Congress’s B(JP) team sans ideological fig-leaf

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Jharkhand fumble — where the party wanted to break its ruling alliance with the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) because its leader, Shibu Soren, voted against the cut motion of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the Lok Sabha on April 26 — has revealed what has been suspected all along, that the main opposition party is acting more like its national rival, the Congress, in the manner of unthinking responses and shabby afterthoughts.

Perhaps the Congress would have executed the coup de grace with a little more panache than what the BJP could muster. This is not to say along with many of the BJP’s sincere middle-class admirers — spread across the caste and religion spectrum — who believed the party to be different and who are bitterly disappointed that the BJP is no different from the other bad political parties.

It is true that the NDA had issued a whip which obligated all the partners to vote for the motion. If someone had violated the whip as in the case of Soren, then the NDA convenor, Sharad Yadav, should have convened a meeting and followed the procedure to take disciplinary action against the errant member, including that of expulsion.

Instead, the BJP’s top brass in Parliament decided to withdraw support to the JMM government in Ranchi. It was a clumsy thing to do because what had happened in the Lok Sabha should not have been used to bring down the state government because there was no local crisis.

The BJP leaders did something worse. They dithered and let the JMM-led coalition government continue, for the moment.

Though the BJP takes shelter behind the fig leaf of the Hindutva ideology — which it interprets as cultural nationalism and its detractors call Hindu communalism — what it really does is pursue pragmatic politics which will enable the party to come to power and implement policies that are needed to win elections.

That is why the BJP’s Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh implementing populist welfare measures like Rs3 for a kg of rice is difficult to be differentiated from the Congress’s the late Rajasekhara Reddy in Andhra Pradesh.

Similarly, the developmental rhetoric of Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan and the market swagger of Gujarat’s Narendra Modi are not very different from that of Congress chief ministers in Haryana, Delhi, and Assam.

It can be said with some justification that in these post-ideological times, when political right and political left do not make sense, it should not come as a surprise that the BJP does what needs to be done in terms of practical governance without bothering too much about ideology. The argument is plausible but not in full measure. It overlooks the real thinking of BJP.

The party has been in opposition for most of the time, but it has always wanted to be the party in power instead. Its six years in power from 1998 to 2004 had given rise to the hope that it has transited from one position to the other. It proved to be short-lived.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee had a clear notion that what matters in politics is to be in power. If ideology is needed to achieve power, then let there be ideology. If on the other hand, ideology becomes a liability, then push it to the backburner. The other leaders in the party accepted this implicit Vajpayee line.

Interestingly, this is also the Congress line, and hence the convergence. It is not surprising then that starting with Vajpayee, the political icon for BJP leaders is Indira Gandhi more than Shyama Prasad Mookerjee. But the BJP does not have the Congress’s bench strength of power brokers and trouble-shooters. While in Gujarat, the Congress is the ‘B’ team of the BJP, in the country at large the BJP remains the ‘B’ team of the Congress.