Second rung ringtone

BJP General Secretary Pramod Mahajan’s sudden comments on the state of his party are easily slotted. They can be immediately read as the positioning manoeuvre of a contender for the throne that officially falls vacant in December, but for which the race starts now. That assessment may even be valid. But Mahajan’s intervention is interesting even for those who are not exactly keeping their eyes peeled on the horse-race within the BJP, but who are alive to the long-term significance of the political choice before the party today. Ever since L.K. Advani made his Jinnah speech in Pakistan, and throughout the consequent tumult in the parivar, it has been obvious that the BJP is at a tipping point in its career as a right wing political party. It has been equally obvious that the famed second rung leadership is timid, or hedging its bets. No one has seemed willing to take up L.K. Advani’s invitation at the party’s national executive in Chennai, to enter into an open debate on the BJP-RSS relationship. Mahajan is the first to speak up from the second rung.

So what did Mahajan say? In interviews to a television channel and to this paper, he has called for a ‘‘collective leadership’’ within the party and asked for the revival of the team spirit. So far, so unexceptionable. In our democracy, all parties, even those run in autocratic ways, swear by the principle of collective leadership, but rarely practice it. More team spirit, a wider ownership of decisions, would be certainly welcome in the BJP. But the real problem with the BJP today is not that some of its leaders have been cut out of the decision-making processes by a cabal around L.K. Advani. The real problem, on the other hand, is that Advani has finally articulated a question that has been waiting to catch up with the party for a long time — and the party continues to shrink from it.

On the question itself — what should be the BJP-RSS equation of the future — Mahajan disappoints. He denied the need for a public debate on the issue. He painted it as a domestic spat, a parent-child disagreement. This is a whole step back from where Advani had sought to take the discussion when he described the relationship as ‘‘symbiotic’’ in his address at Chennai, rather than ‘‘umbilical’’. Mahajan’s intervention only confirms the impression that has been gaining ground in the past few weeks: contrary to the rumours of dynamism, the BJP’s second rung may be a very still, very stale place, after all.