#dnaEdit: BJP’s filial piety

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has grown frail and he has been unwell for most of the last decade. But he has continued to be member of the central parliamentary board (CPB ), the highest decision-making body of 12. He has also remained chairman of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), with LK Advani assuming the position of “acting chairman”. In 2004 Sushma Swaraj dismissed the idea of the party asking either Vajpayee or Advani to move over. Then Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief GS Sudarshan had said then that it was time Vajpayee and Advani retired from active politics. She argued that such things are not done with family elders, and she implied that the BJP milieu was that of the family.  It was one of those cultural givens of the BJP with its ostensible adherence to Indian values. 

In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, 63, and BJP president Amit Shah, 50, have been forced to take the difficult, necessary decision of dropping Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi from the CPB. And in a bid to soften the blow as it were, Shah and Modi, have created a new committee, Margdarshak Mandal, which literally means a guidance committee, and Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi have been nominated to it, along with Modi and Union home minister and former party president Rajnath Singh. It has all the features of a delicate manoeuvre. It will be difficult to know as to whose brainchild it is, of Shah, of Modi, or of the RSS. Whoever may have been the author of the idea of Margdarshak Mandal, it is a politico-cultural gesture, and it lacks both clarity and purpose.

Shah and Modi have failed to deal with the hard realities of the situation. An ailing Vajpayee was not clinging either to the post of NDA chairman or that of being a member of the CPB. On medical grounds, he could have been dropped from the two posts without being rude. It is also an empty gesture to make him a member of the new committee. The issue is different in the cases of Advani and Joshi. Both of them are active politicians, they have fought the Lok Sabha election this summer and they won. The differences between Modi and Advani are too visible to be papered over. Joshi being shifted to Kanpur from his constituency in Varanasi to make way for Modi revealed that the senior leader was not any more a leader in his own right. It would have been far more democratic to either retain Advani and Joshi as members of CPB and listen to their dissenting views without necessarily accepting them, or they could have been dropped without much ado because the naming to the CPB is at the discretion of the party president. It is understandable that Shah wanted a more coherent CPB and central election committee (CEC). Quite probably, Advani and Joshi may have preferred the political warrior code of losing out their positions in the party hierarchy instead of the empty gesture of being pushed into the Margdarshak Mandal. 

The most interesting and unstated bias of the BJP in the reordering of the party panels is that Modi and Shah seem to believe that there is need for younger leadership to lead a young country where the majority of population is below 35 years of age. In contemporary parlance, it is called “ageism”, which entered the Indian society sometime after the ushering of economic reforms in 1991. It is a presumption full of holes.