections.  This is the outcome of the BJP national executive session in Mumbai which was meant to review the party’s performance and point the way forward. It is a different matter that the BJP has never been out of the Hindutva orbit. The future supremo of the party, L K Advani, summed up the reasons for the defeat as neglect of its ideological constituency which comprises “our karyakartas, our ideological parivar (the RSS) and our social support base.” The running thread in Advani’s speech was that the BJP has turned its back on its core ideology and its support base which cost the party heavily.

While this is the sum and substance of the introspection on the debacle, the BJP failed to come to terms with the real reasons for its rejection by the people. In the political resolution, it took cover behind such vacuous and superficial reasons as overconfidence, complacency and certain organisational failures. There is no worthwhile explanation why the BJP lost ground among sections of its supporters, including the middle classes.  Nor has the BJP been able to explain the defeat suffered by its allies like the TDP and the AIADMK. 

The nearest attempt to arriving at a realistic appraisal came ironically from Atal Behari Vajpayee. In his concluding speech, Vajpayee mentioned that one of the major reasons for the defeat was the failure of the party to reach out to the poor and to address the every day concerns of the people. This was the only indirect admission that the BJP has been branded as a pro-rich and a pro-imperialist party among vast sections of the people.

The BJP national executive was preceded by the curious episode of Vajpayee attributing the setback in the elections to what happened in Gujarat and the failure to remove Narendra Modi as the chief minister. Neither the RSS nor the BJP was prepared to countenance any implicit or direct talk of Modi’s removal. Vajpayee played true to the role typecast for him all through his career in the political wing of the RSS --- to be the moderate face who agonises over the choices to be made, but who eventually as a true `swayamsewak’ falls in line with the directive of the RSS. In Mumbai too, Vajpayee struck the pose of a reluctant leader unwilling to continue one day; the very next day, he dismissed his earlier posture as one of misunderstood humour, and finally pledged to stay the course. Vajpayee’s remark a few days earlier that they would not wait for five years to come back to power is the real expression of how the wily old leader is biding his time to make a comeback.

The Mumbai session of the BJP has made it clear that Vajpayee will remain only on the terms set by Advani and the RSS with their newfound determination to go back to the basics. There is nothing surprising in this development. Without the RSS and Hindutva, the BJP would be just an empty shell. Vajpayee, despite all his protestations, cannot be oblivious of this fact. For the allies of the BJP, the future is bleak in the outfit called the NDA. However much that they cling to the elder statesman image of Vajpayee, they will have to deal with the hard reality of a BJP which will flex its Hindutva muscles. It will not be long before some of them will consider jumping off the ship. For the BJP, the lessons of the electoral defeat will do nothing to prise it away from the lethal mixture of majority communalism, acting as agents of big business and servility to imperialism.