While being in a highly self-destructive mode, the BJP is hurtling into a dark pit and there is no one whose writ can run.

See, who is silent! 

At a time when even the most communal in the BJP are trying to unlearn some lessons of Hindutva and BJP allies have dumped it one by one, Punjab’s ruling Akali Dal led by the father-son duo of Parkash Singh-Sukhbir Singh Badal remains ties to the apron strings of the saffron party. Naveen Patnaik dumped the BJP before the elections, Nitish Kumar kept his distance till he knew he was safely home and virtually everyone tried a line more moderate, the Akali Dal has maintained complete silence on the BJP’s humiliating defeat and there is no murmur that the RSS and Hindutva ideology has done the BJP in. At one stage, the SGPC President Avtar Singh Makkar had said that the RSS was enemy number one of the Sikhs but after a gag order from the Badal Jr, he has not opened his mouth. The Akali Dal takes no umbrage at the BJP’s formulation that the Sikhs are part of the larger Hindu samaj, the BJP in Punjab openly backs many self-styled godmen like the Noormehlia Ashutosh baba and defends Gurmit Ram Rahim but the Akali Dal pushes the entire issue under the carpet.

BJP’s deepening crisis  

Nothing fails like failure, judging from the upheavals in the Bharatiya Janata Party following its worst electoral performance in two decades. A defeat on this scale was bound to lead to some discord but the profound unrest points to an existential crisis in a party whose claimed strengths have been its discipline and its rock-solid faith in Hindutva. Today these ideals appear under serious challenge, with dissidents rising in open rebellion against the leadership and questioning the mobilisational utility of Hindutva. At the centre of the storm are former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. Both have hit out at the leadership quartet of Lal Krishna Advani, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, and Arun Jaitley. Significantly, the anger seems directed more at the last three than at Mr. Advani who was re-elected party leader in the Lok Sabha. The reason for this is twofold. Mr. Advani, who went into the election as the party’s prime ministerial candidate, owned up responsibility for the defeat, although he was quickly persuaded to stay on. Secondly, the dissidents know that the 80-year-old leader’s re-appointment is a holding operation and that the real jockeying for power will start later this year when a successor will be chosen.

Naturally, last week’s key decisions — the appointment of Ms Swaraj as deputy leader in the Lok Sabha and Mr. Jaitley as leader in the Rajya Sabha, with Mr. Rajnath Singh continuing as party chief — have raised hackles in some quarters. Mr. Jaswant Singh and Mr. Sinha, who lead the BJP’s middle rung, feel outmanoeuvred by the ‘gang of three’ who seem to have promoted the impression that one among them would lead the party into the 16th general election. But there is more to this churning than the personal ambitions of a handful of malcontents. The BJP’s rout has brought home the brutal truth that Hindutva — and by extension the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh — has little purchase among today’s young voters. That the RSS has been pitching for a younger leadership underscores the irony. The BJP’s biggest problem is the stifling relationship in which it is trapped with its ideological and ‘social’ mentor. Sections of the party want a rethink on the association — Mr. Jaswant Singh has gone so far as to claim that he did not know what Hindutva meant — yet predictably the leadership has squashed speculation through loud reiterations of loyalty to the command centre. With the revolt gathering force, the party can take one of two courses: take the RSS bull by its horns and move away from the disruptive influence of Hindutva — or fall back on its Jana Sangh pre-history of ideological obscurantism, isolation, and political stagnation. (From the editorial in English daily, The Hindu, dated June 16, 2009

Brajesh Mishra finds culprit: It is Varun, not BJP
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There are two ways of ducking responsibility. One is to refuse to analyse the failure, the other is to make a deliberately far fetched and wrong analysis and then project it as the divine truth. Top BJP think tank Brijesh Mishra has gone for the latter. As the BJP grapples with the growing internal chorus questioning its failed strategy in the general elections, Mishra, former National Security Advisor and one of the closest aides of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, has come out with the first categorical denunciation of Varun Gandhi’s hate speech in Pilibhit saying it caused the “greatest amount of damage” to the party’s electoral fortunes.

In a TV interview to The Indian Express' newspaper's Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta, Mishra, throwing to the winds the gag order issued by BJP president Rajnath Singh, said the BJP committed a mistake by not censuring Varun Gandhi’s “repugnant” statements.

The right course for the BJP would have been to “completely dissociate itself from him and not give him a ticket,” he said. Asked how Vajpayee would have handled the situation, he said, “He may have called him and advised him. But I am sure he would not have liked it.”

Although not formally associated with the BJP, Mishra was considered extremely influential in the NDA government, mainly because of his proximity to Vajpayee which he continues to enjoy to this day. Underlining that the continuance of BJP as a major political party was good for the nation, Mishra put his critique in context.

“I want the BJP to survive and thrive,” he said. “This country needs the BJP. It needs two national parties. Otherwise if BJP were to, God forbid, disappear, then within four to five years, regional forces will once come to the fore and we will again be faced with very very unstable situation,” he said, adding that not just the BJP but its ideological parent, the RSS, too, needed to reassess its strategies and bring moderation in the ranks.

Mishra said the BJP had come to power, with the help of allies, only by moderating its agenda and people had accepted that. He said the top leadership of the party had not moved away from that moderate agenda but in these elections, however, the impression went out — “through the voices of Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi” — that the party stood for a very strident form of Hindutva which was exclusivist in nature.

“I am absolutely clear that the Varun episode did the greatest amount of damage to the BJP...his speech and his behaviour...The BJP should have totally moved away from him,” he said, adding that such statements did not go down well with the masses. “The kind of statements Varun Gandhi made...people were completely taken aback. They also thought that as soon as a BJP government came to power in Karnataka, organizations like the Ram Sene came out in the open.”

“The Hindu ethos does not allow people to go beyond a limit,” said Mishra. “The impression going out was that this was not Hindutva. This was something else,” he said, adding that the inclusive nature of Hindutva had affected other Indian religions as well. “That is why today you cannot say that more than, say, 0.0001 per cent of Muslim population would be jehadis.”

“Clearly, your (BJP’s) message of Hindutva, howsoever you may define it, did not get across to the voters who voted for the Congress, and for stability,” he said.

Mishra also faulted the BJP for unnecessarily attacking Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, saying the strategy only helped in consolidating support for Congress and the Prime Minister. “By calling the Prime Minister weak, more publicity was given to him than he himself could arrange. It also resulted, for the first time, in the Congress announcing that so and so would be its Prime Ministerial candidate. This benefited the Congress and gave strength to Manmohan Singh,” he said.

Mishra said instead of running a highly negative campaign, the BJP should have concentrated in telling people how it could have performed better than the UPA government. “The negativeness was not liked. The BJP could have run a positive campaign and concentrated on telling people that it could have done much better on bijli, sadak, paani issues,” he said.