A rudderless BJP in India’s political sea

With the Indian political league hotting up and elections barely two years away (or less, Mamata Banerjee has claimed), it may be a good time to look at where the major players stand. For the sake of convenience, one can divide them into three categories — the Congress, the BJP and the Others. In recent years, the Others have assumed much more importance than their intrinsic worth, since individually and collectively they can help make or break governments. This they know and frequently exploit to the hilt, much to the irritation of the bigger national parties. Those who are enjoying the discomfiture of the UPA at the hands of Ms Banerjee would do well to remember that J. Jayalalithaa had made the NDA suffer.
Aware that coalition governments are here to stay and all kinds of permutations and combinations are possible, politicians around the country are looking for winning strategies. By all accounts, the UPA is floundering; the constant bickering within it, the scams and the policy stasis (no big-ticket market-friendly reforms, etc.) implies that this grouping could be in trouble before the elections. Many allies may thus look for other opportunities, leaving the Congress in the lurch, while the Congress, too, may want to ditch troublesome partners.
The regional political players are flirting with each other to see if a front of some sort works out. This is a perennial fantasy of those who want total non-alignment from the two big parties, though in the end they are happy to go along with any one of them. Still, for the moment there is a lot of mutual love between Ms Jayalalithaa, Naveen Patnaik and Ms Bannerjee; lurking in the wings are Nitish Kumar, Chandrababu Naidu and even Sharad Pawar. Past experience has shown that these fronts do not last long, yet, like Sisyphus, the Others keep rolling the boulder up the hill before every election.
This should be a tailor-made situation for the Bharatiya Janata Party, which has ruled the country in the recent past. The Congress’ travails and the lack of cohesion of the Federal Front ought to provide a perfect window of opportunity to the second largest party to take full advantage of the situation. The calculation should be that the voters, fed up of the UPA, would like to bring back the NDA, which gave us a “Shining India”. But will that happen? Far from fashioning a grand strategy to fight the UPA, the BJP is busy putting out bush fires that break out with alarming regularity.
In the last eight years, since it lost power in 2004, the BJP has, instead of building itself, gone into steady decline at the national level. In 1999, when it came to power, it had won 182 seats; 10 years later, it got only 116. It has won only one state election (Karnataka) of any significance, and the situation there is in a mess, with the threat of former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa breaking the party to form his own outfit.
Consider the past few weeks: the sentencing of former BJP president Bangaru Laxman to four years’ imprisonment in an 11-year-old corruption case has effectively taken the wind out of the party’s sustained and noisy campaign against the various scams in the UPA coalition government. Who can forget the sordid sight of the BJP chief stretching out his hand to take `1 lakh from the fake arms agent? With this and the corruption cases against Mr Yeddyurappa, the BJP will find it difficult to attack the UPA on its various scams.
Or take the recent, almost silly, contretemps over the disagreement with NDA partners over the BJP’s views on presidential candidates. It was managed swiftly and effectively, but it showed that the party lacks cohesion at the top and coordination with the allies. How can the BJP demand that the Congress discusses the next presidential candidate with it when it cannot keep its own allies in the loop?
BJP president Nitin Gadkari may be getting another term as the party president (with an RSS-backed change of constitution to facilitate it), but he has not managed to stamp his authority on the powerful leaders all of whom have ambitions of becoming the Prime Minister. Vasundhara Raje has been ignored for some time but she has shown that she had the clout to make the party bend to her demands; she, too, may well be planning her own regional party.
Such regular problems distract the leadership from planning a long-term strategy to challenge and oust the ruling coalition. Winning seats is one thing — the BJP today looks brittle and cannot inspire confidence in its putative allies that it can challenge the Congress. It has already lost old friends like Mr Patnaik and Mr Naidu — only the Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena (a prickly friend) remain in the BJP camp. Mr Nitish Kumar runs a coalition but has left no doubt that he is an equal, if not a senior ally. And the party’s own senior leadership is busy cancelling each other out.
In the past year or so, all the really forceful attacks on the government have come from either freelance players like Anna Hazare (with a little help from the RSS), or UPA allies, like Ms Banerjee, or institutions such as the Comptroller and Auditor General and the courts. The largest Opposition party has tried to play catch-up or has been reduced to knee-jerk opposition on every government initiative even if it had supported the same idea in the past, such as FDI in retail. Now the BJP with its long-standing commitment to a strong Centre, is even ready to hop on to the federalism bandwagon. Anything to keep itself in the news.
All this prompts one to ask: Is the BJP a serious player in national politics any more or is it another of the many disparate elements — a Third Fronter — trying to join hands to eject the UPA? Even those who may not be particularly favourably inclined towards it would be appalled at the sorry condition of an organisation that till a few years ago was ruling India. It is not as if some great, strategic plan is unravelling; what we are seeing is the gradual implosion of a party that finds itself utterly lost and directionless. At this rate, the BJP will require a miracle to become a viable alternative to the Congress. Can Mr Gadkari, with the backing of the RSS but the reluctant support of his colleagues, pull it off?