Editorial
Two months after the BJP suffered an ignominious defeat in an election in which it thought it had been calling all the shots from timing the elections to fixing the electoral agenda, the party is evidently yet to come to terms with the shock. The party’s consecutive victories in 1998 and 1999 had fuelled its hope of getting recognised and legitimised as India’s ‘natural’ party of governance as the Congress was till the 1980s. The party thought that despite Gujarat it could continue to harp on its newly honed discourse of de-ideologised governance and win an election by parading mobile phones, expressways and India’s much-hyped superpower potential! Verdict 2004 has clearly belied these fond hopes.
The saffron camp is clearly divided in its analysis of the election results. Ideologues of the RSS seem to be suggesting that the BJP has had to pay for under-emphasising its ideological moorings. The VHP argues that the BJP has been punished for ‘abandoning’ the Hindutva agenda. According to Ashok Singhal, the TDP-BJP combine lost the elections in Andhra because Andhra apparently has the highest incidence of religious conversion! Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray too holds the NDA’s ‘moderate’ plank responsible for the defeat, but instead of treating the debacle as a ‘punishment’ meted out by disillusioned Hindus he describes it as a conspiracy hatched out by the ‘green moles’, his latest expression for Indian Muslims.
Vacationing in the hills of Manali, Vajpayee made quite a sensation by suggesting it was Gujarat that really did the BJP in and hinting at a possible change of guard in Gujarat. Of course, he was not talking about the genocide and the role of the Gujarat government in sponsoring it or that of his own government in condoning it, he was only concerned that the BJP had underestimated the opposition’s ability to ‘exploit’ the Gujarat ‘incidents’ to the latter’s advantage! Vajpayee even recollected how he wanted to remove Modi in the wake of the killings but had to restrain himself in order to accommodate other opinions in the party. But by the time he returned to Delhi, he had done another Vajpayee! Gujarat again became a closed chapter and Modi got yet another ‘reprieve’, even if a temporary one.
Following his defeat in the elections, Vajpayee now stands squarely dumped by his own party and Parivar. As far as the Sangh is concerned, he has evidently exhausted whatever utility he had as the Parivar’s ‘liberal mask’ and as the ‘poet statesman’ prime minister of a neo-liberal pro-imperialist regime. With the BJP back in opposition, once again it is Advani who is back as the leader. Unlike other leaders and ideologues of the BJP and the Parivar, Advani’s response to the NDA’s poll debacle has been quite cautious. While downplaying the debacle by describing it as a fractured mandate attributable to a host of local factors, he has accepted responsibility for the BJP’s ‘failed’ slogans which tried to conjure a feel-good factor in a ‘shining India’ but clearly failed to connect and communicate. And significantly enough, he has said nothing about either Hindutva or Gujarat.
Advani knows the difference between 2004 and 1984. With 138 MPs, the BJP today is placed much more comfortably than when it had only 2 members in a 540-plus Lok Sabha. The party is certainly not faced with any major identity crisis or any imperative to ‘reinvent’ itself. The BJP knows all too well that the Congress is not going to navigate back to its ‘socialistic pattern’ days, and that it is going to operate very much within the parameters of neo-liberalism, pro-Americanism and soft Hindutva. Such an ideological-political terrain is very hospitable to the BJP and the party can always hope to stage a comeback much the same way the Congress had staged a comeback in 1980 after being rejected so resoundingly only three years earlier.
Instead of singing paeans for Indian democracy and imagining a crisis for the BJP where it has to either ‘secularise’ itself or face a permanent exile to political oblivion, the progressive opinion in the country must focus on asserting a radically different people’s agenda of democracy and development. Nothing short of a powerful anti-feudal anti-imperialist awakening of the Indian people can effectively foil the fascist gameplan of the RSS.