Monday, May 18, 2009

Election 2009 – The BJP got what it deserved - II

Election 2009 – The BJP got what it deserved - II
Radha Rajan

On parasites and spitting partners

The first grim warning signal that the BJP was ready to cast its distinctive ideology aside came during the 1999 elections to the Lok Sabha. The BJP made the (mis)calculated choice of not going to the people with its own manifesto but with something called NDA Agenda for Governance (NAG). As early as in 1999, barely within a year of the BJP coming to power in Delhi as a Hindu political party, there was no BJP, only a motley group of opportunists around an ascendant BJP called NDA.

By choosing not to go to the people and seek their mandate on the basis of its ideology and presenting the country with a deracinated document called NAG, the BJP with deliberate intent abdicated its responsibility to the Hindus and allowed itself to be ‘secularised’ by the parasites feeding on it.

Every one of the components that went into the unnatural creature called NDA were regional parties which back home relied on the Muslim and Christian vote.Every parasite openly courted the Abrahamic minorities but denied the BJP, off whose body they were fattening themselves, its right to speak for the Hindus.

The parasites extracted a double price from the BJP for the privilege of eating into the BJP’s vitals – not only must the BJP efface all its distinctive features which made it a Hindu party, it should also not make any move to ‘grow’ in the states which these regional parties considered their personal fiefdoms.

Atal Behari Vajpayee managed the 24-party coalition “successfully” only by destroying his own party. Parasites became ‘coalition partners’, walking with crutches became ‘taking everyone along’, opportunist buckling to parasite pressure became ‘coalition dharma’ and Ramjanmabhumi became an ‘encashed cheque’ and ‘BJP is not a construction company’.

The inevitable consequence of the untrammeled power of these individuals was that the RSS was also forced to endure the handicap of silence and inaction. Consequently, instead of the BJP looking like the political wing of the RSS, the converse became true and the RSS began to look more and more like the BJP. And even as all this was happening, the rift between the BJP and the VHP over Ramjanmabhumi widened and eventually all communication between the siblings broke down completely.

The time for polite silence and text-book discipline has passed. The Hindu nation is larger than individuals, organizations and political parties.

The first thing to be done is to silence all public voices in the BJP until the introspection process is complete, responsibility is pinned and hierarchy is restored. The second thing to do would be to state emphatically that the innumerable journalists and editors who had been promoted as the voice of the BJP for purposes of television news channel appearances no longer speak for the party.