Self-opposition party

A man holds up a Bharatiya Janata Party flag at the courtyard of the party's headquarters in New Delhi | Anindito Mukherjee | Bloomberg

Could it be that we have been so obsessed with the freeze in the UPA as to totally overlook the convulsions in the BJP?

Over the past three weeks, the BJP has excelled itself in its own leaderless-ness, and rudderless-ness. Also, in its own ideological confusion. It’s been topped now by its totally knee-jerk opposition to FDI in retail. Having been a party of reform under Vajpayee, the BJP should have been at the forefront of pressing for not just retail FDI but other positive economic reform. On the contrary, it is using retail FDI to stall Parliament, as if another excuse was needed. Its comeback kid, Uma Bharti, is threatening to burn Walmart stores. It is still making noises against a national GST out of utter cussedness. Its threat to boycott P. Chidambaram in Parliament only underlines its lack of creative ideas in a political market that has exactly what a challenge the party needs: a power vacuum, an opportunity and a pent-up demand for solutions. But rather than come up with any ideas, vision documents, alternatives or solutions, it is borrowing everybody else’s nutty ideas. It has bought Baba Ramdev’s fantasy of bringing back lakhs of crores of black money. It has snatched the Left’s anti-Americanism, unthinking attacks on nuclear liability laws and instinctive opposition to all reform. That, when many of its own chief ministers are supporters of reform and are carrying out much of their own anyway.

Of course, there will be senior and articulate BJP leaders arguing as to why these policy positions are not nutty as we describe them. But what they won’t, and can’t, do instead is tell us what would they offer us as a more attractive economic agenda.

The BJP’s entire politics today seems predicated upon the inevitability of the Congress party’s self-destruction. As if the BJP has to do nothing until then, but to wait and be a nuisance. Meanwhile, with the next general election presumed won, its top leaders only need to position themselves for the ultimate prize: the prime ministership. So while one embarks on one more rathyatra just as he turns 84, the other announces he is going to contest for Parliament the next time though the immaturity of many of his utterances would suggest he is not quite the minimum age of 25 yet. Another one is travelling to China, to red-carpet welcome by the only Communists with any real power in the whole world, and pretending to speak in Beijing for all of India, and thereby appearing prime-ministerial. The BJP, sadly, has begun to look like it has already declared that 2014 is now 2012, and which general election it has won already. It is not even talking of how it will bring new allies into the NDA to get to that figure of 272, which is impossible unless it now begins to reach out to Naveen Patnaik, Jayalalithaa and Chandrababu Naidu. After all, the Left will not join the NDA even if the BJP fully embraces their reform-phobia and anti-Americanism. It is not even considering the possibility that in the absence of a Vajpayee-like figure with pan-national appeal it might have to concede prime ministership to an ally like Nitish Kumar. Its leaders believe that they have won the 2014 election in 2012 all by themselves and the only competition now left is among themselves, and only for the prime ministership. Can you get more delusional than that? Unless, of course, your life is run by friendly, rented astrologers.

Yet, while the yatras and the grandstanding go on, one state where its leaders and leadership have not been visible lately is Uttar Pradesh, which is the semi-final before the next general elections. Even on the issue of breaking Uttar Pradesh up into four states, the BJP’s response has been confused. The party, today, seems to offer no alternatives for anything. It will oppose everything the UPA does, even if it means going against its own free-market instinct. Its really bright and powerful chief ministers, who will ultimately bring in the seats in the next parliament, are left out of all this. Talk to one of them informally about the prime ministerial ambitions of his own party stalwarts in Delhi, and you are guaranteed a bellyful of laughter.

The party’s central leadership continues to overlook the alienation of its real stars, the chief ministers who feel left out of these big-power games while the responsibility for bringing votes, as also to herd reluctant crowds for their so-called national leaders’ rathyatras and rallies, remains with them. They retaliate by paying minimal attention to their central leadership and party president. In fact, its chief ministers now function pretty much like the Coke/Pepsi franchisees of the BJP brand. They pay their tribute to the central kitty, or a kind of franchise fee, look after their franchisers when they come visiting and send them back laden with gifts. Not having a high-command culture should have been the BJP’s strength. But the current anarchy, when its central leadership has even less authority within its own party than the prime minister might have in this government, is ruining its prospects.

This, when the BJP has more talent, more leadership and more articulate voices than the Congress any day. It also has, or rather had, a much clearer strategic worldview and economic philosophy as unveiled during the Vajpayee years. If India’s power politics has now shifted to the states, along with its NDA allies, it has a star cast of chief ministers, Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Raman Singh, Nitish Kumar, Prem Kumar Dhumal, even the Badals that the Congress can never hope to match. But, in the absence of any top-down coherence and a clear economic agenda, it has reduced itself to a rabble of brilliant individuals with conflicting ambitions. It opposes the opening up of retail because it thinks it would hurt the banias, its main constituency. Funny that the party should think so, when it has spent the past two decades burying exactly that bania-party” notion and thereby widen its vote base. Funnier still, ask any bania in the BJP and he will tell you that the highest position to which a bania has ever risen in the BJP is treasurer, exactly as Manu ordained.

You want to know what happens to a formidable political party when it closes its mind and alienates itself from its own core beliefs? Look at the BJP right now.