BJP in a mess of its own making
When earthly beings proclaim themselves messiahs against corruption, ordinary folk have a good laugh; and the joke gets funnier when political parties climb the pulpit. That can be said to be the BJP’s awkward fate for now. The past two years have been a rollercoaster ride for the party riding the morality plank. If it steps off, it can be flung without direction; if it stays put, it risks infinite ridicule.
The BJP’s own description of being an acolyte of Anna Hazare, duly communicated to the sanctimonious social activist by party president Nitin Gadkari himself, is passé. Well before that, and even before the 2G spectrum scam came to light, the BJP had resolved to attack the UPA-2 government, from a high moral trajectory, on the ground of corruption. The fly in the ointment was its then Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa. So the party let it be known publicly that it would be jettisoning the CM in order to make its assault on the Congress-led government look convincing. But this was not to be. Mr Yeddyurappa stayed put. Corrupt or not, he was deemed a vote-catcher. When the CM was finally sent packing, it was because the state lokayukta officially called him corrupt.
To refurbish its image, the BJP latched on to the Anna Hazare movement, hoping to gain from this association, and became an enthusiastic convert to the Hazare edition of the Lokpal. But the backlash has been not long in coming, with the Hindutva party falling for the bait of attracting allegedly super-corrupt politicians — such as Babu Singh Kushwaha in Uttar Pradesh, until recently a minister in the BSP government in Lucknow — in the hope that they would deliver their caste votes. Mr Khushwaha is said to have swindled the National Rural Health Mission of thousands of crore of rupees, and done many other unsavoury things besides. The irony is that a lot of the documentation against the former UP minister — inducted into the party by none less than the BJP president himself — was brought to the attention of the Central Bureau of Investigation by BJP national secretary Kirit Somaiya.
Whether Mr Gadkari is becoming a liability for the BJP is something for the party to decide. But it is pertinent to quote him. While defending Mr Yeddyurappa, the BJP chief had breathtakingly noted that what the man had done was “unethical, but not illegal”. In the Kushwaha affair he has been quoted as saying that the charges against the BSP defector are “not all that serious”. The party of Hindutva also has sticky fingers. That’s not a matter of conjecture. The more worthwhile thing to see is how it proposes to rid itself of the taint.
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