Nothing is ‘Right’ these days

The 2004 electoral shock for the BJP led to some strange antics by some of its leaders – remember Sushma Swaraj’s threat to shave off her head if Sonia Gandhi became Prime Minister. But the party still nursed the hope that Congress victory might have been fluke, and that the BJP might be able to win back its old support base. LK Advani’s book ‘MY Country My Life’ was designed to project his Prime Ministerial potential, his stature as a thinker, a visionary and a statesman.
Only, the party had failed to see that the Congress has made inroads into the BJP support base, with the stroke of inclusivity added to the India Shining picture and with the more-or-less clean image of its Prime Minister. It also failed to realise that pitted against octogenarian Advani was the new youth icon Rahul Gandhi, who, let’s face it, does have the X factor. While Advani portrayed himself as a net-savvy politician and did much of canvassing using new-age media, Rahul ventured out in the heat for his door-to-door campaign, captured voters’ hearts and breached the BJP bastion once and for all.

Sinking ship
The disarray in BJP quarters after this election debacle is complete.
The party, which presented itself as the viable alternative to the Congress in the Nineties, demonstrated its governing ability for about six years (1998-2004) and brought India on the diplomatic map of the world, is today not able to keep its own house in order following two consecutive Lok Sabha defeats.

The group of liberal-minded personalities it had attracted in its heyday are finding themselves marooned, and are trying to find one reason or the other to desert the ship. Perhaps it’s no more the brilliant place to be, which it would have been during Vajpayee’s days. Who would like to serve a dejected outfit steered by the Nagpur cotorie and managed by an ordinary mortal Rajnath Singh?

The month after election results saw an open attack on the leadership of Advani from various quarters. The party, under pressure from within for a generation change in order to match the young blood that the Congress has infused, made Sushma Swaraj the deputy leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, and Arun Jaitley the leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha.

This too led to a revolt, with one section claiming there was no reason for promotion of certain leaders without introspecting the causes of poll debacle. Yashwant Sinha quit all the party posts in a huff, including that of the vice-president. Veteran Jaswant Singh was expelled from the party because of his book ‘Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence’, in which he has taken sympathetic view of Jinnah and has criticised Congress leaders, including Nehru and Sardar Patel.
Senior leader Arun Shourie also went public with his feelings, calling his party ‘kati patang’, ‘Alice in Blunderland’, ‘Humpty Dumpty’…, for which he was issued a show-cause notice.

Other charges were also leveled. Advani detractors claimed that he was very much in the loop during the entire Kandahar hijack drama. They also claimed that Advani was behind the cash-for-vote expose in July 2008, during the Confidence vote on the issue of Indo-US nuclear deal. It was expelled leader Jaswant Singh who let the cat out of the bag, alleging that Advani was behind that scandal.  “Advaniji was at the centre of this whole drama,” Jaswant Singh has alleged in an interview.
Meanwhile Arun Jaitley, who was the chief election strategist and became the target of attack by several party leaders after the electoral debacle, resigned from the post of general secretary of the party under one man, one post pretext.

Which direction, for the Centre?
The problem before the BJP is, following the resounding ‘no’ of the electorate to its ideological plank, what alternative to the Congress does the party present? The party doesn’t have an answer to this, as in the last five years, the Congress has beaten the BJP in growth agenda, by outsmarting BJP’s ‘India shining’ with ‘Inclusive growth’ slogan.

A generation of veteran leaders has called it a swan song. What new worldview will the BJP project in the next general elections? The party would do well to change the script as the trailer provided its youth leader rather portends disaster for the party. Addressing an election rally in his constituency Pilibhit, Varun Gandhi had claimed that he would cut off the limbs of anyone who dared to harm the Hindus.

Following the defeat, the BJP was forced to accept that the 'Pilibhit' hindutva, ie Varun Gandhi's hate speeches (the forensic study of the CD of Varun Gandhi's speech found that it was not tampered with and that Varun actually made those speeches) did a lot of damage to the image of the party and denounced it for the first time.