Yesterday no more

As the principal opposition force, the BJP hopes to reap a full anti-incumbency harvest. If its post-budget parliamentary interventions are any guide, the BJP probably feels that it has merely to keep taunting the government with the same clever “aam aadmi” imagery that the Congress itself used with telling effect in 2004. The rest, it would seem, has been left to providence.

With the economy experiencing a downturn, reforms stalled by the Left veto, soaring government expenditure fuelling inflation and counter-terrorism hamstrung by sectarian considerations, the electoral prospects of the UPA don’t seem encouraging. The average Congress leader doesn’t seriously expect heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi to do a Barack Obama and somehow turn anti-incumbency on its head with a show of youthful energy. Rahul may be projected as the face of the future but the themes of his coming-out party are at odds with the ethos of New India.

It is striking that despite being a beneficiary of rudderless governance the NDA is not confident of notching up a clear victory. BJP strategists are worried that the next election will have only a handful of national issues, notably terrorism, the crisis of agriculture and, maybe, inflation. The ultimate verdict, it is felt, will be shaped in the states where the NDA has a local anti-incumbency to cope with. In short, the next election could well be a zero sum game.

From 1990 till 2004, the BJP was justifiably proud of its ability to set the political agenda and redraw the electoral map. Yet, with barely a year to go before the UPA completes its full term, the party’s political positioning remains remarkably fuzzy. There is some awareness of what the BJP opposes but remarkably little clarity over the NDA’s agenda of governance. In his speech to FICCI on February 15, Advani stated that the BJP had its own measure of GDP: good governance, development and protection. As an enunciation of general principles it was an attractive sound bite but it lacked meat. This would not have mattered if the BJP had followed the broad contours of its 1998-2004 programmes. Unfortunately, while in opposition, the BJP appears to have developed second thoughts on the pro-enterprise and pro-reforms policies pursued by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government.

Arguably, some of the party’s strident opposition to UPA initiatives was dictated by narrow political imperatives. However, it is undeniable that in the past four years the central BJP has appeared to be out of tune with the impulses of a youthful and modern India. Interestingly, this is not the case with the BJP state governments, particularly the administrations run by Narendra Modi and Vasundhara Raje. Modi’s victory last December was, in fact, propelled by the enthusiasm of the New India that the BJP seems so anxious to alienate.

The BJP’s present incoherence is a consequence of two factors. First, the party was in a state of disorientation between Advani’s post-Pakistan downfall and his formal rehabilitation in December 2007. No worthwhile debates and policy initiatives were undertaken in this period, not least because those at the helm were unequal to the task. Second, the period also witnessed the intrusive over-involvement of the RSS in the BJP. The “micro-management” coincided with the RSS’s own loss of direction and its inability to cope with the challenges of an assertive, globalised India. In a macabre display of what old-style communists used to decry as “voluntarism”, the RSS tried to equate the certitudes of its full-timers with the mood in the outside world. In Uttar Pradesh, where the pracharaks conducted the 2007 campaign, the BJP was decimated; in Gujarat, where Modi chose to ignore them, it won a famous victory. In Madhya Pradesh the RSS runs the government; in Rajasthan it is at odds with the chief minister.

Today, the BJP is at an important stage in its political evolution. At one level, it has evolved into the principal opposition to a dynastic Congress. A taste of power at the Centre and the states has curbed its impetuosity, increased its awareness of governance and blunted its idealism. However, this voyage into the political mainstream — what Vajpayee and Advani had hoped for at the time of the BJP’s formation in 1980 — has not been accompanied by any worthwhile deliberation on what nationalism involves and how it can be applied to contemporary realities, at least not since the Ayodhya movement. More important, the quiet but uneven transformation of bellicose Hindutva into Hindu Democracy has not been complemented by a parallel desire to accommodate the subtler shades of Hinduness into the party. The BJP is a mass party that reflects the different impulses of Indian and Hindu society. Tragically, its organisational structures and decision-making processes are that of an ideological sect.

If these distortions had not been there, the results of the forthcoming general election would have been a foregone conclusion.

The writer is a Delhi-based commentator swapan55@gmail.com