By Swapan Dasgupta
Vidya Charan Shukla who died last summer was one of
the most hated figures of the Emergency. He was entrusted with the
responsibility of regulating the flow of news through rigorous censorship and
he carried out Indira Gandhi’s command with effective ruthlessness.
I didn’t know Shukla during his halcyon days, when
he also acquired a reputation for being a bit of a lad. Arun Nehru introduced
us during the early days of the Jan Morcha, wich subsequently morphed into the
Janata Dal. What immediately struck me about Shukla was that he was always
immaculately turned out. Indeed, I have met no other person who wore a dhoti so
elegantly.
Unfortunately, his overpowering sartorial grace
wasn’t good enough to obliterate the past. To my generation, Shukla and the
Emergency were inseparable. This may explain my disgust when I found him
sharing the dais with L.K. Advani at an election rally in 2004. Shukla, for
those with short memories, contested the 2004 poll from Mahasamund as a BJP
candidate. He lost and shortly after left the BJP to make his way back to the
Congress.
I was reminded of Shukla while observing the steady
stream of Congress worthies switching sides effortlessly and proclaiming their
undying faith in Narendra Modi. Apart from the usual galaxy of film-stars and other
performers who have developed an irresistible urge to enter politics—just look
at the candidate list of both the BJP and Trinamool Congress in West Bengal—the
new converts include hardened
politicians like Rao Inderjit Singh, Purandeswari, Sonaram Chowdhury,
Jagadambika Pal, Satpal Maharaj and the habitually fickle such as Jai Narain
Nishad and Brij Bhushan Singh. And I am not even including the ex-babus.
Many of them have been ‘adjusted’—a wonderfully
evocative expression to denote amorality—and others given assurances about the
future. Actually, the BJP’s record of keeping pre-election promises is rather
good. In 2004, despite the defeat, the party accommodated at least four high
profile new entrants into the Rajya Sabha where their total contribution to the
revival of the BJP was an enormous zero. However, within the political class,
the BJP has a better reputation of being specially accommodative towards those
who have earlier drunk from a secular cup. Whether this stems from a genuine
desire to broaden the party’s social reach or is a function of Hindutva
‘dhimmitude’ is for social psychologists to ponder.
In narrow political terms, however, there is no
doubt that a steady stream of in-bound traffic does much to boost morale and
demoralise the opposition. More important, in the context of the Congress (and
AAP) bid to suggest that India will suffer a bout of communal indigestion if
Modi is voted to power, the newcomers help expose the secular-communal divide
for what it really is: intellectual self-abuse. Ironically, it also helps break
down the spurious perception that the BJP is a rigid ideological party. The
commitment to a particular stream of thought may have defined the party at one
stage of its evolution but political power invariably results in the
dissolution of inherited certitudes. Unwittingly, new entrants have helped the
BJP’s unquestioned passage from Hindu nationalism to Hindu republicanism. Under
Modi, the BJP’s evolution as a right-of-centre party with a focus on governance
is likely to be more pronounced. This would have happened in any case if the
party had not unexpectedly lost the 2004 poll and been overwhelmed by a
leadership crisis subsequently. The likelihood of a Modi victory in 2014 has
revived a process that was abruptly left incomplete ten years ago.
The movement from the margins to the centre
inevitably involves the accumulation of diverse social forces and, predictably,
some garbage. In 1991, the first occasion the BJP started attracting talent
from outside the RSS fraternity, there was an overweight of retired bureaucrats
and military officers among the new entrants. They included the likes of Lt-Gen
Jacob, Lt-Gen K.P. Candeth, Brajesh Mishra, S.C. Dixit and B.P. Singhal. What
is further interesting that most of these individuals didn’t desert the party
after 1991 and, indeed, played a role in the process that led to a BJP-led
government at the Centre. The willingness of the BJP to mop up the remnants of
the Janata Dal also played an important role in the larger social enrichment of
the party. At least two facets of the present BJP—its hold over the middle
classes and its significant presence among OBC voters—have their origin in the
open-door approach of the 1990s.
By contrast, those who latched on to the BJP in 2004
in anticipation of another term for Atal Behari Vajpayee turned out to be birds
of prey. Most of the umpteen film-stars and other celebrities quietly moved out
of the party’s orbit once it was clear that the Congress was back in the
saddle. They left behind a trail of resentment in the party, particularly among
the old faithful who had stood by it loyally through days good and bad. This
may have been a reason why the involvement of the BJP’s traditional supporters
in the 2004 campaign was so perfunctory. At the same time, the rapid desertion
of the newcomers after the May 2004 defeat created a mental block in the party
against newcomers, a block that overlooked the earlier experience. From 2004
till the anointment of Modi in September 2013, the BJP was deprived of new
blood.
Today, once again the BJP is witnessing a problem of
plenty. Carefully handled, the process can devastate the Congress permanently
while extending the BJP’s social reach. Ineptly managed, it could turn BJP into
a party of rank opportunists.
Sunday Pioneer, March 23, 2014
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