Agenda

Jab koyi baat bigad jaaye...

Advani alone can lead the BJP to its future
CHANDAN MITRA

The Setting, Year 1990 LK Advani is BJP president. The VP Singh Government, supported from outside by historic foes, the Communist parties and the BJP, is in power. VP Singh has let loose the dogs of caste war by promulgating the Mandal Report as official policy. Sidestepping the issue, Advani starts a rathyatra from the Somnath temple in Gujarat to the site of the Ram Janmabhoomi/Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, crisscrossing North India. Most of the country is electrified.

Millions of young people who had never conceived of associating with a party that commanded a paltry two seats in the Lok Sabha till a year ago don saffron bandanas, raise full-throated cries of Jai Shri Ram and Kasam Ram ki khaate hain, Mandir wahin banayenge. Advani's arrest by the adventurist, then Bihar Chief Minister, Lalu Yadav, hastens the VP Singh Government's fall. It is replaced by the short-lived, opportunistic Chandra Shekhar regime.

Meanwhile, the ideological battle lines get clearly redrawn. Journalistic shorthand demarcates them as Mandal vs Kamandal. LK Advani, a non-ritualistic Sindhi, becomes the mascot of political Hinduism. The resurgence of Hindutva that began mutedly some years earlier when VHP stickers urged people to proclaim their Hinduness with pride - Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain - is now evident to all. Indian politics has been decisively redefined.

Year 1997

The IK Gujral Government has replaced its equally nondescript predecessor - the HD Deve Gowda Ministry. The Congress under Sitaram Kesari appears in terminal decline. The party president seems to have no control over the marauding hordes that want to see the dynasty back at the Congress's, if not the country's, helm. The politics of Mandal has been arrested in its tracks, paradoxically through widespread adoption of that agenda by most parties. The BJP under Advani has acquired even more electoral muscle winning 121 seats on its own in 1991 against the 89 it won in 1989 through seat adjustments with the VP Singh-led front.

This is also the 50th year of India's Independence. Advani undertakes yet another mammoth rathyatra covering remote districts in India's hunger bowls populated by hapless tribals. He even travels to the far-flung Andaman Islands. The BJP's saffron-and-green flag flutters in parts of India that hadn't heard of the party till Advani descended in their midst.

Advani's stock as strategist soars along with his established reputation as ideologue. Experts conclude the BJP's march to power is unstoppable. Indeed, it is: The party has already had a 13-day brush with power in 1996. But in 1998, a year after the Swarna Jayanti Rathyatra, Vajpayee leads a triumphant BJP with over a dozen new-found allies in tow to the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhawan to be sworn-in as Prime Minister. Finally, the BJP is a party of government.

Year 2004

The BJP's spell in power is abruptly and unexpectedly terminated in May. Through March and April, Advani has been on his familiar rath, touring India promoting the Vajpayee Government's achievements. Advani's Bharat Uday (India Shining) Yatra draws big crowds, but he is probably speaking only to the converted. For once, Advani campaigns on bread-and-butter, Bijli-Sadak-Paani (BSP) and other development issues, abjuring emotional subjects. It doesn't work. After steadily increasing its tally from two in 1984 to 182 in 1999, the BJP's strength in the Lok Sabha is down to 138.

The party takes collective responsibility for the setback. Nobody blames Venkaiah Naidu, handpicked by Advani as BJP pr ’esident after disastrous experiments with Kushabhau Thakre, Bangaru Laxman and Jana Krishnamurthy. And suddenly, from its vaunted status as "natural party of government" the BJP is seen sliding back to its old role as "natural party of opposition".

Much store is laid on the Maharashtra Assembly polls in October. The Congress-NCP combine, it is widely believed, will not manage to buck anti-incumbency. But it manages that, and the BJP-Sena alliance ends up with fewer ats in Mumbai's state-of-the-art Vidhan Sabha building than it got in 1999. Clearly, the BJP needs to be re-invented. The second generation to which the baton was being progressively passed, has faltered. Can the party be rescued from the depths of depression and defeatism? It decides to play what Pramod Mahajan calls the trump card. Advani is back at the helm after a hurriedly convened meeting of the National Executive on October 18. Will his "third coming" as BJP president work the same magic? Only time can tell.

The Challenges

The task before Advani is three-fold. First, he has to pull it out of its present demoralisation. Second, he has to define its ideological and organisational parameters and give the BJP renewed clarity of vision and strategic direction. Third, he has to mount an energetic campaign to discredit the Congress-led UPA Government at the Centre.

