The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seems to be taking one mis-step after another. First, it was its opposition to the civil nuclear deal with the US, where the party argued that it would not accept any constraints on India’s right to conduct more nuclear tests. In doing so, the BJP ignored the point that India does retain the right to test under special circumstances. Also, it presumably hopes that the country will not remember that its own leaders had been willing to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — Mr Vajpayee said as much in the UN General Assembly. Now the party has taken the next mis-step of declaring that it will not lend a helping hand to the government for passing any legislation that will take forward the process of economic reform — thereby signalling a new degree of hostility to the government (which may be understandable) but also indicating that it cares two hoots for the national interest. When the NDA was in office, Arun Shourie had argued that a party sitting in the opposition benches should adopt the policy of not opposing any step that it would have taken if it were in office. That precept has obviously been given the go-by.
As if these aren’t bad enough, the party has gone to the absurd length of suggesting that the recent bomb blasts are the handiwork of the government — which (according to the BJP) seeks to divert attention from the scandal of bribing MPs! Indeed, the party’s response to the blasts has been to harp once again on the need for tougher anti-terrorist laws, forgetting entirely the sorry record of what happened when such laws were in place: terrorist attacks continued, and the police used laws like Tada (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities) and Pota (Prevention of Terrorism) to harass people who had nothing to do with terrorism. It is therefore time to ask, what has gone wrong with the BJP? For here is a party that has won many state elections and parliamentary by-elections. It has a senior leader as its prime ministerial candidate, and it has the gift of inflation with which to beat the government.
Yet, the party has made little use of its opportunities, and allowed Ms Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party to become the focus of anti-government polarisation in the run-up to the trust vote last week. It has lost allies like Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam, while it has been unable to guard its own flock, eight of whom have now been thrown out of the party for disobeying the whip — reducing its strength in the Lok Sabha to 119, the lowest in 12 years. Suddenly, the BJP looks like a bunch of rudderless losers.
If the party hopes to pull itself out of this morass, it has to redefine its mission, conscious of the fact that it has been unable to expand its vote base from the level achieved in the wake of the Babri Masjid’s demolition. In short, it has to move closer to the centre of national thinking. The party can go blue in its face talking about the Congress’s pseudo-secularism, but it is only those Hindus who don’t like Muslims that see the BJP’s ideology as a reasonable one. As the party’s vote share of 23 per cent shows, that is not enough. If the party hopes to return to office, it needs allies, and that means giving up its so far divisive brand of nationalism and adopting a more inclusive version — of the kind that would have endorsed the nuclear agreement. If it fails in this task, it will sit in the opposition benches till 2014.
