Revival politics

The ruling coalition at the Centre is unravelling. Mid-term polls have been all but called. Leading lights of the main opposition party go into a huddle. To ponder the national moment, assess feedback from the ground, frame a strategy? Not quite. Listen to the sound bites from the BJP’s national executive in Bhopal over the past weekend, and you hear mostly apocalyptic and entirely self-indulgent rantings on an issue that the ruling alliance has defused and been seen to do so. Is this all that the BJP has up its sleeve then — the Ram Sethu controversy as it might have been, if the government had not quickly withdrawn the unwise affidavit? Was this what the party faithful and bigoted, now creeping out of their obscure and resentful corners, have been waiting for all along? Like former BJP MP Ram Vilas Vedanti, who lashed out at the Tamil Nadu chief minister with a fatwa from Ayodhya, though he now disowns it. Do the wise men and women of the BJP have nothing to say about anything else — about the UPA’s vulnerable record on governance, or stalled economic reform? Why doesn’t the party hammer out a rigorous challenge to the UPA on national security? On the eve of what may be India’s first ever foreign policy election, why doesn’t the BJP set the agenda for debate on India’s place in the world?

The BJP cannot. Over the last three years its idea of playing opposition has been to effect complicated policy somersaults and hope no one will notice. On economic issues as well as on the paradigm shift vis-a-vis India’s engagement with the US, the BJP has denied its own past, and its achievements in government, lest they should interfere with its current slogan-making. The Ram Setu controversy arguably brings the BJP back full circle. A party that began with an over-reliance on emotive and agitational politics around the Ram mandir, is back to dredging up ‘Hindu’ insecurities after a short period of sober engagement with governance issues.

But India has changed from the time when L.K. Advani rode the Ram rath. India is not angry and withdrawn any more. It is a young aspirational country, straining to look ahead. The politics of hoary resentment will have diminishing returns. First the BJP needs to search for a leadership that can listen to the voices of this new and young India. Only then can it find a politics that can talk to this country again.