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ShareHistory repeats itself, first time as a tragedy and the second time as a disaster, as Karl Marx did not say. For the BJP, revisiting the Ramjanmabhoomi movement via the Liberhan report may well turn out to be the second denouement.
It is not only that a replay lacks the excitement of the original event. It can also highlight what went wrong. This educative aspect of a second look holds considerable significance for the party. It took only four years after the Babri masjid demolition for the BJP to realise that its Hindutva agenda had led it into a cul-de-sac.
The realisation dawned when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government failed to secure a majority in Parliament in 1996 despite 13 days of wooing of possible allies.
As it reluctantly offered its resignation, Vajpayee announced that the BJP was putting the temple issue on the back burner along with the two other favourite subjects of the saffron brotherhood, the introduction of a uniform civil code and the scrapping of Article 370.
Even before this retreat in 1996, the party had lost the UP elections, where the Samajwadi Party and the BSP had formed the government. It was another matter that this alliance of the subalterns soon fell apart. What was more relevant was that the temple issue had not yielded as much political mileage as the Hindutva brigade believed.
Instead, it has been a millstone round the BJP's neck. It is only the cynical tactic of shelving the project of building the temple which has ensured the party's survival at the head of the NDA. And it is only by remaining in this position that the party can ever hope to regain power at the Centre.
However, a renewed emphasis on the temple following the Liberhan report will only accelerate the NDA's disintegration, whose latest signs were the desertions of Naveen Patnaik and Mamata Banerjee. Earlier, of course, a host of others like Chandrababu Naidu, Ramvilas Paswan and Farooq Abdullah had left the alliance.
Yet, despite the writing on the wall, the RSS continues to insist that it is the shelving of the Hindutva agenda which led to the BJP's defeats in 2004 and 2009. Now, the revival of the memories of the Ramjanmabhoomi agitation has brought the saffron hawks again to the fore.
While Kalyan Singh's proud announcement of his lack of remorse for the demolition can be dismissed as an act of expediency after the snapping of his ties with the Samajwadi Party, this cannot be said of similar assertions by Giriraj Kishore, Pravin Togadia, Vinay Katiyar and others. These are the saffron storm-troopers who have again seen an opportunity to take up their favourite chant.
Since the entire top leadership of the BJP has been indicted in the report, the party has no option but to claim that it did no wrong. The resultant endorsement of the temple project entails a denial, therefore, of the 1996 pledge, if not an outright rejection.
As a consequence, LK Advani's recent attempts to don Vajpayee's moderate mantle will no longer carry much credibility. As it is, the move never seemed too convincing in view of Advani's longstanding hardline image. Instead, it was seen as a pre-poll ploy to woo the minorities. After the defeat, Arun Jaitley also played the moderate card by saying that the party had to abandon its shrill tone.
But these voices will now be stilled, as Jaswant Singh's was for his book on Jinnah and for having said that Hindutva needed a new definition. Since the moderates are a minuscule group in the BJP, the hawks will not find it too difficult to corner them with their strident justification for the demolition.
Besides, as Advani has never been a fully paid-up member of this group, the chances are that he will return to his combative days of the early 1990s, with a nudge and a wink from the RSS.
There may not be a formal restoration of the three shelved issue -- temple, uniformcivil code and Article 370 -- on the BJP'slist of priorities, but the ascendancy of the
hardliners, evident in the shouting of theJai Shri Ram slogan in the Rajya Sabha
and the extolling of December 6, 1992, as a memorable day for Hindus, cannot but unnerve the BJP's sole remaining secular partner, the Janata Dal (United).
The BJP will have to relive, therefore, the crucial days of 1996 when it had to make up its mind on persisting with its fiery rhetoric or become less shrill. But now, the RSS's greater control over the party means that it has much less room for manoeuvre.
Besides, it does not have someone of Vajpayee's stature to navigate through the choppy waters. Yet, the few saner elements in the party know that a return to the earlier combativeness will forever close its doors to power at the Centre.
The writer is a Delhi-based commentator on social and political affairs
