Secularisation of the BJP

VALUE FOR MONEY

Manmohan Singh famously said during the Harshad Mehta phase of stock market volatility that he would not lose any sleep over what happened on the stock market.

He was roundly condemned for this and had to carry some of the blame for the negative fallout of the volatility which was blamed on his indifference.

India's present rulers cannot be accused of any such neglect. They are trying their best to add to the hype, without actually being seen to be ramping up the market, by referring to the feel good factor in an approving manner.

This is the election season and to paraphrase an Indianism, the bottomline is 'ideology no bar'. Everything goes and anything that can even remotely bring in votes is grist to the mill. The most spectacular burial is of the one ideological issue that matters to the BJP, the Ram mandir.

On the face of it, this is technically correct. Building the Ram mandir is the BJP's agenda, which must give way to the NDA agenda. The latter, with socialist pseudo-secularists like George Fernandes at the helm, will naturally have none of the mandir stuff.

However, there is also the lesson to be learnt from the last round of Assembly elections in which the BJP is seen to have done well by underplaying its communal agenda and playing up the governance issue against the incumbents.

The secularisation of the BJP, in the worldly sense of the word, is indeed remarkable. Otherwise, how else would a person like Govind Acharya find no place in it and a person like Pramod Mahajan emerge as one if its most successful managers.

Perhaps the most eye catching is the sight of L K Advani welcoming the idea of the Dalai Lama mediating a negotiated settlement of the mandir issue.

It would be difficult to realise from his phraseology, which sought to draw a distinction between the government, of which he is a part, and those who launched a movement for a Ram temple at Ayodhya, that it was he who had gone round the country at the head of a rathyatra that made the mandir the main plank for the BJP.

Right on cue, the CBI has decided not to go in appeal against the court decision to discharge Advani from the conspiracy case over the demolition of the Babri masjid. All that now remains to be done is for a cartoonist to depict Advani telling an interlocutor, "Mandir, what mandir.?"

It would be comforting to think that secular issues have won over communal issues. But it would be more realistic to see current developments as a choice of strategy, instead of a change of heart.

Narendra Modi is there and will definitely campaign, depending on the mood and mindset of individual constituencies. Sanyasin Uma Bharati will be able to effortlessly switch back to her traditional stance as soon as the party managers see fit.

With hindsight it is possible to say that Digvijay Singh has got his just deserts. This is what happens when you try to steal your opponent's political colours.

If voters are angry over the state of roads and power, then they are hardly likely to change their minds because he has joined the bandwagon to ban cow slaughter. How much nobler it would have been for him to have stuck to issues like rural and tribal empowerment and ensuring a primary school in every village.

There are other instances which highlight how much this has become a season for political opportunism. First is the old red herring, the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi, being drawn across the path of the voter.

This issue is raised and put on the backburner depending on the mood and need of the hour. If the party managers have diagnosed that resurrecting it will do no harm and may well win a few votes, then why not.

The second is the on again off again game that has been played with the timing of the elections. If you declare the agenda for the elections and the pre-electoral process is set in motion, then you can hardly keep announcing administrative goodies to try and win votes.

Hence the excruciating process of first loud thinking, then the NDA deciding, to do what? "" Not hold elections "" that would be too quick "" but to authorise Vajpayee to take a decision in the matter! Then finally, after the goodies are announced, the BJP recommends early elections.

It is reassuring to remember that Rajiv Gandhi's decision to organise a shilanyas at Ayodhya did not win the day for him.Neither did Narasimha Rao's version of soft Hindutva "" fiddling while the mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed "" or the goodies he announced from the Red Fort in 1993 by keeping Manmohan Singh out of the picture.

It is comforting that pre-election goodies do not swing votes either way. The average voter, who does not read a newspaper and has no idea of what the stock market is, makes up his mind instinctively, on the basis of things that matter to him, like law and order and the prices of things.

On both these, the Vajpayee government is currently seen to be doing none too badly, helped no doubt partly by the gods correctly sequencing the good and bad monsoons.

It has also helped itself no end by putting in place a finance minister who both raises comfort levels and has an instinctive feel for positive actions that make for good policy, unlike his predecessor who had a genius for the opposite. The cardinal and most immediate example of this is the main elements of the just announced mini-Budget.

Last fortnight this column had argued for letting the rupee float up so as to curb import costs and put a damper on inflation. Jaswant Singh has done better "" he has cut import duties drastically, resulting in the same lowering of import costs.

If such good policy can be the stuff of pre-election goodies, then he must be asked to play on. More fundamentally, if the BJP will cease to be communal, then who can have anything against it. But conclusive evidence of that is still far away.

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