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BJP tears itself apart, so why
should we be interested?
Sach Kanwal
Singh
 By
now, the facts are all out. Or at least the obvious ones are.
Tottering at the
edge of oblivion after its defeat in India's general elections,
tearing itself apart but refusing to engage with the reasons for
getting its nose bloody for a second consecutive time, the
right-wing ultra-nationalist Hindutva-spewing Bhartiya Janata Party,
a pivotal member of the Sangh Parivar, was hit by a book written by
one of its senior leaders currently out of favour.
On cue, the
chorus went up, and Jaswant Singh was thrown out of the party.
Another out-of-favour pen-pusher intellectual Sudheendra Kulkarni,
the man behind the unsavoury sting operation that resulted in
currency wads making it to Lok Sabha at the time of a crucial vote
of confidence, felt enraged to leave the party. Good for him since
he had little to do in the party anyway.
Next to speak
out was Arun Shourie, a man of great personal integrity and wide
reading but with problematic views on a range of issues and gravely
out of sync with the understanding of ethos and aspirations of
minorities, dalits and other marginalised people. Sidelined within
the party and ignored despite his provocative articles in the media,
Shourie found no one was picking up his line; so he crafted a few
clever ones, called the BJP leader Humpty Dumpty, compared the party
to a kite cut loose, and laughed heartily on TV after calling his
party boss Alice In Blunderland.
He knew no one
in Blunderland puts Humpty Dumpty back again, but was satisfied at
having created enough grist for the media mill where he came from.
Minor side shows
continue on the margins. A leader in Rajasthan asked to resign
taunts by resisting, a Yashwant Sinha sitting farther away from the
core of the party bides his time to attack. And every few minutes,
BJP chgief Rajnath Singh has to check out his authority, second
guessing how much has he lost.
These, then, are
the obvious facts. Now for some others.
Because of BJP's
troublesome parentage, communal core, hatred agenda and highly
casteist structure and style of functioning, the party has been
hogging the Right of Center space in Indian polity but has failed to
emerge as a genuine right winger because of its parochial agenda.
With an anti-Muslim face, anti-minority agenda, anti-Pakistan
brouhaha, and with little differentiating it from the Congress
except the form, the BJP has for long blocked the emergence of a
genuine right wing force in India. The Left already stands
vanquished, and the centrist Congress tilts opportunistically to
left, right and every which way to become a party that means all
things to all people, which, effectively, means little to anyone but
keeps it in power.
The TINA factor
keeps bringing it back, when not consecutively, then spasmodically.
If you prefer, call it erratically.
But there is
another side to what has been happening in the BJP and will, by all
available signs, continue to happen for some more time to come.
Inner party
democracy in India is almost a fancy idea, a luxury that mainstream
parties claim they simply cannot afford. In the Congress, the top
brass is not just called High Command, it even has an address that
happens to be the house number and street on which Sonia Gandhi
lives: 10, Janpath. It was the BJP and the Left that had some
semblance of inner party dissent and views, but increasingly that is
on the wane.
The latest
fracas, notices, expulsions and show cause notices in the BJP
underline the party's discomfort with the idea of inner party
democracy, but the shrill voices from senior leaders show that there
is still some fight going on. Unfortunately, most political
observers think the Congress has nothing to learn from the Tom and
Jerry show now on in the saffron camp. As for the Akalis where inner
party democracy was murdered long back by father-son duo of Badals,
no one has even started talking about the basis of an alliance with
a party that is in principle opposed to even the unique identity of
the Sikhs, the idea of Sikhs being a separate Quom, and has never
been in sync with Sikh political aspirations.
The Humpty
Dumpty in the Akali Dal have ruled for so long and there are not
even enough men left who commanded enough personal integrity and
could critique the party functioning.
As the Indian
prime time comedy cum tragedy show space is hogged by the BJP’s
shenanigans, and ghosts of India’s Partition are being summoned from
the grave to help boost an argument here, a slimy invective there,
the Akali Dal is blissfully staying away from the debate even though
the outcome of the many actions of personalities under question
decided forever the fate of a large section of the Sikh community.
As the Jinnah
djinn hovers over the BJP and his shadow lurks beneath the surface
of India’s collective memory, the Sikh community too cannot help but
revisit the horrors of Partition. That the Hindu fundamentalists are
tearing themselves and each other apart are no reason why we should
not engage with knowledge production processes that have over the
years created a romantic self-serving idea of a pantheon of
so-called freedom fighters like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, arrogated
to themselves brilliant sons of the soil like Baba Ambedkar and
demonized Jinnah as being responsible for the division of India
while completely and steadily obliterating the role and sacrifice of
Sikhs.
The fact that
the sub-continental memory is forever singed by a carnage, the
uprooting of 14.5 million walking through 500,000 bodies and the
burden of a traumatic memory besides the political mythology built
around it, is what must force us to engage with the other layers of
debate that neither Congress will be interested in, nor the BJP can
afford to bring to the fore.
26
August 2009
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