BJP must learn to respect India's diversity, stop being RSS's political wing.
Any Indian politician whose ambition is to become prime minister, or who sincerely wishes to pursue political power for the sake of serving the nation — personal ambition and desire to serve the nation are not mutually exclusive — is bound to meet two great teachers in the course of his or her political journey. They are democracy and diversity. A leader who learns the right lessons from these two gurus has the chance to succeed. He who discards or defies their uninfringeable teachings is bound to get his comeuppance.
Indira Gandhi once recklessly defied democracy, for which she paid a huge price. Congress leaders have since learnt that authoritarianism doesn't work in India. To its credit, the Congress party's greatest strength is that it has never given up faith in India's diversity, especially its religious diversity — call it secularism. And this faith, unmatched by any other constituent of the country's political establishment, has stood the party in good stead. Often, its championing of secularism has amounted to tokenism, using Muslims as a vote-bank to perpetuate its own power. Even so, the Congress remains the party with the largest pan-Indian and pan-society footprint.
With growing public disenchantment with the UPA government, that footprint will surely shrink in the 2014 general elections. For India's good, any contender for power must take special care to rejuvenate, through good governance, not only the country's floundering economy but also its democratic institutions, its commitment to socio-economic justice and its secular traditions. Is the BJP capable of this task?
The BJP has been a good pupil at the feet of the guru of democracy. Indeed, much of the prestige that the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (the BJP's previous avatar) earned in the minds of democracy-loving Indians came from its leaders' spirited struggle against Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism during the Emergency. But when it comes to dealing with India's diversity, the BJP is still a learner, unwilling at times, unable at others, and always inconsistent. And insofar as learning any useful lesson in politics entails a good bit of unlearning, the BJP's progress has been slow, halting and even riddled with reversals. This is because the unlearning pertains to the socially restrictive Hindutva ideology of the RSS, which seeks to control the party's thought process, its organisational architecture and leadership choices.
The only-Hindu or mainly-Hindu approach of the RSS, to the deliberate exclusion of the large Muslim population of India, has always posed problems for the BJP. On the one hand, this RSS-dictated communal approach has benefited the party to some extent in certain states. On the other hand, the benefits have been short-lived, as is spectacularly evident from the BJP's marginalisation in UP, India's most populous state. Facts and figures relating to the 15 general elections in the country so far incontrovertibly show that a majority of Hindus have always rejected the Sangh's espousal of the concept of "Hindu rashtra" and its communal approach to society and politics.
The mature, farsighted and secular-minded among the BJP's leaders know fairly well that an exclusively Hindu-oriented politics is unproductive at the national level. After all, at the national level, they have to contend not only with India's social diversity but also its political diversity. With the BJP lacking the heft to win a parliamentary majority on its own, it has to depend on support from other parties to be able to form a government at the Centre. This inescapable reality will always force it to distance itself from the socio-political agenda favoured by the RSS, as it did when it formed the National Democratic Alliance in 1998. And unless the RSS itself changes its outlook, this will inevitably create tensions between any prime minister heading a BJP-led coalition government and the Sangh Parivar. This is how it was during the six-year rule of the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. And this is how it will be, with far greater certainty, in case the BJP manages to form a coalition government headed by Narendra Modi.
The likelihood of Modi-RSS contradictions surfacing is far greater for three main reasons. First, his current image as a polarising figure, a liability for any leader wanting to garner non-RSS voters before the 2014 Lok Sabha election and thereafter to lead a coalition government, will put greater pressure on him to adopt Vajpayee's moderate stance on divisive issues. He can ill afford to say or do anything that alienates him further from the Muslim community and from potential allies. But the more he emulates Vajpayee, the more he'll disillusion hardliners in the Sangh Parivar. After all, the Sangh Parivar's disillusionment over the "betrayal" of the Vajpayee-Advani "soft" leadership of the NDA government was one of the reasons for the BJP's debacle in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.
Second, never in its long history, or in the history of the BJP, has the RSS so directly and so deeply interfered in the party's affairs as it has done in recent years. Obviously, it has done so in order to influence a future BJP-led government. But this could boomerang, since no BJP prime minister can ever lead a stable government if he or she is seen to be remote-controlled by an external organisation with direct or indirect extra-constitutional influence.
Third, in Gujarat itself, Modi as chief minister has deliberately and systematically kept the RSS, VHP and other parivar functionaries away from the institutions of governance. But in New Delhi, he may find it difficult to be his own master.
Hence, it is good to remember that there will be internal factors, in addition to external factors, contributing to instability in the event of a Modi-led government coming into being. Given the people's strong mood for change at present, and their natural desire for a stable and better government led by a strong leader to replace UPA 2, the BJP has a good chance, no doubt, to form NDA 2. For this to happen, however, it has to stop being the political wing of the RSS. It has to learn many more earnest lessons in the classroom of secularism. After all, unflinching respect for religious diversity has been the bedrock of India as a civilisational nation since times immemorial. This, combined with respect for political diversity, has also been the guarantor of stable democratic governance in our country since 1947. Vajpayee had understood this, which is why, as a leader acceptable to a broad social spectrum he could become India's prime minister three times.
In short, the BJP needs a new Vajpayee — a more decisive Vajpayee, but a Vajpayee nonetheless — if it wants to form a smooth, stable and effective NDA government in 2014.
The writer, former national secretary of the BJP, was officer on special duty in the Vajpayee PMO (1998-2004)express@expressindia.com
courtesy : "The Indian express", Tueday, September 17, 2013