Additionally, he will be expected to push the party to perform well in the upcoming electoral challenges in Haryana, Bihar and Jharkhand early next year and subsequently in West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. He enjoys the "advantage" of the party's weakness in most of these States. In other words, he will not be blamed if the BJP fares badly in the Assembly polls over the next two years since it is virtually nonexistent in most of these States, barring Jharkhand where it runs the Government and partly in Bihar where, in alliance with the JD(U), it is still reckoned as the only serious opposition to Lalu-Rabri misrule. But currently, the BJP's ship appears to be in the doldrums - sitare gardish mein hain, as the evocative Hindi phrase goes.

Ideological Parameters

Advani has always insisted that the BJP's unique selling proposition is its steadfast commitment to cultural nationalism and opposition to pseudo-secularism. But the edges of this commitment were frayed over six years of NDA rule because the party was compelled to push its core issues on the back burner in order to retain its wide-ranging alliance with disparate groups that ranged from hardcore provincial chauvinists like the Shiv Sena to the conventionally secular Telugu Desam, not counting the Natio nal Conference of J&K, which too was a partner in the Vajpayee Government for several years.

The time, then, has come to redefine Hindutva to make it relevant in concrete economic terms. What does Hindutva hold out for me, seems to be the question many erstwhile BJP voters are asking of its leaders. Advani has to answer this in an uncomplicated, down-to-earth way. The BJP has benefited electorally whenever the national mood has been surcharged, whether on account of the Shah Bano judgement, the Ram Mandir issue or Kargil. But re-playing old themes may not work the same magic as in the past. Advani is one of the greest political strategists India has seen; certainly the best since Indira Gandhi. It is now up to him to locate the ideological thrust that could once again catapult his party to electoral supremacy.

Organisational Tightening

In its years in power, the BJP grew a lot of flab. Even a cursory post-mortem of the poll results reveals that people were angry primarily with their MLAs and MPs rather than the party's national leaders for whom there is still a great deal of respect. One reason for this is that the party grew too big, too fast in some States (UP, for example) and, therefore, attracted supporters who had little ideological commitment or popular base. Many of them were corrupt to boot.

Further, because the party has not grown in many other States, such as those going to the polls shortly, it has to rely on the Hindi belt to retain its pre-eminent position in the NDA. It was forced to repeat its sitting MLAs and MPs who attracted personal anti-incumbency as many of them won successive elections on emotional issues projected by the party. Moreover, it was repeatedly pointed out during the Lok Sabha polls that the party's local, State and even national leadership had lost touch with workers.

The BJP is not the Congress. It is a living, dynamic and democratic organisation that shuns the culture of sycophancy, which is the Congress's hallmark. BJP workers don't take being ignored lying down. Congress activists are accustomed to prostrating themselves outside 10 Janpath and that culture flows top downwards. Advani has to restore self-esteem among party workers and members of sister organisations like various RSS fronts such as Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and Bharatiya Kisan Sangh.

Strategic Vision

Advani is probably the best modernist thinker the Indian Right will have in the foreseeable future. Because he is in tune with the latest global ideas and also receptive to India's popular culture, he should be able to envision the transition the BJP has to make in the years to come.

India is rapidly urbanising, psychologically even if not physically. The BJP's future, therefore, lies in its transmutation into a modernist, development-oriented but culturally-rooted party on the lines of the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe. Despite his age (Advani turns 77 next month), he is the only man with adequate vision and organisational prowess to push the party into that track. He is a team builder non-pareil. Almost every party worker swears allegiance to him and his authority is unquestioned.

Advani should never be judged by the present. Many people, including some of his senior colleagues were aghast when he announced his Somnath-Ayodhya Rathyatra. But that was a politico-ideological masterstroke that brought e BJP from the fringe to centrestage. The BJP's electoral triumphs and its consequent evolution as India's natural party of government may not happen in his lifetime. But then, who thought even 15 years ago that the colour saffron would so determine India's political hue? In what surely is his last stint as chief of a party he built brick-by-brick, Advani is the BJP's man of destiny.

Perhaps the classic Jurm number, based on a Western country ballad, could have been penned just for him by an ever-grateful party:

Jab koyi baat bigad jaaye
Jab koyi mushkil pad jaaye
Tum dena saath mera
O humnawaz...