No tears for the BJP

How quickly memories fade. Was it only four years ago that the BJP rushed a special plane to Tel Aviv to fly Jaswant Singh back to Delhi to defend a Jinnah-hit Advani?

Jaswant sportingly cut short his Israel trip so that he could attend an emergency parliamentary board meeting, called to rescue Advani from the saffron hounds baying for his blood.

While Advani’s coterie floundered on the bedrock of the Sangh’s obdurate beliefs, Jaswant worked quietly with Vajpayee on a compromise formula that satisfied the RSS and was also a face-saver for the man who was BJP president at that time.

It is ironic that when Jaswant slipped and fell on same faultline, no-one extended him a helping hand, not even Advani. Instead, the parliamentary board behaved like a kangaroo court. It tried Jaswant in absentia and expelled him without giving him a chance to defend himself. Much water has flowed under bridge between Advani’s 2005 brush with the Jinnah djinn and Jaswant’s 2009 collision.

The two leaders have had a falling out after the BJP’s electoral debacle. But more importantly, the party is without Vajpayee’s towering presence after he was taken ill last year. Vajpayee’s accomodative style of politics was a benign influence that helped to soften the BJP’s ideological angularities.

It was he who guided the party back from the brink when Advani’s Jinnah row threatened to consume it. Today, as the BJP stares at its biggest crisis yet, his absence is being sorely felt.
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Delegates to the BJP’s chintan baithak at Shimla are mysteriously silent about the whereabouts of the 400-page introspection report on the BJP’s poor electoral showing, prepared by party vice president Bal Apte.

It seems the document that was circulated at the meet, and also leaked to the press, was a nine-page summary of the report, not the actual document itself. One of the members of the three-man Apte committee wrote a suitably sanitised precis of the report for presentation at the baithak.

The summary contained no names and omitted all uncomfortable references that would have put party big-wigs in the firing line at Shimla. The actual report is believed to contain stringent criticism of the manner in which the BJP planned and conducted its election campaign and distributed tickets.

It spares none and does not shy away from taking names while detailing, with specific examples, what went wrong. According to the buzz in party circles, it has put all the high-fliers in the dock, including Advani, Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh. There’s considerable unhappiness in the BJP rank and file over the wilful suppression of the full report.

The Apte inquiry was supposed to help the party prepare a roadmap for revival. But it seems the senior leadership doesn’t have the stomach for harsh truths. Escapism is a preferred option.
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TAILPIECE
The minute Rajnath Singh announced Jaswant Singh’s expulsion, SMS messages started flooding the cellphones of Congress working committee members who were busy at that time in a meeting to discuss the crippling drought and price rise.

Although Sonia Gandhi was in the chair, the news from Shimla was far too exciting to not be distracted. Noticing that many of her senior leaders were busy with their cell phones, Sonia wanted to know what had happened. The BJP has expelled Jaswant Singh, one of them told her. Sonia was unmoved. Better concentrate on drought and price rise instead of the BJP, she chided them.