BJP Clings To Same Discredited Platform 

Harkishan Singh Surjeet

PRESENTING a written statement on the salient points made to the BJP national executive committee at Ranchi on November 26, the third and final day of the session, party president L K Advani harped on something which even the party’s critics could not have imagined. Taking a long leap from the terrestrial to celestial, he informed the nation that his party was nothing less than blessed by the Almighty Himself. He said: “The BJP is really the Chosen Instrument of the Divine to take the country out of its present problems and to lofty all-round achievements.”

That this was not an off-hand remark became clear when he repeated the same thing during the question-answer session at a press conference. Replying to a query, he said: “Divinity is not a medieval concept. Maybe, atheists do not believe in it but God has chosen us, given us the responsibility.”

BJP HAS NOTHING FOR CONSOLATION

THIS indeed brings out the BJP’s sad plight in the most glaring terms. First the people of this country rejected the BJP in April-May this year and then the people of Maharashtra did the same in October, which means its rejection by the people twice in a span of only five months. It is therefore natural that the party really has nothing to console itself with, except by invoking the God’s name.

However, if Advani thinks he can influence the mass mood by implying that the people should not hesitate in lining behind the BJP as the latter has been chosen by the God Himself, this can only be termed as the height of naivete. The people of this country may be deeply religious but they are not naïve and can well differentiate between religiosity and its political misuses.

As for political misuses of religion, it was known to one and all that this was the BJP’s stock in trade. But yet nobody must have thought that Advani would stoop down to the level of invoking the name of God in order to gain political legitimacy and acceptability. This all the more glaringly underscores the desperation that has currently gripped the BJP.

And this desperation gets accentuated by the fact that the BJP has nothing to hope in the assembly elections in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana that are to go to polls in coming February and in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamilnadu where assembly polls would be held soon thereafter. If anything, the BJP is all set to lose its government in Jharkhand where is has set new records in corruption, misadministration and anti-democratic treatment to local bodies.

This is what explains the BJP’s attempt to frighten the people of Jharkhand with a dire situation in case the BJP loses its government in the state. While in Ranchi, Advani indicated that the party’s campaign in the state would be to tell the people that not to vote the BJP back to power would be to invite a “reign of terror,” “social strife,” “criminalisation of politics” and “unlimited corruption.” It means the BJP would claim to try save the people of Jharkhand from the same evils which it has been fostering in the state ever since the latter’s formation three years back!

The holding of the BJP national executive meeting at Ranchi also underlined that the party has a very big stake in Jharkhand, so much so that the loss of its state government here would give it a very severe jolt.

BACK TO THE SAME OLD LINE

ALL said and done, however, the Ranchi meeting of BJP national executive only confirmed that the party has no option but to tread the same path which the RSS national executive meeting at Hardwar had charted out in the earlier part of the same month. And this change in the BJP’s stance, if it is a change at all, comes in the wake of serious frictions within the Sangh Parivar, which have made the BJP and indeed the whole of the Parivar a butt of ridicule. The way VHP leaders boycotted the RSS meet in protest against Advani’s presence there and the way they joined the meet the next day when Advani was not present there, showed to the world how the RSS, the Parivar’s all-powerful patriarch, arm-twisted the BJP into falling in line and adopting a more strident communal posture.

This is what Advani lamented at Ranchi. He said he was pained that angry voices of “impatience were articulated by organisations we regarded as fraternal. The dissensions fostered an impression of ideological disunity.” Yet Advani and the BJP did at Ranchi precisely what the RSS wanted them to do.

But what is significant about the Ranchi meet of the BJP, which several commentators have noted in unmistakable terms, is that the party did not even think it necessary to make any serious introspection about the causes of its defeat in the recent polls. The general tenor of virtually all media comments has been that the BJP lost the polls not because of too little Hindutva but because of too much Hindutva, but this is precisely the reality which the BJP and the whole of the Sangh Parivar have refused to accept. So much so that the RSS has rejected the BJP’s argument regarding the NDA compulsions as “frivolous.” The thinking, apparently, is that the BJP has no hope unless it adopts a stridently communal posture and divides the people along communal lines. It is only in a situation of communal polarisation and by creating a fear psychosis among the Hindu masses on cooked-up threats that the BJP can have some hope of winning votes. In sum, the BJP is now back to the same old line of communalism that gave it some dividend in the late 1980s and 1990s.

THE MOOT QUESTION

BUT the moot question is: Will the same gamble pay it again? This is what many BJP watchers have serious doubts about. As an eminent political commentator A G Noorani writes in the Hindustan Times (November 30): “The Hindus have done just that. They rejected parochial politics. Misled by Advani & Co in 1989-92, they voted for the BJP only to regret it. Revival of the Hindutva plank is not going to pay any longer. The souffle rises only once.”

The BJP’s performance in the last few years provides ample indication about the possible fate of its resurrected communal plank. The fact is that the party came to power in 1998 not on its own and not on any positive vote. The people’s discontent against the Rao government and then against the United Front government was the main thing that was propelling the people to search for an alternative, and the BJP tried to exploit this very yearning by posing itself as a party of principles, as a party with a difference. Then the fact that the Congress had still not realised the change in the political situation and refused to form any coalition on the thinking that it could come to power on its own, proved yet another factor helping the BJP. Even then the BJP could come to power only with the help of more than a dozen regional parties, and that too with the outside support from the TDP. It is thus clear that the BJP’s Hindutva plank had failed to click even in 1998, and this became further evident during the subsequent six years when the BJP (and also its allies) lost more than 80 per cent of the assembly polls. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP sought to contest the February 2002 assembly polls on a communal plank, and the VHP’s jamboree at Kumbh Mela in Allahabad even threatened to launch an agitation if the ground for temple construction was not cleared by a particular date. But yet the party badly lost the poll and its seat tally came down by half, from 177 in October 1996 to 88, relegating the party to the third position.    

