After the electoral verdict that saw the Bharatiya Janata Party’s strength in the Lok Sabha decline by about 15 per cent, to just 116 seats (its lowest tally in two decades), Lal Krishna Advani did what defeated leaders usually do—offer to step down as the leader of the BJP’s parliamentary party. Mr Advani has now been persuaded to stay on by (among others) the party president, Rajnath Singh. In the absence of an obvious successor, the hopefuls had started tossing their hats in the ring, notably Murli Manohar Joshi. The prospect of a bitter contest for the succession may have persuaded Mr Advani to continue. But this only postpones an issue that the BJP will have to face before long: 40 years of being led by the duo of Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Advani are coming to an end, and a new party leadership has to emerge.
Tied to the succession is the question of what direction the party should take at a time when the party has seen its vote share drop to barely 18 per cent, a good 10 percentage points short of the Congress score. The options are to move to a centrist position and soften its Hindutva line in order to win over more allies, so that the limitations of the party’s vote base can be overcome; or play to its core support base by emphasising the party’s point of difference with the Congress and others, on the secularism issue, and indeed to seek polarisation on this count. Opinion aired during the election campaign was that Narendra Modi would be Mr Advani’s natural successor; it goes without saying that this could push the party into emphasising a more aggressive Hindutva line. That in turn would risk the party losing allies like the Janata Dal (United), after having already lost the Telugu Desam and the Biju Janata Dal.
It must be presumed that there would be a stream of opinion within the party that would be uncomfortable at this prospect. For, the more the party base gets fired up by provocative statements from people like Varun Gandhi and Mr Modi, the more it alienates people who might otherwise think of voting for the BJP. Mr Gandhi has swept a polarised Pilibhit, but the party has done poorly in Uttar Pradesh. Indeed, even in Mr Modi’s Gujarat, the difference between the BJP vote and the Congress vote is barely 3 percentage points.
Besides which, the Congress has changed the nature of the game by reaching out to young voters and by aligning itself firmly behind a pro-poor agenda. The BJP has no coherent response to either challenge, and in some senses it looks just now like a party that has run out of ideas. It has lost faith in the political appeal of a market-oriented reform agenda after seeing the success of the “aam aadmi” programme cobbled together by the Congress. And it has no known faces with whom young voters might identify. The leadership question therefore gets subsumed into the larger issue of how the party wishes to define itself for the future. Mr Modi has been emphasising his administrative abilities, and the party has sought (without much success) to take ownership of the national security issue. It needs to do more thinking and careful articulation, for only then can it hope to present a credible response to the challenge posed by a rejuvenated Congress.