Will the BJP lose by gaining?

When the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ordered the Bharatiya Janata Party to nominate Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate six months ago, neither organisation could have imagined that this would entail not just a uniquely aggressive politics, but a wholesale takeover of the BJP’s election campaign and party machine by a tiny clique.

That clique, comprising Modi, his Gujarat henchman Amit Shah, and party president Rajnath Singh, with general secretary Arun Jaitley in a servile role, is now riding roughshod over the BJP. It has totally monopolised election ticket distribution, and marginalised the BJP’s entire senior leadership, which had pulled the party up from the abyss of two Lok Sabha seats in 1984, and catapulted it to national power in 1998.

The veterans who suffered humiliating marginalisation include LK Advani, Jaswant Singh, Murli Manohar Joshi, Kalraj Mishra and Lalji Tandon, all in their seventies or older. Advani, who wanted to assert his independence by contesting from Bhopal, was forced to fight from Gandhinagar, under Modi’s shadow.

The ‘Iron Man’ lumped the insult and ‘chose’ Gandhinagar in keeping with a shoddy RSS-proposed face-saving formula. His supporter Harin Pathak was refused nomination from Ahmedabad-East which he has won seven times. Yet, Advani didn’t protest.

Joshi was unceremoniously turfed out of Varanasi because Modi decided to contest that seat. After initial noises, Joshi caved in. Mishra was shifted from Kanpur to Deoria, ignoring the prior claim of former BJP state president SP Shahi. Tandon vacated Lucknow for Rajnath Singh, who isn’t confident of winning a second time from Ghaziabad.

The senior leaders were obviously unhappy, but only Jaswant Singh (and Bihar’s Lalmuni Choubey) publicly protested. Singh was refused a ticket from Barmer (Rajasthan) thanks to opposition from Chief Minister-turned-Modi-crony Vasundhara Raje. The ticket was allotted to a Congress defector.

Singh broke down in public, accused the party leadership of “betraying” him, and filed his nomination as an independent. Sushma Swaraj was the sole BJP leader to express solidarity with him. Jaitley advised him to “see reason” and “retract”. This only highlights rifts at the BJP’s apex.

The message delivered by the Modi cabal to these seniors is clear: their ‘experience’ or past contribution doesn’t count; they must obey the clique and make way for younger leaders. Even more important is the hint that they shouldn’t expect important portfolios if a BJP-led coalition wins.

The Modi clique is now severely restructuring the BJP’s national leadership along the lines developed in Gujarat, by destroying all dissidence and subordinating the party to one person’s authoritarian leadership. Nobody matters in Gujarat except Modi. He has reduced the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to irrelevance there and wants to repeat this nationally.

Even the RSS, whose leadership is never elected, couldn’t have thought in its wildest dreams that the organisational ‘Fuehrer principle’ it adopted in 1929, ek-chalak anuvartitva (following one leader), would be realised so grotesquely within the BJP under Modi.

The RSS started appointing its own men as BJP state and national organisation secretaries a decade ago. It has since further tightened its grip over the BJP as its ideological mentor, political master and organisational gatekeeper. It now has the last word in every BJP decision.

This avowedly ‘cultural’ but secretive organisation, which has no democratic mandate, now decides even day-to-day matters for a party that is supposed to have a democratic internal structure under India’s electoral law. This huge contradiction warrants serious legal action.

The RSS is culpable on another ground. The ban imposed on it after Gandhi’s assassination was lifted on the condition that it “should adopt a written and published constitution, restrict itself to culture, forswear violence and secrecy, profess loyalty to India’s flag and Constitution and provide for a democratic organisation.” The Sangh never fulfilled these conditions.

However, the ruling Congress is unlikely to initiate action: why, it hasn’t even pursued the ‘Hindutva-terrorism’ bomb blast cases – despite compelling evidence of the Parivar’s involvement!

Amit Shah’s imprint is starkly evident in Uttar Pradesh, critically important for the BJP, where he was sent as chief campaign manager well before Modi’s anointment as prime ministerial candidate. His assigned job was to run a campaign dedicated to Modi’s election, not the BJP’s victory.

Shah has handpicked all the UP candidates on the basis of their caste, local base, loyalty to Modi, etc. He is micro-managing the BJP’s campaign by trying to revive the defunct party apparatus, roping in other Parivar functionaries, pouring in vast sums of money, and spreading communal poison, as in Muzaffarnagar and beyond.

Shah is credited with both ruthlessness and prodigious organisational abilities. But such abilities shouldn’t be exaggerated: had micro-management been all-important, the BJP wouldn’t have won just 15 of Gujarat’s 26 Lok Sabha seats in 2009.

Besides, Uttar Pradesh is vastly more complex than Gujarat. It’s marked by sharp social divides, strong caste/community allegiances, a substantial presence of upper-caste Hindus, Muslims and Dalits (respectively 21, 19 and 21 percent of the population), and tight multi-cornered contests, whose result aren’t easy to predict.

In recent years, more than two-fifths of UP’s seats have changed hands between parties as vote-shares got translated into seats disproportionately. In 2009, the Congress and the BJP got 18.3 and 17.5 percent of the vote, but ended up with 21 and 10 seats respectively.

The Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, both strong cadre-based organisations, together polled over 50 percent of UP’s votes. They continue to be formidable. Nor can the Congress be written off. Although it has lost popular support, it maintains a strong presence in pockets. Its ally Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal also remains a sizeable force in western UP.

Modi’s stock has definitely risen in UP, especially after the communal polarisation wrought by Muzaffarnagar. But it’s hard to say that there exists a ‘Modi wave’. In fact, the Modi campaign appears to have lost some momentum in the last two weeks.

Shah has embarked on a gamble in UP. Whether his strategy will succeed or not remains unclear. What is amply clear is that the BJP will need to win at least 40-45, if not 50, seats from UP’s total of 80, and another 25 or so from Bihar’s 40, to approach the 200-seat mark nationally – even if it performs brilliantly in its ‘home states’ (Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh) and also does reasonably well in Andhra Pradesh/Telangana and Karnataka.

In Maharashtra, another key state, the BJP could have done better by going it alone, but it has sealed an alliance with the Shiv Sena, which faces a serious challenge from its stronger, combative rival Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. This will further increase the BJP’s dependence on UP. And a gamble in UP has its own uncertainties.

The entry into the BJP of defectors and small parties or unattached individuals –Gen VK Singh, Jagdambika Pal, D Purandeshwari, and more significantly, the (Kurmi-based) Apna Dal in UP and Ram Bilas Paswan’s Lokjanshakti Party in Bihar – seems a big gain. But it will probably extract a price too.

That price is internal dissidence and sabotage. There are already signs of this happening not just in UP, but in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and elsewhere too. How the gains balance the losses still remains unclear.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.  Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in