The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was born in 1980, as a new avatar of the old Jana Sangh—whose leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya had died unexpectedly in 1969. In the 40 years since then, the party’s two stalwarts have been Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani. Mr Vajpayee is now out of politics, while Mr Advani has been given a fresh five-year term as leader of the BJP’s parliamentary party in the Lok Sabha. The post-election situation cries out for new leadership but Mr Advani will lead the party’s campaign in the 2014 parliamentary elections, by when he will be 86 years old. With the Congress almost certain to project Rahul Gandhi (by then 44) as its leader, there must be serious questions asked about what actually went on during the three days of the chintan baithak in Shimla. What were they thinking?
The Jaswant Singh affair, shabby as it has been, has done no credit to the BJP. Mr Singh may be a lightweight politically (else he would not have run to Darjeeling for a constituency), but he is a senior leader of the party. His book may have made no great revelations, and offered no new insights, but it is also clear that there was nothing in it that merited the author being expelled from the party and the book being banned in Gujarat. Was there a threat to law and order in the state, that Narendra Modi felt he could not control? Was Mr Singh’s crime so great that he could not be given a show-cause notice and then a fair hearing? In the absence of any credible answers (Sardar Patel being the issue cannot be a serious proposition), credence must be given to the theories that have to do with party in-fighting.
Two theories have been offered: Vasundhara Raje Scindia refused to step down in Rajasthan until Mr Singh, her bête noire, was also penalised. And second, an outfit known in the past for its internal discipline had to assert leadership control in order to stop dissidence. Two other critics of post-election moves in the party, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie, were not invited to Shimla. Mr Singh was a third critic and he too has now been dealt with. After Mr Advani, these three were the party’s most important ministers in the Vajpayee government, while a fourth (Pramod Mahajan) is dead. Observers have suggested that a younger, more hardline leadership is asserting itself. If so, what does it say of the position of the person who has survived the carnage, Mr Advani?
If anyone in the BJP thinks that dissidence is about to end because of these actions, he is mistaken. Mr Advani is simply not a credible candidate for prime minister in 2014. The others occupying key positions now have a history of rivalries (Rajnath Singh vs Arun Jaitley vs Sushma Swaraj), and Mr Modi waits in the wings. Two of these four, along with Mr Advani, have been in the line of fire when it comes to analysing the election results, so the situation is tailor-made for subterranean skirmishing—which usually lasts a while before matters come to a head.
Mr Advani has compared the Shimla session to the Palanpur session of 1989, when the BJP decided to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya. No decision of even remotely comparable import seems to have been taken at Shimla. Mr Advani has also said that the party has to reach out to its allies; the question is, with what agenda? From whichever angle one sees it, the BJP is still consumed by internal tensions among party leaders, and not focused on the external challenge of a sharply reduced vote base.
