Goodbye to ground zero

This is strange. While Uma was in the BJP, her current champions saw no virtues in her. She was identified as a reactionary perversion of feminism, not a mass leader but merely a rabble rouser. She was not “transparent” and “honest”, only simplistic and unifocal. Her personal life was the subject of malicious gossip, all in the larger cause of “secularism”.

Today, of course, Uma is the new stick to beat the BJP with. Convenient as this is, it ignores the reality of Uma’s battles within the party over the past year.

When she resigned from the Madhya Pradesh chief minister’s post in August 2004, Uma was unsure whether she wanted to eventually come back or switch to national politics. The party was equally uncertain. At that point itself, Shivraj Singh Chauhan had been suggested as chief minister—a majority of MLAs backed him as Uma’s successor. The lady insisted on a “dummy candidate”, Babulal Gaur, whom she could control.

Months later, with Gaur reluctant to move aside, Uma suggested a three-member coordination committee, comprising the BJP state organising secretary, the chief minister and herself, as a sort of super cabinet. There were objections in Delhi. This would amount to handing over a state to one individual, it was pointed out.

In recent months, Uma played the factional game as intensively as anyone else. She found sectional support in the party’s top echelons, but, in the end, paid the price for indiscipline and indiscretion, and putting off too many people.

For most of 2005, the BJP has suffered the embarrassment of senior functionaries speaking out of turn. When the party finally decided to talk tough, Uma just happened to be first in line.

The instant judgement is that Uma will become the new Kalyan Singh. Just as the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister—like Uma, a Lodh OBC—damaged the party after his expulsion in 2000, Uma will too. Again, this is too pat a verdict.

The BJP’s decline in Uttar Pradesh had begun even while Kalyan was chief minister, as evident in the 1999 Lok Sabha election. When Kalyan was removed, he was replaced not by the future but by the past—new chief minister Ram Prakash Gupta was pushing 80 and well past his sell-by date. The slide became unstoppable.

Turn to another state where the BJP was left bereft of a charismatic and popular leader in the 1990s—Gujarat. When Shankarsinh Vaghela split the local unit, there was similar irrational exuberance among BJP-phobes. Yet the party recovered, eventually finding in Narendra Modi a public figure and administrator who far outshone Vaghela.

Which way will Madhya Pradesh go? Shivraj Chauhan is no geriatric, he’s an OBC himself and a good public speaker. He has three years to establish himself as a capable chief minister. If he can’t make the Uma factor irrelevant by December 2008—when the state goes to polls—he’ll have only himself to blame. It’ll be his defeat, not her victory.

Finally, as it approaches its landmark conclave in Mumbai, what does the crystal ball indicate for the BJP? This has been the party’s annus horribilis; it has swung from one irrelevant issue to another, been reduced to debating Jinnah.

Yet, however tentatively, the party would seem to be pulling itself out of its trough. Bihar, the Volcker issue and the cracking down on maverick individuals have restored some order. In this parliamentary session, the party will scalp K. Natwar Singh—and, if the Supreme Court judgement on the Bihar assembly dissolution arrives soon, Buta Singh too.

The party’s “second generation” has made an effort to be seen as working in coordination. Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley are, in the popular reckoning, emergent party bosses, Sushma Swaraj a strong presence in Parliament. Even Rajnath Singh has finally left Lutyens’ Delhi for the badlands of Ghazipur and Mau. Signs of a return to “normal” have relieved stakeholders, not least the RSS, keen on a collegial leadership.

Not everything is settled. The BJP is still carrying a lot of government-era baggage—prominent former ministers not active politically and unwilling to exert themselves. The next president, by present calculations, is likely to be a short-term one, and will serve out the remainder of the current term, up to February 2007.

As the Sangh sees it, this gives the second generation time to decide which of them is most able. As others see it, this means postponing the problem.

In any case, between party elders who may say anything to contradict anyone at any time, ambitious colleagues, and an RSS determined to re-establish its stamp on the party, the new BJP president has an impossible task ahead. Ideally, he needs to be a taciturn individual everybody is comfortable with, but nobody is threatened by.

“A silent Venkaiah Naidu”, as one insider put it, would be best. In the absence of this dream figure, will M. Venkaiah Naidu—three press conferences a day notwithstanding—emerge as the common minimum party president?