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The two faces of RSS/BJP |
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Prime Minister Vajpayee has expressed strong public disapproval of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s proposed Gujarat yatra, of the attempts to turn Godhra into a political issue, and of the repeated attacks on Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh by his party’s own spokesmen and by members of the Sangh Parivar. The party’s aggressive spokesmen were publicly humiliated by the Prime Minister on these issues. He spoke clearly and precisely, with few pauses. Godhra could not be an election issue, he said. Elections should be fought on issues of substance, like unemployment. Nobody, he asserted, should attack the Election Commission; it should be respected.
Noted political analyst Vir Sanghvi recalls that in recent months, Vajpayee has concentrated on running the Government and stayed out of party politics. But by going public he served notice that he would distance himself from any extreme position.
Vir Sanghvi points out that there have always been at least two parties within the BJP. In the 1990s, there was the secular-centrist party that Vajpayee wanted the BJP to be, but there was also the Hindutva party headed by L.K. Advani - this was the party of the Ayodhya movement (which Vajpayee had publicly dissociated himself from).
These days, the dynamics of the BJP, says the columnist, have altered. Ayodhya is no longer a defining issue and Advani and Vajpayee both seem to propound the same secular-centrist policies. But there is also a new BJP, and it is represented by Narendra Modi and his supporters within the party. The VHP best captures the mood of these people and it is no accident that frequently, BJP spokesmen and the VHP’s Praveen Togadia seem to be reading from the same script.
This new BJP is defined less by its policies - there is no big issue like Ayodhya - than by its rhetoric. The columnist argues that even in the heyday of Hindutva, the BJP’s greatest strength (and the source of much of its middle class support) was that L.K. Advani always came across as reasonable. Advani was never angry; he was always anguished. These days, however, the party has adopted Venkaiah’s loutish persona as its trademark. Between Modi’s abuse and Venkaiah’s combativeness lies the literary style of the new BJP: shrill, self-righteous abuse. A new generation is in charge and it knows no limits. All parties have Young Turks. What makes the BJP special is that it has Young Jerks.
Within the party, these Young Jerks have risen in influence because of the perceived political and electoral failures of the older generation. As the party has been routed in Assembly election after Assembly election, the defeats have been attributed to the reasonable, centrist line forced on New Delhi by the demands of the NDA agenda. The BJP’s new strategy is to allow the Government to be run by reasonable old men, but to place the party in the hands of an aggressive younger generation.
So far at least, the strategy does not seem to have paid off -and now it exploded in the party’s face. Hence the importance of Gujarat and its adoption as a sacred cause by the Young Jerks.
Not everyone in the BJP, says the columnist, is happy with the emergence of the Jerks and their style of politics. Often the divisions are determined by age rather than policies. In Gujarat, the older Keshubhai Patel (no secularist, he) hates what the younger Modi represents. In Delhi, the older RSS hands are no fans of Togadia and his VHP. It is significant that though the VHP greeted Vajpayee’s statement with defiance, RSS spokesman M.G. Vaidya went on TV to endorse Vajpayee’s position. One of the few BJP leaders to have criticised Modi’s utterances is Murli Manohar Joshi. But the problem is simple: can any BJP leader afford to openly attack Modi and the Jerks when they are about to win the party its first election in years?
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