#dnaEdit: BJP’s core dilemma

This has always been a difficult question for the BJP leaders to answer: Will the party build the Ram temple at the site of the disputed land in Ayodhya, if it came to power at the Centre? Between 1996 and  2004, the BJP answered that question in the negative. The party argued that taking a position on temple construction was impossible as long as the BJP shared power with its allies. In other words, the BJP would need to have full majority in Parliament to enable it to take a forthright position in the matter. In the last Lok Sabha elections, party leaders shied away from answering the question whether they would want to run the campaign on the promise of building a temple. Throughout the 2014 Lok Sabha election campaign, then prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi scrupulously stayed away from that thorny question. 

On the occasion of the Modi government’s first year in office, BJP president Amit Shah had a tough time parrying the question that time and again comes back to nettle the BJP. At one of the media events of the one-year-in-office celebrations, Shah said that the party believes that the Ayodhya temple issue should be resolved either through mutual consultations among the concerned groups, or through the judicial process. 

But on Tuesday (May 26), Shah seems to have forgotten his earlier formulation and waded into troubled waters. During a media interaction at the party office, in response to a question, Shah said that the BJP will not be able to act on the “core issues”, which include Article 370 — granting of special status to Jammu and Kashmir — and uniform civil code mentioned in the Constitution’s Directive Principles, because the party does not have the 370 seats in Parliament that are needed to make the required constitutional changes. This would imply that the BJP has not entirely jettisoned its basic agenda, and would pursue it once the party can muster sufficient parliamentary strength of its own. 

But, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a RSS affiliate, are wedded to these core issues. The RSS tacitly, and the VHP explicitly, have been demanding that the BJP execute the core agenda once it is in office. It looks like Shah — through the media — was actually messaging the RSS and VHP that the BJP will not be able to act because it does not have the numbers in Parliament. It was also his reassurance to the Hindu voter that the party hasn’t forgotten the temple issue.

The construction of Ram temple at the site of the mosque in Ayodhya was not part of the BJP’s core agenda until LK Advani made it so in 1989, and embarked on the “rath yatra” from Somnath to Ayodhya in 1990. Until 1989, the core agenda of the BJP and its predecessor Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) comprised Article 370 and the uniform civil code. There were two views within the BJP about this core agenda. The pragmatic view mandated the BJP, as a national party which has been voted to power, to not rake up divisive issues and instead focus on governance. The conservative view, on the other hand, believed that it would be morally wrong for the BJP to abandon the temple issue after having used it to come to power. 

The key question is whether the temple issue contributed to the BJP’s electoral victories in 1998, 1999 and 2014. The party did not fight the elections on the temple issue. As a matter of fact, the people had voted for the BJP to get rid of a Congress government which was seen to be blatantly corrupt. The BJP now faces the dilemma — whether to consolidate the party’s success at the national level by providing effective governance, or risk it all for the sake of faith and dogma. Shah, Modi and the BJP are literally caught in the proverbial cleft stick.