After the Change

The leadership change in the BJP has come at a time when the party is mired in a deep crisis and needs a meaningful anchorage. Rajnath Singh’s lacklustre stewardship had had the party pay a very heavy cost, while its prime ministerial candidate, LK Advani, belonged to an entirely different generation and seemed a total stranger to the youth as they cast their votes for the 15th Lok Sabha. Now that they are gone and we have Sushma Swaraj as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Nitin Gadkari as party president, will things change?  This will be a function of how Swaraj conducts herself in the House and take on the ruling Congress, and how Gadkari contributes to the organizational aspects of the party. Swaraj would do well to realize that personal attacks, as were evident during Advani’s direct tirade against Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, will take her — and the party — nowhere but to the image of a party whose leaders are incapable of raising issues that matter to the people, and therefore, of a party that cannot be accepted. Swaraj, then, needs to do a lot of homework. As for Gadkari, the task is far more gargantuan. An unheard-of leader and a choice more of the RSS than of the party, Gadkari’s first major task is that of public relations — image build-up. The country wants to know who he is, what he has in mind, and whether he has any alternative paradigm for the party to follow and succeed. More importantly, since he is young by Indian political standards, the youth would be eager to know what he has that can appeal to their aspirations. The next task for Gadkari is overhaul of party organization and infusion of democracy into it. It is here that he will be tested and it is the quality of his work on party organization that will define the BJP’s future course. Equally defining will be whether Gadkari can make the BJP evolve as a modern and progressive right-of-the-centre force that has its own pertinence to Indian democracy and which the BJP should have been able to capitalize on long ago. No one is asking the BJP to jettison its ideology of eulogizing Indian-ness — our rich tradition and ethos that have roots in a marvellous philosophy and the way of life that it has helped fashion. No one is asking the BJP to join the pseudo-secular bandwagon. What the people of the country expect — and let there be no doubt that they look for a strong and tangible opposition — of the BJP is a meaningful shift towards modernism. But what is modernism? It is not any pretentious policy course to hoodwink the people for short-term gains, but the way of responding to problems in a modern way and a vision that does not run counter to the 21st century; a modern BJP, for instance, would have a wholly radical approach to education, and it is education that could be its greatest plank to address the youth.

The issues that had led to the genesis of the BJP and its meteoric rise from just two seats in the Lok Sabha, have lost their sheen, replaced as they are by the ones that are crucial to the march of New India. It is not for nothing that the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry is so much in the news. After all, it concerns the education system. What has the BJP to offer here? And how willing is it to cast off the old cloth so that the youth may identify with the party? Both Swaraj and Gadkari face a daunting challenge.THE SENTINEL