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HomeOpinionThanks to Modi, BJP has conveniently forgotten its war cry against FDI

Thanks to Modi, BJP has conveniently forgotten its war cry against FDI

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With 100% FDI in single brand retail, the Modi govt has rectified the party’s old political positions for the better. We can now look forward to more reform.

Exactly five years after it fought a losing battle in Parliament against FDI in retail, the BJP under Narendra Modi is retracing its steps. Exactly as we had predicted it would. On both issues, the nuclear deal and retail FDI, the party sought to defeat the UPA/Congress in a Lok Sabha vote, making common cause with its permanent ideological enemy, the Left.

On the nuclear deal, Narendra Modi made a spectacular turnaround as soon as he came to power, further raising the strategic level of India’s alliance with the US. With retail, progress has been slower, but allowing 100 per cent in single-brand retail through the automatic route now is a major step.

On 8 December 2012, just as a BJP-Left campaign to defeat the Manmohan Singh government a second time (the first being over the nuclear deal in 2008) had failed, I had written a ‘National Interest’ saying the BJP had once again discovered its nuclear deal moment, and that to be so stupid for the second time in four years needed special talent.

But I had also said in conclusion: the BJP has squandered nine years. Now its stalwarts can only wait for the formality of the Gujarat election results, and the inevitable rise of Narendra Modi. The story will then resume with an entirely new twist.

The latest turn makes me happy not just because I can claim the I-told-you-so vindication. That is important for a commentator. The more important thing, however, is that the Modi government has rectified the party’s old political positions for the better. We can now look forward to more reform, hopefully overriding the defiance of the party’s own ideological reform-sceptics in the name of swadeshi.

Here is how the picture had looked to us just after the BJP suffered that second humiliation in a Parliament vote, in December 2012:

In 2008, even BJP leaders had ruefully admitted that the loss of the no-confidence motion over the nuclear deal allowed the UPA to neutralise the incumbency disadvantage in 2009. The BJP could have gone to the polls claiming it was cheated through cash-for-votes in Parliament. But, for that, the underlying issue, the nuclear deal, had to have great emotional appeal. It turned out to be a dud. Even the fantasy that such a strategic alliance with the Americans would anger Muslims into dumping the Congress and its supporters was belied.

Why did the BJP repeat exactly the same blunder in December 2012? Once again, it struck a cynical alliance with political forces with which it had nothing to share but hostility. Simple logic suggests that you build new alliances and equations in the life of one Parliament that expand your base and reach into the next election. Did the BJP/NDA achieve that by joining hands with Mayawati, the Left, and even Ajit Singh, against the nuclear deal? It ended up, and inevitably so, fighting each one of these so-called allies in the 2009 election. The defeat over FDI indicated it learnt no lessons from that disaster.

Here is an idea. Trace the BJP’s history of post-2004 blunders to one common fact: that it never accepted the 2004 loss with humility. From May 2004 onwards, therefore, it failed to build a political plan for a full five years in opposition. It built, instead, a politics for each Parliament session. The central belief is the old one, that the UPA is about to collapse, just a case of ek dhakka aur do. That “dhakka“, usually, would be something that pushes out one of the UPA’s fence-sitting allies. As a result, it has written off many Parliament sessions. And yet its target looks steadier than before in Parliament, even with the loss of an ally, the TMC.

When the party was blocking the 2012 monsoon session over the CAG report on coal allocation, I had gone to chat with some of the topmost BJP leaders. The analysis based on those conversations was published in ‘National Interest’. If you revisit that, you can easily see where the BJP kept going wrong. It had then calculated that the SP, TMC, and even Mayawati, were keen on an early election and would bring down the government in the winter session. Coal had also given them their first opportunity to target the prime minister. So they could bring down the government and take the corruption issue to an election in January-February 2013.

That hope was belied. The BSP and SP, instead, saved the government. And the UPA was allowed to put coal and other scandals on the backburner, helped along by the BJP, which so quickly leapfrogged to retail FDI. Coal ceased to be a war cry as the 2012 winter session began. Retail FDI then died as an issue midway through the same session. Mayawati was indulging in Lakhnavi euphemisms in calling these sour grapes. It was much worse.

India has no place for politics with such a lack of imagination and such boring predictability. Unless we see a dramatic turn in the weeks following the Gujarat election (in the winter of 2012), it would seem that the BJP will again return to the next general election seeking a vote against the UPA rather than a positive mandate on the basis of a distinctive and competitively attractive agenda. It is because of this lack of imagination — and patience — that the only strategy it has had for nearly nine years now is to somehow bring down this government.

It started with Uma Bharti and Sushma Swaraj threatening extreme forms of self-flagellation, including shaving their heads, sleeping on the floor and eating parched gram if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister in 2004. This carried on. There was a “strong” belief among the party’s higher counsels that the UPA would fall by October 2004. Why? Because their favourite “bulls-eye” astrologer (somewhere in West Delhi) had said so. And then it continued on to the nuclear deal. In Parliament then, one session was nearly written off by protests on FDI in retail (budget session, 2012) until Pranab Mukherjee announced a deferral, another was fully blocked by the demand for a JPC on telecom (winter session, 2010), yet another on coal (monsoon session, 2012), and nearly half of the current one again on FDI.

The top 15 leaders of the BJP now are veterans in national politics, I wrote in December 2012. They are by no means intellectually challenged. Yet, they allowed a single agenda to drive their political responses: anti-Congressism.

Driven by that one emotion, they even sacrificed (or suspended?) their essential ideology. On the nuclear deal as well as retail FDI, they made common cause with the Left. And how does it work in the end? Each time the BJP joined hands with the Left, it suspended the key elements of its own essential ideology — pro-Americanism, on the nuclear deal (who but Vajpayee’s NDA first had the courage to call America a strategic ally, reversing five decades of the Nehruvian worldview), and free market championship, on FDI in retail.

In each case, the Left could justify embracing the BJP because it was only bringing some most unlikely converts into its ideological tent. The BJP was going out on a limb, totally confusing its core voter. That is one of the reasons it was so thoroughly rejected in 2009 in all the major cities where it had hoped to win. The last thing a loyal BJP voter wants is to see his party as the B-team of the Left.

It was not as if the BJP has nothing substantive to offer. It has won several new states and renewed its mandate in many. Its chief ministers are, by and large, the most efficient and effective in the country. They even have a stellar record in implementing anti-poverty schemes — including MNREGA. Their states have been, by and large, scandal-free. The party could build a story around these successes, along with modern, new, reformist ideas on the economy, foreign policy, national security. It squandered nine years. Now its stalwarts can only wait for the formality of the Gujarat election results, and the inevitable rise of Narendra Modi. The story will then resume with an entirely new twist.

Postscript: The Gujarat election results won Narendra Modi another famous victory and almost immediately he began looking unstoppable as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. His campaign began a year ahead of the 2014 summer polls. He talked about achche din, corruption, scams, black money, national security. But not so much about the nuclear deal or FDI in retail. This gives him the space to make these about-turns, and hopefully more going ahead.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. It is about turns. When is the next one expected? Can you trust a person who has keeps ‘TURNING ABOUT’ every other day. Be it relations with Pakistan: Aadhar: and many others.

  2. It would have been wonderful if a whole slew of economic reforms had been initiated in the first flush of victory. Air India’s sale ought to have been announced in the first 100 days. The land ordinance took up political capital. It was not really a priority, for as Dr Ila Patnaik’s column explains, very few new projects are being taken up.

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