Election 2009: BJP got what it deserved
Radha RajanWhen ambition overrode ideology
while all of Congress’ problems were external to the party, BJP’s problems were all from within.
The BJP suffers from seven problems – Advani, Jaswant Singh, Murli Manohar Joshi, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh; each one’s coterie expanding their personal agendas in an oceanic circle, some of them expanding across the Atlantic and the Pacific and then coming back to Indian shores as returning currents with ambitious jetsam and flotsam riding on their crests. Venkaiah Naidu for some reason opted out of the race in 2004.
They all think they are Prime Ministerial matter; after Vajpayee, Advani thought he had the automatic right of inheritance while the remaining six think they have automatic right of inheritance after Advani.
The Problem Seven, in the last 10 years have done two things – they have ruthlessly decimated or kept at bay other challengers to the throne in the states and in Delhi, while simultaneously doing everything to make sure that the other six in the group do not take even half a step in the direction of becoming party president which is the penultimate chair before the throne; and that is why, despite losing the elections in 2004 and now in 2009, Advani continues to remain at the top. Advani’s continuation is the only way to prevent the others from getting there. The top leadership is therefore septuagenarian or octogenarian, the second rung leadership is already aged and the third rung is aging fast and frustrated. This group has held the BJP hostage through their coteries, each coterie more cut-throat than the others.
Ask any ordinary political minded Hindu on the street what he/she thinks the BJP stands for and we will have the answer to why the BJP’s downward slide is unstoppable. The BJP’s descent was accelerated with Advani’s public pronouncement that good governance does not need ideology. This was as good as saying that a family is only an involuntary collective of individuals and can function efficiently without family values.
For all that the BJP claims it is different from the Congress, any one who has studied the freedom movement, not as insipid history in school text books, but as a real drama unfolding through its dramatis personae, would realize that the BJP today finds itself in the same position that the INC found itself repeatedly, first in 1908 when the Hindu nationalist leadership - Tilak, Aurobindo and Savarkar - had been decimated and the Congress floundered leaderless and clueless and without an identity until Gandhi began to use it as a vehicle for his agenda; then in the late 1930s decade when Gandhi had failed on all fronts but refused to relinquish control of the INC, and again in 1948 when after Gandhi, Nehru thought he had automatic right of inheritance.
