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BJP at the cross-roads |
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B.I. Saini
Faced with defeats in this year’s Lok Sabha elections and the recently concluded Maharashtra Assembly polls, India’s main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, appears to have decided upon a complete overhaul. Party president Venkaiah Naidu has been replaced by former Deputy Prime Minister and once spearhead of he Ayodhya movement, L.K. Advani. This is expected to be only the first step in the overhaul of the party policies and structures to again make it a winning force.
The BJP was in power for almost six years along with its allies, only some of whom believed in its ideology. But in the case of most of the allies like the Samata Party, now reunited with the Janata Dal (United), the Trinamul Congress, the DMK and allied parties, at one point of time, and the Shiromani Akali Dal, the coalition was only with the objective of keeping the Congress out of power and for sharing the spoils of office. The only exception perhaps was that of the Shiv Sena, which was close to the BJP on the Hindutva issue.
The anti-Congressism worked for some time, but it was clear that no combine could function on just this basis for all time to come. Ideologically also, the BJP found it difficult to explain to the people and the voters how it co-existed with parties which not only did not care, but were completely opposed to its ideology of Hindutva and building a Ram Temple at Ayodhya. The contradictions in the alliance were too glaring to be missed by the people.
Nonetheless, the National Democratic Alliance Government was kept running by the personality of the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who projected the moderate image of the BJP. Even political parties which were diametrically opposed to the BJP and RSS ideology kept silent when one of the country’s worst communal carnages took place in Gujarat. They were obviously thinking that Vajpayee with his “towering” personality would be able to keep the hotheads in the BJP and the RSS in check. The loaves and fishes of office were another major cementing force.
The BJP also had to compromise in the NDA and keep on the backburner the main planks of its ideological agenda like Hindutva, building of the Ram temple, doing away with Art. 370 and enactment of a Common Civil Code. This helped the party to get the support of people who thought that the party would veer more towards the Centre, rather than the Right. But it also had the effect of alienating the traditional vote bank of the party, the people belonging to the upper castes and urban areas. The party raised the issue of development in a big way in the Lok Sabha elections. The BJP obviously thought that its record was much better than that of the Congress and the United Front Governments which had preceded it in the New Delhi “Gaddi” or seat of governance. The party was taken in by its own propaganda of “India Shining” and failed to see or recognise the large patches of darkness and poverty prevailing in the country.
L.K. Advani’s first visit outside Delhi after taking over as BJP president was to Nagpur to take part in the Vijaydashmi annual meeting of the Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh (RSS) which is the fountain head of the Hindutva or “nationalist” forces in the country.
This is a clear indication of the direction the party under L.K. Advani is going to take in the future. The BJP is perhaps oblivious of the fact that things have changed in India since Advani launched his first Rath Yatra in the early nineties. There is very little possibility of the people being taken in by such moves now. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 made the Ayodhya issue irrelevant in the eyes of even the most devout Hindus.
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