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BJP : Back to the past |
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B.I. Saini
The Ranchi meeting of the BJP national executive has made it clear that the party continues to search in vain for a new strategy to overcome the electoral defeats it suffered this year in the Lok Sabha election as well as in Maharashtra. There is nothing new in the back to Hindutva agenda chalked out by party president L.K. Advani; the only point of departure is that it is even more strident in its tone than the Ram Temple issue raised by the party in the eighties and nineties. Apart from a more aggressive reiteration of its old stand on Hindutva, the party has been unable to come out with a roadmap to overturn the loss to the Congress and Left parties in the Lok Sabha elections.
To some observers, Advani’s exhortations for the preservation of what he calls the “Hindu ethos” may be disturbing. In the past, it has been seen that the Hindutva agenda is divisive and has resulted in communalising the polity. In the nineties, it paid political dividends to the BJP with the result that from just two or three seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections, the party emerged as the single largest party in the elections held in the late nineties. The BJP also projected itself as the party with a difference. But six years in power eroded the appeal of this claim as the people came to know that there was very little difference between the Congress and BJP governments so far as governance and providing a clean and transparent administration is concerned.
BJP’s rule was marked in the public perception as serving the interests of the well-off sections of society rather than the poor and the common man. The BJP tried to do some soul searching after its defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, but it appears that the party leaders were unable to pinpoint the reasons for the party’s reverses. Before the elections, they refused to see the writing on the wall and even after the results were out, they have been unable to come out with a clear idea of what led to the party’s defeat.
The BJP fought this year’s Lok Sabha elections on the basis of what it called its “good governance” and the “Feel Good” factor it had created in the economic sphere. The party appeared to have been taken in by its own propaganda. The Ranchi meeting indicates that the party still has no clear view of the role it should play in the future to regain power. That is why it has fallen back upon its own ideology of building a Hindu India. In pursuit of this strategy, the party is willing to grab every opportunity to show that it is the only party capable of preserving the Hindu ethos. This is shown by the BJP’s agitation against the action taken by the Tamil Nadu Government against the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram in a murder case rather than allowing the law to take its own course.
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