But if the Hindutva plank could not pay the BJP any dividends in the last few years, there is not much chance that it will do so in near future. And this is perfectly natural for two reasons. First, during the last six years the people have seen the BJP in action, its real face in contradiction to its professed claims. This was true in the context of all the burning issues facing the country --- from economic issues to corruption, from criminalisation of politics to foreign and defence policies. Secondly, the people of this country are secular to the core and do not want that their social life should be marred by communal strife. That is why, temporary aberrations apart, the people have refused to be swayed by communal appeals and the BJP’s plank is not likely to fetch it any dividends in the coming days either, provided the actions of our rulers do not create what has often been called the anti-incumbency factor.    

SLOGANS FAIL TO CLICK ONE BY ONE

THIS mode of thinking of the mass of our people also explains why the BJP’s slogans are failing to click one by one. The BJP sought to create a communal inferno in Hubli (Karnataka) on the Idgah Maidan issue and the people refused to listen to it. Ms Uma Bharti started on a so-called Tiranga Yatra and there was no one to lament its miserable failure. The party sought to exploit the Savarkar controversy and failed. The move to incite base passions on the issue of Afzal Khan’s grave ended in a fiasco. The skeletons that are tumbling out one by one from Narendra Modi’s cupboard in Gujarat are only adding to the party’s embarrassment.

It is in such a hopeless situation that, hoping against hope, Advani sought to impress upon his national executive the importance of the Ayodhya issue for the party and vowed to fight for what he called the “Hindu ethos.” He charged the Congress, the communists and other “anti-Hindu” forces with “erasing the Hindu ethos and obfuscating the Hindu identity of our culture and civilisation” and with having “jolted Hindu society.” At Ranchi, he also reiterated the bogus argument that only his party is genuinely secular while others are pseudo-secular, adding that “India is secular principally because of its Hindu ethos.” He also said that in “the general climate of pseudo-secularism in our country, maligning of the Hindu faith” has become the “sole criterion of one’s commitment to secularism.”

Here we won’t go into any detailed analysis of these baseless charges; in the past we have rebutted them on several occasions and would definitely get more chances to rebut them in future. In order to provide a glimpse of the perverted logic of Advani & Co, here we only ask a few questions: Who maligned the Hindu faith when a crowd of Bajrang Dal goons burnt alive a priest and his minor sons? Who erased the Hindu ethos when, with open support and protection from the BJP government, communal goons killed more than two thousand innocent Muslims in Gujarat? And yet the BJP president has the temerity to say that it is anti-BJP forces who are trying to malign the Hindu faith!

Be that as it may, it was in such an atmosphere of popular revulsion against the RSS-BJP brand of politics that the arrest of Swami Jayendra Saraswathi, the Sankaracharya of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, on a murder charge gave the BJP a chance to rejoice. And the party, naturally, clutched upon the issue just like a drowning man clutches upon a straw in order to somehow save himself. Yet, blissfully ignorant of the currents and undercurrents of the mass mood, Advani boasted at Ranchi that this arrest was a means “through which, as in the Ram Janmabhoomi issue, we will powerfully counter our ideological and political adversaries.” The VHP and other Sangh Parivar outfits also called for a Bharat Bandh on November 22. But what they realised to their utter dismay was that on the day national life went on as usual. At New Delhi, where Vajpayee sat on a dharna in protest against the arrest, he did not have more than 200 souls with him --- a number that is not befitting even for a local level outfit, what to talk of a national party!

As The Hindu editorial on November 29 put it aptly, “But is the campaign against the Sankaracharya’s arrest the 2004 equivalent of the Ram temple movement? Nobody seriously believes it is so because the BJP’s actions have met with only lukewarm approval whether from the devotees of the Math or from the public at large. Even the Sankaracharya’s counsel, Ram Jethmalani, has attacked the party for wanting to make political capital out of the Kanchi Acharya’s travails.” One can only hope that, as more and more revelations come out in regard to the Kanchi case, they would further take the wind out of the BJP’s sail.

It is thus no wonder that a distraught Advani also abused the Dravidian parties, i e the AIADMK and DMK, by saying that they were pursuing “the politics of vendetta, confrontation, one-upmanship and social divisiveness.” One will recall that it is the same parties with which the BJP had itself aligned at one point of time or another.

FRUSTRATION AT ITS HEIGHT

THE frustration of the BJP president has reached such a level that after the first day’s session of his national executive he accused the Congress and the communists of not allowing the NDA government to take many steps. The charge is ridiculous, to say the least. Here is a party whose government did not have a majority in Rajya Sabha and yet it pushed through the draconian POTA by calling a joint session of the two houses. Who, then, is going to believe that the Congress and the communists prevented the NDA government from taking pro-people steps?  

The situation is thus grave, rather perilous, for the BJP. While isolated from the people at large, the party has, in the first place, simply refused to make any introspection or retrospection as to why the people have rejected it at all. This is what prompted a veteran journalist like M K Dhar to write in an article for the news agency NPA: “It goes without saying that the BJP will be marginalised in Indian politics if it pursues a purely communal agenda. That was the lesson of the last Lok Sabha elections, which the party’s leadership refuses to learn. Jehadi culture is out of fashion in all religions and has no permanent place in a secular democracy.” This aptly sums up the predicament in which the BJP currently finds itself.

This is not to deny the threats the resurrected Hindutva platform poses to our national unity and communal harmony, to our civilised existence and composite culture. But the situation is certainly conducive for the Left, secular and democratic forces who have to unite and effectively meet the new challenge by mobilising the people on the question of secularism and national unity.