BY PACHU MENON

THE TUMULT over its poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls has left the BJP in tatters. In retrospection, where a collective responsibility for the debacle would have saved the day for the party, the search for scapegoats has resulted in a clash of egos. This is primarily a result of individuals overgrowing the party.

The news that a few leaders have been pampered by the organisation leads one to believe that the BJP is an assortment of such leaders who have got themselves together under the banner of a so-called party that kept them in harness solely for the purpose of demonstrating its intellectuality. This very trait has been the party’s undoing! Moreover, accusations of treading a corporate path with some detractors even likening the party to a private enterprise which has been prolific in its demands of late for resignations and dismissal notices served impromptu, the administrative capabilities of the party president, the CEO of the company, could not have been a more glaring anomaly.

Disciplining the party cadre over matters detrimental to an image that took years of tenacious approach to be projected as a formidable political body promising to be the most viable option for the Congress monopoly in the country somehow appears hollow on the face of a resolute battering by the insiders who have started questioning its core ideology. The BJP must now be sorely missing the troubleshooting skills of the high profile Pramod Mahajan who, with his own contrived skills, time and again managed to salvage the day for the party. A sense of paranoia afflicting those on the top rungs of a brittle hierarchy has now reduced the party to an assortment of insignificant groups, the ‘politics of coteries’ in evidence, so to say!

CONTRADICTIONS

WHERE authoring a book carrying some controversial matter has attracted the wrath of the party inviting a summary sacking from its fold for the writer who has been a faithful soldier of the party from its inception, overlooking certain disparaging comments against the stringent castigation by another equally senior member came as quite a surprise. It would amount to saying that if a party member, as an individual, has his own opinions about any historical event that involved Pakistan - and that went against the party’s traditional beliefs of the occurrence - he is never at liberty to express his views for fear of being censured. At the same time, the party would take a very lenient stand on any leader who dare attack the party, its functionaries and especially the top brass with the choicest of words that would slur all the nursery rhymes we were taught in schools. What hypocrisy!

But hypocrisy thy name has always been BJP. In spite of swearing by a system of belief that emphasises its secular leanings, the party has been a contrasting compilation of brigades that has given it a ‘saffron’ identity. With so many splinter groups appearing to overawe the central leadership, the party has indeed become a kati patang, a kite with a broken string at the mercy of the winds! People at the helm of affairs kowtowing to the diktats of a select few in the organisation get myopic over a period of time, in the sense that they refuse to see anything beyond a particular point. Leaders need to exercise authority and at the same time carry the party with them. This can hardly be said for the current lot.

The BJP, as a matter of fact, is the most visible face of the RSS, with loud whispers that it is being ‘remote controlled’ by the RSS. When a senior functionary in the party says that he is not privy to certain major decisions made by the central committee as he is outside the magic circle of advisers and thinkers being a non-RSS member, one can well gauge the currents of proprietary running deep within the party. If that be the case, as it definitely is, the RSS needs to shun its trumped abhorrence for taking political centre stage. The organisational skills of the highly disciplined outfit that the RSS is made out to be, was never in doubt. It is when the organisation becomes mute spectators of the downwards slide witnessed in the party, hesitating to contribute to its upsurge, that one gets disillusioned.

RESTRUCTURE NEEDED

AS has been suggested, a survival for the BJP means revamping the present hierarchy. Rather than being the moral police of the BJP, the RSS should evolve ways and means to infuse fresh blood and plan a central leadership that comprises of the best from the states. If one appreciates the spate of modernisations carried out in Goa during his tenure, none can refute the claim that, as an administrator, our former chief minister, Manohar Parrikar, is par excellence, though he appears to be wary of a stint at the centre. There are many more such leaders in the party across the country who could be depended upon for bringing the party out of the red. Avoiding pernicious arguments that could usher in only ochlocracy, the BJP’s chintan baithaks should not be seen as platforms for taking vindictive stands against a section of the party.

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