The three-year itch

It has always been the case that the BJP is under seige more from its friends — sister organisations of the sangh parivar and allies in the NDA —than from its enemies. But this predicament has never been more sharply etched than it is today. The VHP and Bajrang Dal are unhappy, their leading lights proclaim to anybody who cares to listen, with the Vajpayee government’s performance on terrorism and disinvestment. As far as these organisations are concerned, the country’s security policy should have been far more muscular, and the economic policy infinitely more ‘swadeshi’. But even as they speak, it is evident that these are not the civilised ‘perceptional differences’ that party president Venkaiah Naidu has painted them to be, to be sorted out across the table when the family elders meet. The tone and tenor of the criticism — the crass insults hurled at the prime minister or his PMO by senior VHP worthies Ashok Singhal and Giriraj Kishore — point to a more intractable problem. The VHP and the Bajrang Dal are simply unwilling to accept that even a BJP-led government cannot be bullied on crucial matters by interest groups that posture and preen outside of the electoral process. This is, equally, the BJP’s failure: as the party in power, it has been unable to impress upon these organisations the full measure of their unimportance.

As for the increasing tendency of ministers to carp at each other in public, it has only confirmed suspicions that the concept of collective responsibility has yet to sink into, and be absorbed by, the Vajpayee ministry. Again, be it Thackeray’s rant against the PM, or the Sena versus Shourie, the BJP must accept the larger share of the blame. As senior partner, it has not been able to persuade smaller and recalcitrant parties of the need and efficacy of a modicum of discipline. Overall, at the end of three years, and as the countdown begins to the end of its five-year term, the NDA government is a government at odds with its own self.