NEW DELHI, 1 September — After four years of trial and a lifetime of error, the BJP is still uncertain about the nature of power. Power is not a cold animal, agreed; but it must be a cool one.
Many politicians confuse power with the fox, or the elephant; but slyness demeans the powerful and pure strength tends to trample without discrimination in addition to being ponderous.
The lion is king of the jungle because it knows when to sunbathe (which is most of the time), when to let the lioness search for the kill (a need-based rather than arbitrary function), and when to ignore the mouse gnawing around it rather than swipe it dead. It is also pertinent that the lioness does the hunting.
You cannot rule without a compass. One is not urging the BJP to be different than others, particularly when it shows no inclination to be different at all. It has set up a regime in competitive corruption that uses the past of the Congress party to justify the present of the BJP. Its inexperience, or inability, shows in the absence of sensible pragmatism when caught.
The Congress has a history of scams; indeed, one of its more notorious scammers, Sukh Ram, now feathers the BJP nest in Himachal Pradesh. But the Congress knew how to balance loss and gain. Given a choice between one Ram Naik and 2,000 petrol pump dealers the Congress would have dumped Naik and retained the petrol dealers.
Those petrol pump dealers are pools of influence at 2,000 points across the country, each with a capability to protect their interests and wound the adversary. The BJP retained Naik, antagonized the dealers and has ended up holding both an illegitimate baby and the bath water. As a mess, this is in a class of its own.
The BJP has not been able to find another balance, that between loyalty to its own, and responsibility toward the electorate. In each crisis, its first reaction is to protect its own. Such loyalty may be praiseworthy in a family, but is awkward in a political party tasked to run a national government.
One BJP dissident (the tribe does exist) suggests a more colorful parallel. The BJP has become, he says, like the monkey-mother that clings to its baby long after it is dead, until another child is born. This may be a charming display of maternal fidelity, but the carcass begins to stink even in a mother’s embrace. That is not good news for the environment.
But when you sit in high office, and become a Cabinet minister in the government of India, you become stink-proof. Layers of fawning colleagues, subservient officers and sundry firewalls guard the minister’s nose from malodorous wafts that create a stench among the people. Nothing reaches the minister’s newly sensitized sensibility except heavy doses of artificial perfume. This must be the only reason why no one can smell the putrid stench from Gujarat. The BJP measured the fallout of the riots earlier this year by only one yardstick, victory and defeat in an assembly election. It showed no sense of understanding what it was losing elsewhere as the price for winning the elections in Gujarat.
It lost the moral as well as practical support of wide sections of the middle class that creates the infrastructure that in turn runs the country. This is a very heavy price to pay for any government or political party, but no one was willing to argue this case.
There was no measure except that of inflamed votes that would bring a Narendra Modi back to power. Nor was there sane or calm assessment of what Modi was all about. Modi is not an individual so much as an attitude. There is a gross, extreme core in any political organization which cannot be easily excised or ignored, but all parties do their best to confine their influence to the margins. In the BJP’s case this extremist core has a single point agenda: Anger, even virulent anger, against minorities. What Modi did during the riots came naturally to him. Under advice from his superiors he might put on a different face as circumstances change. But however much circumstances change, a Modi cannot change.
That attitude toward minorities will reassert itself under the slightest provocation. We saw it again during the execrable exchange with the Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh. When the Gujarat elections were postponed Modi pulled the meanest, and for him the most natural, card from a soiled pack. He accused the chief election commissioner of doing what he did because he was a Christian! That the BJP tolerates, absolves and continues to protect such rank communalism is indicative of how much it will sink.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee tried his familiar rescue act by instructing his chief minister to avoid such language. It is appalling that a prime minister must intervene to tell a chief minister of a state to show a level of decency that any civilized society would take for granted. Modi does not need a rap on the knuckles for such communalism; he needs a kick elsewhere.
The BJP may have lost in either case in Gujarat. If Modi wins it will be a victory for communal hysteria, with all the implications of such an eventuality. And if Modi loses (albeit unlikely, but not impossible) then the BJP will have supped at a dangerous table without getting any healthy sustenance. If you rule without a compass, is it any surprise that you get stranded? With more than half its elected term eaten up by mistakes of omission and sins of commission, the BJP is looking lost, without either an agenda or any idea of how to go forward.
Ask what it plans to do next and there will be no answer clearer than fire-fighting. The government, like most rulers, has set off its own fires. It did not need an arsonist from the Opposition to start this blaze. Like all other governments it thought that no one would notice that its tail was on fire. It did not seem to care when that tail began to swivel around, setting anything in the vicinity on fire.
In a democracy when people and institutions get burned they send for the fire brigade. The fire engines, in turn, speed up with all bells clanging, making an infernal racket. The voter hears that racket patiently, and enters details into his memory log, retained for use during election time.
The chief of the fire brigade this time around is J.M. Lyngdoh. Names change, but institutions continue to exercise their unique remote control upon the flow of events. It is surprising that the BJP of all parties has forgotten the rule that politician may take on politician, but politician tries his best never to take on institutions.
In the BJP ranks of the Rajya Sabha is a certain T.N. Chaturvedi. Those who know Chaturvedi also know that all his career he has been an outstanding civil servant, whose name has been synonymous with honesty. His name shot onto the front pages when his audit committee exposed irregularities in defense dealings. During the long years of the Bofors controversy, Rajiv Gandhi indulged in regular artillery fire with opposition leaders. This had its impact. But the deadly wounds did not come from anything thrust by the political class. They came from institutions that retained the trust of the people, like the press. And from the Chaturvedis.
Lyngdoh was made chief election commissioner by this government precisely because of his reputation for integrity. Integrity is not a moveable feast.
Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani is too closely linked with the Modi faction; he does not possess the distance needed to repair the damage. (I am assuming that someone in the higher rungs of the BJP actually believes that there is need for repair.
I could be accused of optimism.) If anyone can still restore the reputation of the government and the ruling party it is the prime minister, because he has taken care to establish a thin distance from the vulgarity in Gujarat. But his own credibility is not what it was once. And he certainly cannot do any restoration work without taking charge. Will he? The prime ministership of India is not a moveable feast either.
