Blunder Janata Party

In its UP campaign, BJP has displayed all the weaknesses usually chronic to Congress: lack of a clear CM candidate, infighting, absence of a grassroots organisation & agenda.

A file photo of BJP supporters outside the party headquarters in New Delhi (representational image) | Photo: Manisha Mondal/ThePrint

There couldn’t have been a better time for the BJP, since its loss of power in the summer of 2004, to be smiling. The UPA government is non-functional. The Congress itself has been reeling under a killer onslaught from Anna Hazare’s activists, marked out as the most villainous of the contemptible political class. The economy has been in disaster zone, the rupee in free-fall and even though it has been moderating a bit now, inflation at levels that are electorally toxic. The mood of the Congress’s allies ranges from sullen (DMK) to angry (NCP), to contemptuously rebellious (TMC). For a well-organised challenger, this is about as good as it gets. Yet, with three weeks to go into the first phase of polling, it is the BJP that is beginning to look out of sorts and on the defensive.

Their self-goal with the induction of Kushwaha, already being investigated as the kingpin of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in Uttar Pradesh (a story broken by Correspondent Surbhi Khyati, a very young and energetic member of The Indian Express Lucknow bureau), has more than negated all the gains from the midnight Lokpal bill drama in Rajya Sabha. Live, 24-hour news TV is a hungry monster that also loves variety. So, like a monster’s hunger, its outrage is insatiable, but it loves to find a different new cause to vent on. Kushwaha has, therefore, neatly replaced Rajya Sabha which is, at best, last fortnight’s news rendered even less relevant with Team Anna retired hurt, for the time being.

Check out more news on the BJP. A party that boasts a modern, well-educated and relatively young leadership that enthrals its supporters whenever they intervene in Parliament has meanwhile produced a legislation of its own: banning not just the trading but eating of beef in Madhya Pradesh, a state run by it for eight years now, and one with an average real growth rate lower than that of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal (according to October’s CSO data from 2004-05 to 2010-11). Maybe the problem with Madhya Pradesh’s economy, its inability to attract investment and create jobs was that some fifth columnists ate beef under the cover of darkness in their power-starved towns and villages, thus inviting divine wrath upon that hapless state. This from a party that went to the polls in 2004 on a claim, and promise of reform and modernisation.

Don’t be tempted to dismiss it as just an odd thing confined to a unique state, inspired by that catchy line in that rather nicely done advertisement campaign by its tourism department: MP ajab hai, sabse gazab hai (Madhya Pradesh is one of a kind, it is amazing). The party has done more to support the view that rather than move a step forward post-Vajpayee it is taking two steps backwards. The point that got lost in the fog of this war-like winter session was the self-inflicted isolation of the party on the inclusion of a solitary minority member in the Lokpal panel. It even broke ranks with two of its most important allies, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) and the Shiromani Akali Dal on this. It would be too kind to say that by making such a big deal of that single minority representative the party was signalling its return to old, hard Hindutva. It was, on the other hand, telling you what a total lack of imagination combined with an every-man-for-himself leadership can do to the country’s second largest party with a reasonable six-year record in power. Is it any surprise then that a party that should have by now been seen as a natural successor to UPA 2 seems trailing the Congress in the race for rankings 3 and 4 in Uttar Pradesh? In the Uttar Pradesh campaign it displays all the weaknesses usually chronic to the Congress: lack of a clear chief ministerial candidate, infighting, absence of a grassroots organisation and agenda. The Congress at least has its most powerful leader fronting its campaign. Who captains the BJP in the state? It tried to make up for all this by playing the game of caste equations and its first discovery was a lemon called Kushwaha.

Rule by the Congress or a coalition led by it has historically been the default position in Indian politics. That is why even when the party weakens, or faces popular disenchantment (as in 1967 and 1991) or enters an election as a rank underdog (2004), it benefits both from tailwinds of legacy and inertia of history. To break these, the challenger needs new ideas, a new momentum. The BJP (and formerly Jan Sangh) has seen this work thrice already: in 1977, as a part of JP’s movement, 1989 onwards riding Advani’s big political idea of Hindutva and the mandir, and then, in 1999, Vajpayee’s very own promise of patriotic but gentle and inclusive nationalism and economic reform. The party has not produced one big idea since then and that is why it is in decline nationally. Inclusivist nationalism has now been replaced with anti-beef obscurantism and minority-phobia, as if things like these are going to impress today’s aspirational urban Hindu voters, the party’s old, but estranged loyalists. On economics, the party has spent seven years purging the reformist ideas of their own NDA: from opposing FDI in retail, which they promised in the first place and the pension bill which they first brought in through an ordinance. Everything else reformist is being opposed, from insurance FDI to GST to the committee filibuster of sorts even on the harmless Direct Taxes Code. The principle seems to be, if you do not have a big new idea of your own, block all that has come from elsewhere, even if they were your own to begin with.

Meanwhile, some of the best ideas in governance and reform are coming from the BJP’s own and its allies’ chief ministers. Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh is running a food subsidy scheme so good even supposedly pro-Maoist activists (who otherwise hate his guts) applaud him. Narendra Modi is the most economically progressive chief minister in the country and you can say what you want about his hundred other delinquencies, but can you argue with 24-hour power to all his villages? Nitish has already successfully implemented direct cash transfers to the poorest, a first in India. But the BJP’s high command will not stitch together a proper vision, a national agenda, based on their own vote-catchers’ ideas. The state leaders are, in fact, kept confined where they are. It is only in boredom caused by such smug, vacuous political thinking, where you believe the UPA would simply blunder into handing over power to you, that idiotic ideas like recruiting a Kushwaha, criminalising the eating of beef, blocking retail FDI and pension reform rise. And you keep paying for them.