The struggle for BJP's soul

Prem Shankar Jha

The Hindustan Times: March 12, 2004

On March 8 Mr. L.K.Advani admitted that the riots in Gujarat were a blot on the six year record of the NDA government in maintaining communal peace, and the media jumped to attention! Had Advani, the Hindutwa hawk, turned dove? Was he going against his party line, and if so why? Was he making these moderate noises because he considers himself the heir apparent to Atal Behari Vajpayee? Could this be simply be another ploy to woo the minorities and the uncommitted middle vote away from the Congress? Or was this the real Advani, whom the media had so far failed to see? Such speculation personalises politics and obscures the working of historical forces and the evolution of political systems. It is not Mr. Advani who has changed, but India. Mr. Advani has understood the change and has adapted his political style to it.

To see how well he has done this one needs to compare the man of today with the one who led the Ratha yatra to Ayodhya in 1990. Mr. Advani has never made any secret of the fact that he is a Hindu nationalist. But the nationalism he has espoused is cultural. He has always maintained that India is culturally a Hindu country. He has asked Muslims to accept this as a straightforward historical fact, and maintained that many of the communal tensions that bedevil the nation would disappear if they did so. In line with this belief, he supported the agitation to build a Rama temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. But he wanted Muslim organisations to make a gift of the site to the Hindus and agree to shift the Masjid, brick by brick, to another , mutually determined site. He felt that this was a reasonable request because while the site had no special importance for Islam, it was of profound importance to Hindus. Had the leaders of various Muslim organisations accepted this plan the history of the country would have been very different.

Mr. Advani owes his reputation as a Hindutwa hawk to that Yatra. But in fact all he did was to take advantage of a political opening that no one could have foregone. Gujarat has highlighted the Achilles heel of the party. It is to their credit that despite Modi's victory neither of them gave up the struggle to secularise the BJP. In the last year they have reaffirmed Hinduism's innately secular nature, and India's pluralism from countless platforms; they have put Modi firmly back in the Gujarat box, and marginalised the VHP. They have done this in the teeth of a second rung leadership that is openly anti-Muslim and openly authoritarian. They have done this not only because it is the right political strategy for winning the elections, but also because they sense that India has changed in fundamental ways.

Today the middle class has tasted the first blessings of a consumer society and wants more of it. More and more of its members have begun to regard struggles over Ayodhya , or a uniform civil code, or article 370, as atavistic and hurdles to progress. Vajpayee and Advani are responding to this feeling. The true purpose of the "India is shining" campaign and Mr. Vajpayee's determined overtures to Pakistan is to make people look squarely towards the future. The success of this strategy could harden the secular mould. Defeat could have the opposite result by discrediting both Vajpayee and Advani. The fate of Indian democracy therefore still hangs in the balance.