NEW DELHI, 14 July — Whenever I hear Navjot Singh Sidhu’s cricket commentary it reminds me of one half of a Punch and Judy show. There is a great deal of Judy, but no Punch. Sounding nasal does not improve your accent; a shriek is no substitute for excitement; and clichés from class six of a convent school have limitations that become very evident once you have repeated them for the eighth time. For good commentary you have to turn to someone who has something substantive to say and can say it with understated wit. Sidhu is not new commentary; he is just, to use his kind of metaphor-variation, old whine in a new bottle.
However Sidhu has every right to homicidal tendencies when, as I intend to do, I compare him with politicians. But one gets the same sense of quickly decanted drink behind a hyped-up label whenever one hears of change being advertised in Indian politics, as for instance Venkaiah Naidu’s “change of guard” in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
We first need to define what change means. Naidu has to work with familiar human material; he cannot quite invite Madhuri Dixit and Sachin Tendulkar to become his general secretaries. So change cannot be about personalities. It has to be about policy, direction, mobilization and issues. So far Naidu has not said or indicated anything that his predecessor could not have. He has offered a slogan: “BJP ka jhanda, NDA ka agenda” but I cannot see anything dramatically heroic or different in this. Even the rhyme is a bit awkward.
The only remarkable fact so far is that Naidu must be the first BJP president with an atrocious knowledge of Hindi. Jana Krishnamurthi was also from the south but he had the puritan syntax that long years in the RSS provide to any swayamsevak. I consider this remarkable because of the party’s historic insistence that there could be no compromise over Hindi as the national language, a policy that played some part in preventing growth in the south.
Shudh is out. While this means that some unmentioned taboos are wearing off, which is good, it also raises a question.
The BJP’s immediate priority is not seepage toward the south. It is recovery in the north. Much of the soul-searching that led to calls for change was due to the thrashing that the party got in the Uttar Pradesh elections. Since that result Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has done some rescue work, stooping to conquer Mayawati. But that was patchwork. The BJP wants to reassert its central place in the state, and is still a long way from that goal.
How is a party president who cannot communicate easily with workers from the north going to do this job? Not impossible of course, but that much harder.
Naidu’s core task is to restore the credibility of his party. The BJP is suffering classic midterm collapse: It is stranded at the meeting point of ebbing hope and growing misrule, trying to grope forward through disillusionment. One BJP leader who, naturally, refuses to be quoted but does not refuse to talk, laughed that the BJP had become a “Brokers Jokers Party”.
The brokers were doing what brokers do in government. To be fair, there are brokers in every political party. The jokers are more dangerous. The ones in the BJP are the kind who believe that the best solution to the Muslim problem in the subcontinent is to line up every Indian Muslim on the border with Pakistan, and then start a war: The Indian Army could finish Pakistan while Pakistan would finish India’s Muslims. Ha ha ha. They thrive at the second rung of power.
The party, my BJP analyst noted, was Vajpayee. Take him away and there would be nothing left.
He did not mention the worst bit — that the Vajpayee of today is not the man he was a year ago. Since Agra the prime minister has been in retreat, mostly before the harsh-liners (hard is too modest a word to describe them) on his own side.
There is always debate in serious political parties over what really wins elections, politics or economics. There is no iron law, particularly in social formations that are as mercurial as India. But if politics wins one election, economics wins ten. Politicians do not have the confidence to believe in economics, which is why they are called politicians. The BJP, both because of its origins and because of its long decades in opposition, has always been comparatively indifferent to its economic agenda. It still does not have an economic philosophy, with one part of the Hindutva family searching for swadeshi and the other for McKinsey. (The swadeshi element punctured Yashwant Sinha.)
Understandably, the majority of the BJP leadership believes that you can remain healthy on the traditional recipe of minority-bashing. Vajpayee lost his biggest personal asset, credibility, each time he surrendered to this lobby. His name no longer commands the instant drawing room respect it once did. You might win a province by appeasing Narendra Modi, but you cannot win a nation.
Venkaiah Naidu cannot restore the BJP’s credibility by himself. That can only happen at the level of government. The key is not in the hands of the new deputy prime minister either. L.K. Advani will get the trappings of a new office but in real terms he will remain a home minister with a tough job. (It is among the ironies of Indian democracy that no nominated deputy has ever been made prime minister by his party; and more often than not has caused a split, as organizations are unable to deal with two centers of gravity.)
The prime minister seems to understand that he has to restart by restoring the economic momentum and has sent his best minister, Jaswant Singh, to do so. Six percent growth will do more for the electoral fortunes than rattling six hundred sabers simultaneously.
If Naidu has an opportunity it is in the complacent state of the Congress party. Even if she was not quite a leader of the Italian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi’s stagnant style would be enough to comfort her opponents. As one Congress leader — who, like his counterpart in the BJP, must, alas, remain unidentified — put it, talking to Sonia is like trying to warm your hands before an iceberg. This may be temperamental but it is not accidental. Sonia is clearly of the firm view that if she waits long enough the office of the prime minister of India will walk across to 10 Janpath.
Unfortunately for the party she leads, and some might say luckily for the country she hopes to lead, it is not as simple as that. The political current is always in flux, and runs strongly; you have to understand the nature of tides; how to use them when they are beneficial, and how to turn them when they become destructive. You cannot sit on the bank and wait for the opponents to drown.
Time cuts both ways. The largest stake of the Congress is in Maharashtra, and the performance of the disunited front out there has enabled the Shiv Sena, even more than the BJP, to sweep back into contention. The Sena is growing even in Vidarbha.
The Congress is losing ground in Rajasthan as well, and if the BJP can hammer an electoral alliance with Mayawati then Madhya Pradesh will be lost as well. There is nothing to hope for in Uttar Pradesh and only a few crumbs can be expected from Laloo Yadav in Bihar. There is nothing in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu, and only marginal hope in Orissa. Andhra Pradesh is the only state where the Congress can expect to improve its position.
There are solutions to such problems. You need an active leadership with clear strategy to pull back from such crumble-space, either by allying with leaders who command support or by doing some old-fashioned vote-building yourself. But the Congress still believes that it can return to power alone, or at best with help from Laloo Yadav. Given a chance to improve relations with Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh it arrogantly turned it down.
In one of the more delightful stories in his autobiography Jawaharlal Nehru describes the culture shift from the joys of silk underwear and linen suits to the world of khadi and the heat of dust-blown villages. That is the journey to India’s ground zero that made the Congress into what Jawaharlal called the “central fact” of India. Seventy years later the Congress has slipped to the margins. The bullock cart used to be the party symbol once. It should now be the air conditioner.
Naidu might turn out to be exactly what the BJP needs: The man with the right horoscope. What luck. His Punch could be a Judy.
