BJP’s lost opportunity

As Nitin Gadkari approaches his first 100 days as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president, his efforts to reinvent the party, to bring it more in tune with the India of the 21st century, and thus make it more electable, must be termed a failure. His attempt to use symbols to denote the change has not succeeded in enthusing the young and has merely confused the party faithful listening to old Bollywood songs he belted at a party meeting.

Gadkari, of course, has an impossible job in changing the persona of the BJP. To begin with, he has the handicap of being the nominee of the party’s mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose new leadership decided to take the party under its wings in the face of two successive losses in general elections. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat was betting on the fact that Gadkari’s informality, his preference for bush shirts and trousers, rather than the traditional party garb, would help him win new friends and influence people.

But the RSS pitch in elevating him to the party presidency was very much to safeguard the ramparts of the Hindutva creed. The RSS view, and that of a section of the BJP, is that the party’s fortunes have taken a nosedive because it has strayed away from the holy grail. The truth is that neither the party nor its mentor has succeeded in marrying Hindutva to the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the country.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid was a one-off event preceded by the blood-curdling rhetoric of LK Advani painting the countryside red through his original rathyatra. It led to the first national BJP-led government, despite the hiccups. It was clear to the party and everyone else that it could not play the same card again. Worse still, Advani’s expected retirement merely sharpened the contest for the throne.

Bhagwat felt that only a new broom outside the party hierarchy in Delhi was the answer. The new president’s first test was the composition of the new BJP executive. The howls of protest that have greeted the list from Bihar are only one part of the story because most party men and women were underwhelmed. He had to make too many compromises and the induction of men such as Varun Gandhi with his baggage of campaign hate speeches and film, theatre and television stars and sports entertainers of the ilk of Navjot Sidhu was a sign of desperation, rather than maturity.

Bhagwat was betting on the fact that a somewhat obscure party functionary with no record of playing parlour politics would help enthuse the party ranks. Judging by the new executive, it seems that Gadkari’s lack of experience has led him into making basic mistakes. Squabbles in the BJP for the leader’s crown have harmed the party, but it suffers from a deeper malaise of its inability to find a compromise between its hardcore Hindutva beliefs and the compulsions of ruling a heterogenous country.

True, Gadkari has sought to make the definition of Hindutva elastic, as have others before him. The only person who succeeded in doing so up to a point is AB Vajpayee, who took poetic licence in swearing his allegiance to the RSS even while skirting around it.

Where do Gadkari and the BJP go from here? It has lost its self-advertised tag of party with a difference, most recently in the shameful spectacle of the party leadership bowing to the demands of the mining lobby in Karnataka even at the cost of humiliating its chief minister in the only southern state it rules, proving the veracity of the aphorism that “all are naked in the (political) hamam”. How then is the BJP to discover the winning formula to return to power in New Delhi after its tantalisingly brief six years?

Perhaps Gadkari now recognises that he has taken on a bigger challenge than he had imagined. The problem is that the greater control the RSS exercises over the BJP, the more difficult it becomes for the party to sell a sanitised version of Hindutva that does not alarm significantly large sections of the electorate.

Unlike in Vajpayee’s case, Gadkari’s attempt at a makeover for the party through his dress, behaviour and informality has scored poorly in achieving his objective.

It must also be open to question whether Gadkari’s cocking a snook at political morality by elevating a person such as Varun Gandhi in the party’s ranks or roping in film, television and theatre stars to enhance the party’s popularity is the right key to strike at the beginning of his national leadership career. Well-wishers of the BJP can only hope that Gadkari will learn from his mistakes and change course before it is too late.