Scent of a woman

It was the victory in Bihar that emboldened the BJP central leadership — spearheaded by the GenNext trio of Venkaiah Naidu, Arun Jaitley, and Pramod Mahajan — to strike in MP. And despite the fiasco that preceded the ‘‘election’’ of Shivraj Singh Chouhan at the legislature party meeting on Monday evening, the BJP leadership believes that it scored yet another win. After all, as Jaitley informed the media that evening, only 17 MLAs had walked out of the meeting. The remaining 154 had ‘‘unanimously’’ elected Chouhan. Uma Bharati, the subtext went, stood almost completely isolated. And with Atal Bihari Vajpayee too slamming Uma for committing the ‘‘height of indiscipline’’, it was only a matter of time before she would be thrown out.

But however much Messrs Jaitley and Mahajan may seek to portray the installation of Chouhan as a triumph of ‘‘organisation’’ over ‘‘individual’’, as the beginning of a new, tough post-Advani ‘‘collective leadership’’ that would brook no indiscipline, the latest crisis to hit BJP reveals aspects of the party that are deeply disquieting.

For one, the manner in which the whole Uma issue — as indeed other cases of inner party dissidence — was handled shows the complete breakdown of the party leadership’s ability to address grievances through a democratic and consensual process of decision-making.

More significant for the BJP’s long-term future, it reveals that despite the party’s vertical and horizontal spread over the last two decades, it remains deeply rooted in an upper-caste, almost-patriarchal mould that is unable to accommodate the more robust politics of grassroots politicians with mass appeal.

That Uma Bharati, universally dubbed the ‘‘firebrand sanyasin’’, is not exactly the easiest colleague to deal with is no secret. From the day she entered Parliament back in 1989, her fire was always on display — but as long as it was directed at the BJP’s ‘‘pseudo-secular’’ foes during the run-up and aftermath of the Ramjanambhoomi movement, the Sangh Parivar regarded her a prime asset.

But there was more to Uma than her saffron robes. She was also born to an impoverished Lodh family in back-of-beyond Tikamgarh district, and over time came to regard herself — and be regarded by vast numbers in Madhya Pradesh — as a leader of the OBCs. It was the ‘‘saffron-OBC-woman’’ triple combo that catapulted Uma onto the centrestage of Indian politics. A child prodigy who could chant the epics from the age of seven, her oratorical skills imbued her with a mass appeal enjoyed by no one else among her generation in the BJP.

The party recognised that and projected her as their chief ministerial candidate in the Madhya Pradesh election two Decembers ago. And, campaigning on the bijli, paani, sadak theme, Uma led the BJP to an unprecedented three-fourths majority.

But within months, Uma had fallen from grace. The old men who ran the BJP (and the young ones who were even more committed to the XY chromosomes of the club) found her difficult to control. Sushma Swaraj, with her wider-than-Rajpath sindoor and preachy morality, could hang in there as a ‘‘bhabhi’’ figure. Vasundhara Raje’s royal lineage put her in a touch-me-not category. But rustic, rambunctious Uma exuded a raw, subaltern female energy that evoked subliminal fears of a different kind. Unable to control a natural-born leader, the men in Delhi started a campaign full of insinuation and innuendo — she was a terrible administrator, she was surrounded by a coterie, and the clincher of them all, she was too ‘‘temperamental’’.

All of this might well be true, but it is a measure of the bankruptcy in the top echelons of the BJP that they were not able to sit her down and read out a chargesheet. Instead, the party used the pretext of the Hubli flag hoisting case to make her step down from office, and when her name was cleared refused to let her get back the post — or even have a say in running Madhya Pradesh. Then, in another act of bad faith, the party bosses assured her that after the Bihar elections, they would allow the restive Madhya Pradesh MLAs to elect a leader of their choice to replace the unpopular Babulal Gaur. But in an Indira Gandhi style operation, the BJP parliamentary board announced the name of Shivraj Singh Chouhan and asked the legislature party to endorse it. The operation, though, lacked Mrs Gandhi’s finesse — she would have got Uma Bharati to propose Chouhan’s name and ensured he got elected unanimously.

Uma Bharati, the BJP reckons, has been taught a lesson. Like Madanlal Khurana and Kalyan Singh who could do little on their own (or Babulal Marandi and Keshubhai Patel who were forced to pipe down after the leadership ignored their demands), Uma Bharati too has no future outside the BJP. And not a very bright one within it.

But what the BJP forgets is that it never quite recovered from Kalyan Singh’s exit in Uttar Pradesh. As the Bihar results have just shown, the BJP needs an OBC face to win in the post-Mandal Hindi heartland. Shivraj Chouhan may be technically an OBC but he is no match for a mass leader like Uma Bharati. Uma Bharati may not come to much on her own; but her exit is certain to have repercussions on the uneasy JD(U)-BJP alliance in Bihar and on the BJP’s fortunes in Madhya Pradesh too.