Only Change can Save

The principal opposition party of the country, BJP, is in a very bad shape. Pretensions like the chintak baithak of Shimla, and that the road to recovery is well-defined and hence there is no confusion, are proving to be self-destructive. What happened in the chintak baithak? It started with the ‘‘both baseless and graceless’’ — to quote former party ideologue Sudheendra Kulkarni — exit shown to Jaswant Singh for having tried to un-demonize Jinnah and his role in the partition of the country, and ended with a dictatorial decree that in the immediate future ‘‘party discipline’’ must rank a precedence higher than soul-searching; that is, soul-searching can wait, but not punishment to dissenters. And who are these dissenters? Well-meaning, well-read, highly analytical souls like Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie. Where was any chintan then? From now on the BJP would do well to use more meaningful words to describe its conclaves. To call the Shimla baithak a chintan is to misuse the word chintan and to insult the sensible man in the party who is really into the business of deep chintan to save it from a premature death. It is not without reason, therefore, that leaders like Arun Shourie are disgusted by the style of functioning of the party and its top leadership. Launching a vitriolic attack on the party leadership on Monday, Shourie — the best intellectual face of the BJP — called the Rajnath Singh-LK Advani combine and their coterie ‘‘humpty-dumpty’’ and ‘‘Alice in Blunderland’’, and said that under that leadership the party had become a kati patang (a free-floating kite). He argued that the BJP was in need of a major surgery: ‘‘My prescription is jhatka (swift action and execution), not halal (slow action and execution). Saare, Saare (lock, stock and barrel). There should be a total transformation.’’ He said that party leaders were indulging in ‘‘mutual protection and projection’’.

Shourie is right. There are three things that the BJP needs to do immediately to rescue itself from the abyss it is sinking into. First, the top leadership must change, which means the likes of Rajnath Singh, who does not have any appeal in an increasingly young country, and Advani, whose time is up, must go and create vacancies for fresh blood to be drawn from the State level. If they continue to live in the illusory world that informs them very wrongly of their capabilities, they will only be writing an obituary to the party. Secondly, the party must precisely define what kind of relationship it wants to sustain with the RSS, without any pretence. And there must be enough freedom of thought therein — towards an explanation to the people as to why the saffron party cannot be completely independent of the Sangh. The people of the country will appreciate the BJP for being honest and explicit. And thirdly, and this can happen only when a new leadership begins to steer the party, it must explain to the people how the right-of-centre force is a party with a difference and how it is poised better than the Congress to govern the India of the 21st century. With the kind of ideas that the BJP has as of now, its reluctance to evolve with time, its inability to moderate a debate within the party on the possible modernist courses it could follow, and with a leadership that is so very anachronistic, the party can go nowhere. It will then be a huge tragedy for Indian democracy, for the days of Congress monopoly and authoritarianism will return in no time. THE SENTINEL