Feb 21 : The popular Manna Dey number on the "riddle of life" from a Hindi box office sensation of long ago that Nitin Gadkari, the new BJP president, tunefully belted out at the Indore session of his party’s national executive — the first he attended in his new
capacity — might strike many as singularly inapt. The song offers a dollop of pop philosophy — to calmly accept the highs and the lows of life. But this was not the need of the hour. After the party’s disastrous showing in the last Lok Sabha election nine months ago, the flock deserved to see manifest qualities of leadership from a man who has been catapulted to the top on account of recommendations from the RSS that simply cannot be turned down, not limp strands of woolly metaphysics. Mr Gadkari did not put a foot wrong, but there is nothing new in anything he said. The media are running away with the theory that his call for accommodation with the Muslims by offering to build them a mosque at Ayodhya if they helped to make a Ram temple at the contested spot is a shining new thing. It is not. Since that fateful day in Ayodhya 18 years ago, numerous BJP stalwarts — not forgetting Atal Behari Vajpayee who doesn’t keep well enough to attend party jamborees now — have spoken of this so-called exchange offer. It has cut no ice so far and it is not clear how a mere reiteration can make things look different. But to Mr Gadkari’s credit, he has grasped that Ayodhya is not a live issue any more. He made only a pro forma mention of it and buried the reference in the lower layers of his speech. It is also interesting that he said nothing about abrogating Article 370 in respect of Kashmir, which all these years has been a "core issue" for the BJP. Perhaps the party has learnt a thing or two from its six years in government.
The new BJP chief was bold enough not to shy away from asking the bigwigs and the party satraps to stop faction fights which — L.K. Advani is dead right — was a key reason the party fared disastrously. But who’s listening? The former Rajasthan chief minister, Ms Vasundhara Raje, didn’t bother to attend the Indore meet and defied the new chief, saying she wasn’t going to resign her position as Leader of the Opposition in the Rajasthan Assembly. She had also defied Mr Rajnath Singh, Mr Gadkari’s predecessor. So, even before the new chief can dust his new seat to sit down, he will have to baton-charge a prominent and popular party leader. Such a dilemma can unnerve anyone, and if the new president doesn’t get it right, there are enough self-opinionated party bosses to make life difficult for him. But apparently Mr Gadkari has tons of patience and is a man of the world. Therefore, he will know he is on test. Being formally elected by the party’s national council at Indore doesn’t lend him automatic authority over all he surveys. That day will come when he looks like succeeding. Mr Gadkari was right to hit the right buttons on symbolism and wooing the dalit, the poor, the women. Again, none of this is new, but the party is badly in need of a rise in its voting share in the country before it can count as the real thing in Parliament. Right now it is a gaggle of disgruntled, disjointed souls, although it has the capacity to bounce back if it can enlist the support of wider swathes of society in a very competitive age from the electoral point of view.