06-02-2011, 01:17 AM
NVS writes in NewsInsight.net
Quote:Rethinking BJP
The principal opposition party is facing a systemic crisis, says N.V.Subramanian.
1 June 2011:
The BJP's troubles especially as the principal opposition party can no longer be glossed over. This writer would root the troubles of the party to four factors. These are RSS control of the BJP, the manner of selection of the BJP president, the three-legged prime-ministerial race of Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley which is proving a disaster, and the role of such BJP seniors as L.K.Advani, Jaswant Singh, etc.
It is not unreasonable for the RSS to feel a sense of ownership of the BJP because it created its Jana Sangha forerunner. But the RSS's most successful chief, Guru Golwalkar, permitted the setting up of Jana Sangha under duress. Balasaheb Deoras and some others had left the RSS and this was the only way to bring them back. But the RSS always hoped to wind up the Jana Sangha because it found party politics a distraction from its core task of organizing Hindu society.
All this is fairly old history. The point is that as part of the Sangha Parivar and all that it means, the BJP is not going anywhere. The gap between it and the Congress in terms of Lok Sabha seats is not unbridgeable, but it has grown between the 2004 and 2009 polls, despite the first Congress-UPA government having shown no merit to return to power. In any calculation of the future of the BJP at the 2014 elections, you are left wondering how the party can ever return to power on its own, thereby making the NDA a matter of necessity and not of choice.
And today's widely-approved choice of PM for 2014 is Nitish Kumar, not anybody from the BJP. And ignominiously for a national party, it can only have a shy at power by replicating the Bihar experiment at the Centre.
The BJP has simple faded away in UP, which still provides the largest number of Lok Sabha seats. It cannot capitalize on the looming rout of the Congress in Andhra Pradesh. Its government in Karnataka which should have been an advertisement for the South lurches from one crisis to another. It is unable to get its act together in Maharashtra which has been run to the ground by the Congress-NCP. It recently failed to make a comeback in Assam. Yes, its chief ministers are solid. But they are not enough to return the party to power in the Centre.
Obviously, the RSS is not directly responsible for this decline. But it has not given the BJP the independence to chart its own growth path. Although organizations grow collectively, the surge in success usually comes from individual genius. For example, in the late-Eighties/ early Nineties, Advani spearheaded the explosive growth of the BJP. When it formed a NDA coalition government, the leadership passed into the able hands of A.B.Vajpayee.
For various reasons, Advani lost his earlier magic and crashed the BJP in two successive elections. To sideline Advani, the RSS came up with a peculiar principle. The next BJP chief would most likely not be PM candidate and Rajnath Singh got that tenured job. There couldn't have been a worse candidate. Possibly on the same principle, Nitin Gadkari has succeeded Rajnath, and he is in the unenviable situation of having simultaneously to shepherd two PM candidates, Sushma and Jaitley.
In some cases, the one-person-one-post principle may work, but it is run aground the BJP. This writer had suggested an internal party election to choose the president, but possibly she or he would become too independent for the RSS. But without an independently elected BJP president, the party cannot grow beyond its present strength. An elected president would solely be responsible for charting the party's growth (think Tony Blair and New Labour or David Cameron) and he/ she would be the natural choice for PM. If a president fails at the polls, another is elected.
In addition to a RSS-selected party president, the PM competition between Sushma and Jaitley is making it rough for the BJP. In an earlier analysis, this writer had suggested for the BJP to privilege Jaitley over Sushma as PM candidate, chiefly because of Jaitley's clean image. Sushma's attempt to delink from the notorious Bellary Reddys and pass the blame on Jaitley convinces nobody. She is becoming a regular embarrassment for the BJP and lacks the gravity for prime-ministership. The BJP has to revisit her case.
And meanwhile, the party would do well to silence serial embarrassers like L.K.Advani and Jaswant Singh. Advani is indiscreet like Sushma and rushed to Rahul Gandhi's defence in the Bhatta-Parsaul controversy. He disowned a BJP paper on black money after releasing it and he won't give up on "secular" Jinnah. And he's joined by Jaswant Singh who recently penned a piece about the necessity of India to understand Pakistan's concerns about India. What next? Negotiate Jammu and Kashmir?
Sadly, it is not even clear if the BJP understands the rut it has fallen into. Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev have stepped into the legitimate opposition space vacated by the BJP. On their credibility, they have built a mass following. Without a fundamental rethinking of RSS-BJP relations, and without making one and the same person party president and PM candidate, expect little from the country's principal opposition formation.