Old guard the problem, but old way is not the solution

Arun Shourie is a moderate within the BJP. He has opposed the ban on Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah. As he pointed out this week, he, too, had in 2002, sought Narendra Modi’s removal as Gujarat CM.

Arun Shourie is a hardliner within the BJP. He has disagreed with Jaswant Singh’s assessment of Jinnah and called for the RSS to take over the party. Earlier this year, he suggested Modi was a future prime minister, a point he alluded to this week when he said the cream of the BJP leadership was in the states

 Obviously both those assessments cannot be correct. While holding multiple, even contradictory opinions is perhaps the test of an elevated mind as well as of an Indian politician, Arun Shourie cannot simultaneously be a “hardliner” and a “softliner”. 

As such, to see him — and many of his BJP colleagues — solely in these terms is to needlessly limit the conflict within India’s most beleaguered political party to a reductionist framework. This is not simply a battle between swadeshi and religious RSS types who despise America on one hand, and modernist economic reformers who want the BJP to embrace the world on the other. Indeed, the BJP offers a greater overlap between the two positions than is often realised.

No party is a mono-issue entity. In the US, the Republican Party is a confluence of the Christian Coalition, of those at the cutting edge of the defence-security establishment and of economic disciples of Milton Friedman. The party has space for both a Colin Powell — though somewhat on the margins now — and a Pat Robertson.

At its best, the BJP was a similarly broad-based coalition. If the party is ever to come back to office, that template will have to be adhered to. It will need to attract voters and stakeholders from the right and centre-right, from adherents of identity politics to an increasingly larger group with secular pan-Indian concerns.

In private conversation, few in serious authority in the BJP or the RSS contradict that template. Other than fringe elements, nobody quite believes the party should retreat to its Jan Sangh, commune-like world view of the 1970s. Yet, this is exactly what it is doing, almost by default. Why is the party in such a mess, exposing itself to revulsion and ridicule on a daily basis?

The harsh truth is the BJP is in intellectual deep freeze. This only partially reflects a struggle between pro-RSS thinkers and those who argue for the BJP’s political autonomy. In reality, the party has been left bereft of thinking and argument. This, in turn, is not so much a consequence of ideological oppression as of unusually self-centred leadership. Take this month’s high-profile rebellions. Jaswant Singh and Shourie have embarrassed two individuals. Jaswant is upset that LK Advani has reneged on his position on Jinnah — which, as expressed in 2005, was not very different from what Jaswant wrote in his book. Independently, he feels Advani sought to isolate him as the so-called “face of Kandahar”.

Shourie is essentially calling Rajnath Singh an intriguer who is bringing the party down with him. The point is both are feeling used. Jaswant, for all his faults, backed Advani in 2005. The letters Shourie wrote in the build-up to the BJP national executive in July were widely seen to have Rajnath’s backing and helped him deflect attention from his own shortcomings.

The principal fault-line in the BJP is actually the one that divides Rajnath and Advani from the rest of the party. Both are surrounded by sycophants and use-based supporters, some of whom may have incidental links with the extended Sangh family. Neither man will go willingly, but both need to. The longer they stay, the longer it will take for the party to check its free fall.

The author is a political analyst