India�s main Opposition Party, the BJP committed political suicide this week as there is no other word to describe the utter political bankruptcy, lack of political foresight and lack of political grace with which it went about peremptorily and unceremoniously expelling Jaswant Singh who had earlier held the portfolios of Defense and External Affairs in the BJP Government. The core issue that is brought to the fore in this unfortunate controversy is not Jaswant Singh�s book on Jinnah but the fact that the BJP has not learnt the lessons of its two successive defeats in India�s General Elections and that further it is looking for scapegoats to deflect the accountability of those responsible for the disarray in the BJP. Also at issue is whether the BJP can survive as a credible major political party attuned with mainstream India without severing its umbilical chord with the RSS.

Once again I have to refer back to my earlier Columns on this issue. In 2009 in recent months I had written the following two Columns:

Bharatiya Janata Party in Total Disarray   

In this review two major points that were made were that (1) First and most immediate task is that the BJP must publicly manifest that it has severed its umbilical chord to its spiritual and political mentor, the RSS.(2) Secondly, the BJP should replace its ideology of Hindutava with the ideology of Indian Nationalism a more broad-based and inclusive concept for greater acceptability.

Plainspeaking to the BJP After Election Results 

It was stressed that the BJP President Rajnath Singh should resign owning up the defeat and that all BJP leaders above 60 years of age should be ruled out from the race for President-ship or Prime Ministerial candidacy. More importantly it was stressed that �In short, the BJP needs to reinvent itself in the mould and image of what the overwhelming young generation of modern India desires after all it is their electoral preference that would count in the next General Elections.

The existing picture of the BJP is that:

• Advani continues to be the pivotal head of BJP and seems that he would like to position himself again for the next General Elections
• Rajnath Singh continues as President of BJP despite the fact that under his presidency the BJP has gone into a nosedive in terms of political acceptability and political credibility. He has no moral standing to be judgmental on organizational controversies and tussles within the BJP
• Under his term as BJP President Congress-styled turbulence was engineered in BJP ruled States to replace existing Chief Ministers despite local support for them.
• The current tussle within BJP seems to be now taking place between RSS diehards and the non-RSS senior leaders.
• The RSS still seems to be calling the shots within the BJP.

In terms of succession the BJP would really have to pull out a rabbit out of the hat. Advani, Rajnath Singh, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sushma Swaraj, Venkaiah Naidu, Shivraj Singh Chauhan and their likes are not acceptable to the people of India. Arun Jaitley and Ravi Shankar Prasad Singh by trying to defend the indefensible and siding with the older generation in the present controversy have not endeared themselves to their admirers outside the BJP.

The BJP sadly needs a group of �Young Turks�, a younger generation of dynamic leaders imbued with the passion of providing to the people of India a credible alternative to the dynasty-ruled Congress Party and with Indian Nationalism as the core ideology and motive force.

Where does the BJP go from here? Since the BJP has in the last few years �Congressified� itself in terms of its political functioning the best course of action or option for it would be to go in for a political split between the RSS allied component of the BJP and the non-BJP component of the BJP.

Such a political split in the BJP would enable the Indian electorate in the next General Elections to exercise their choice whether in terms of a political alternative to the Congress Party the people of India would opt for the orthodox RSS- allied version of the BJP or would they would prefer a re-invented non-RSS allied version of the BJP more attuned to the younger generation of a rising India.  

August 23, 2009

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