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Even as the Congress walks gingerly
through a political minefield, fending off the Wikileaks exposures
while partially defusing the crises caused by the financial
swindles, the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) ability to make full
use of the opportunity to corner its principal opponent remains in
doubt.
All that the party seems capable of doing is to stall parliament by
uninhibited use of lung power. But, beyond that, it is unable to put
the government on the mat because of a divided leadership and lack
of moral authority.
While the Congress has managed to take some of the sting out of the
scams by agreeing to the opposition demand for a joint parliamentary
committee (JPC) probe, and is resorting to point blank denials of
the WikiLeaks charges, the BJP is aware that rhetorical flourishes
are its only weapon. It can neither cobble together a majority in
parliament to push through a no-confidence motion, nor is the
party's leadership united and charismatic enough to be able to
effectively mobilise public opinion.
The weakness of its position is the result of its own flawed
policies. While the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by it had
24 members at the height of its political power prior to the 2002
Gujarat riots, it now has a mere four - the BJP itself, its sole
saffron ally, the Shiv Sena, the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and the
Akali Dal.
However, there are faultlines even within the shrunken NDA. The JD-U,
for instance, follows its own counsel as when it kept Gujarat Chief
Minister Narendra Modi of the BJP out of the Bihar poll campaign
because of his anti-minority image. And the Shiv Sena did the same
when it refused to support the BJP veteran, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat,
for the president's post.
One reason why these parties have become so assertive is that the
BJP no longer has a leader of the stature of former prime minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee to keep the flock together. It is the absence
of someone at the helm whose popularity cuts across party lines
which explains the bluntness of the BJP's anti-Congress thrust. As a
result, it has to depend on shrill declamations, disruptive
parliamentary tactics and the need to regard the Wikileaks
revelations as gospel truth for the sake of its campaign.
Evidence of the fractures at the top was available when the party's
leader in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, and its leader in the Rajya
Sabha, Arun Jaitley, differed on how to respond to the prime
minister's acceptance of personal responsibility for controversial
bureaucrat P.J. Thomas' appointment as the central vigilance
commissioner, which has been nullified by the Supreme Court.
While Sushma Swaraj adopted a conciliatory forgive-and-forget
attitude towards Manmohan Singh, Jaitley did not want the matter to
rest. It cannot be said for certain whether this difference in
approach is due to the fact that Sushma Swaraj comes from a
non-saffron background, having joined the BJP in 1980 from the
Janata Party, while Jaitley is a diehard saffronite. But the fact
remains that such divergent views at the top do not show a party in
a favourable light.
What is more, the endorsement of the Jaitley line by party president
Nitin Gadkari shows that in-your-face combativeness remains a key
feature of the BJP's politics, evidently to buttress its self-image
of a "strong" party of nationalists as opposed to the weak,
minority-appeasing Congress.
However, this muscle-flexing would have made a better impression if
there wasn't another sign of "softness" and that, too, by none other
than L.K. Advani, the putative hardliner, when he apologised to
Sonia Gandhi for the charges of her family stashing away black money
abroad made by a team of BJP sympathisers.
Advani also exploded another bomb recently when he said that the
Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 had dented the party's
"credibility". Considering that his violence-prone rath yatra of
1990 pledged to do away with the "ocular provocation" - Advani's own
words - of the mosque, the admission that the promised act had
damaged the BJP's reputation showed that the party's divided
leadership was also disunited about its deeds.
The same confusion can be seen in the clumsy way the party has been
handling the case of its tainted Karnataka Chief Minister B.S.
Yeddyurappa. Gadkari's observation that Yeddyurappa's dubious land
deals were "immoral" but not illegal was an unconvincing exercise in
semantics, which suggested that the party's central leaders were
unable to act against a powerful state leader. The corruption
charges against the chief minister have also taken the sheen out of
the BJP's propaganda drive against the Congress for the same
offence.
For the BJP to pose a credible challenge to the Congress, it has to
straighten out the leadership tangles at the top, which have emerged
because the presence of the Vajpayee-Advani duo for many years
stunted the growth of others. For a party claiming to be "strong",
this deficiency is politically fatal. Modi could fit the bill, but
his anti-minority image is a disadvantage. The BJP's fractiousness,
therefore, will help the Congress to survive for the foreseeable
future.
(Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be reached
at aganguli@mail.com)
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