When old gladiators battle, the ground no longer trembles. It becomes a sad joke that signals the beginning of the end. Small wonder then, I woke up to comic spectacle last week when Hindutva’s old warriors Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani took their slugfest over an existential dilemma to the akhara that has come to symbolise their party. Take this from me, the curtains are coming down on the Bharatiya Janata Party. And they are coming down too fast for comfort. Shed no tears for that. It had to happen. The mukhota had to slip off the mukh one day.
Come to think of it, sacking Madan Lal Khurana and then restoring party membership to him on the rebound can hardly be a pointer to which way the BJP will go from here. Neither can Narendra Modi’s continuance as the chief minister of Gujarat decide the party’s fate, for that matter. Strongman Modi still keeps harping on what his party once stood for, even as the world around him has changed. It is not quite an issue either, which way Lal Krishna Advani may be headed. He has a rock-solid wall behind him. And an exit door ahead. As for Atal Behari? Well, the future has only so much space for a footnote to someone who is has-been.
So, who steps in next?
If you ask me, BJP has no choice. It has faces that don’t matter, and names that don’t count. Except, perhaps, when you are electing candidates to the managing committee for organising neighbourhood bhandaras. For, you don’t win votes flexing muscles of backroom boys of the likes Arun Jaitley and Pramod Mahajan. And, in times of peace, you can’t deploy an army of rabble rousers of the likes of Uma Bharti and Sushma Swaraj. Leaders win votes when they connect with the masses. It’s true that BJP, for whatever its stance, found that connect in the leadership of a Vajpayee and an Advani. But all that is history now. Everybody who is somebody in the sangh parivaar knows it’s time for the Vajpayee-Advani combo to make way. And that message gets conveyed day after day. The problem is the parivaar hasn’t thrown up a leader who can connect with the nextgen masses. Because the nextgen doesn’t believe in empty promises. Which is why, the future looks bleak for the party. And the present remains hostage to vested interests from the past.
Why did the party come to such a pass? Because, it vested all its energies in kicking up dust from the past. Five years in power in New Delhi was a long innings for the BJP to make good perceived historical wrongs. But having ridden the Ram rath to power, it abandoned whatever virtues it saw in promising the Ram temple it stood for. It took the BJP to tug at Lord Rama’s apron strings to come to power, riding the passions of a people they divided when they had otherwise no reason to bicker about.
But then, you can fool some people for some time. You can’t fool everybody forever. And the voters are no fools in perpetual waiting for nirvana. So, there’s no second time coming for geriatrics who had been promising the heaven for much too long.
For a party or an institution to remain relevant in the present, it needs to invest its energies in the future. The BJP miserably failed at this even when it saw the writing on the wall. No doubt, it was routed the last time at the hustings.
Now, look at the Congress. For all its historical wrongdoing, the party’s invested in the future. And I am not talking of the second rung leaders that man the present government. Everybody is aware that Manmohan Singh is only a stop gap captain to steer the Congress’ boat on an even keel. And a Kamal Nath here and a Chidambaram there are the necessary ifs and buts of governance. The Congress has its moorings in dynastic politics. That can never be in question. But it also helps when dynasties connect with the masses, so that a Jawaharlal Nehru makes way for an Indira Gandhi today and a Rajiv Gandhi makes way for a Rahul Gandhi tomorrow. Yet, dynastic politics apart, the more you look at the Congress of the future, the more it looks a youthful enterprise where the party has pegged its future appeal on the inheritors of political legacies in the Scindias and Pilots and Prasads. Man for man, if you look at it, the Congress has a face for the future whenever the elections are held next. The BJP is still debating how best Mr Advani can replace himself.
If you look at it the way I do, a party born out of the politics of hate could have only so much of venom to carry it the distance. For far too long, the BJP lived by its swear words to justify its raison d’etre. Now, those swear words are coming back to haunt the party itself. You don’t know who’s right, who’s wrong. You don’t know if Jinnah was indeed the true Mahatma when Mr Advani takes it upon himself to correct another historical wrong.
And even if you do, who cares?
Today never really saw yesterday, but it can certainly anticipate tomorrow...
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