FE Editorial Bewildering Janata Party

The Financial Express
Posted: Jul 24, 2008 at 2225 hrs IST
Updated: Jul 24, 2008 at 2225 hrs IST

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It’s expulsion season now. The BJP has expelled eight MPs and the CPM has expelled Somnath Chatterjee. The CPM’s decision is unconscionable. It had not respected the constitutional nature of Chatterjee’s office and for it to now say that Chatterjee indulged in anti-party activities is proof how brutally unmindful Marxists can be of parliamentary norms. There’s also more than a touch of being bad losers in the CPM’s action. The BJP’s case is more interesting and, given that the party remains, unlike the CPM, a contender for power at the Centre, more important. LK Advani has sought to discipline his MPs and given the whip, his decision is far more technically defensible than the CPM’s. But politics is about more complicated things and the BJP leadership will be making a big mistake if it doesn’t admit to the root cause. The root cause is not buying of MPs, although that matter must be investigated thoroughly. It is the lack of finesse in the BJP’s policy paradigm.

The BJP won’t admit even now that its natural constituency and vote-bank supports strategic relations with the US; their claims of surrendering autonomy to test sounded hollow when Atal Behari Vajpayee had himself declared a moratorium on testing and when the UPA repeatedly assured Parliament that such autonomy was not being hampered in any way. The BJP’s anti-nuclear deal jihadi faction was thus acting against the party’s best instincts on foreign policy, which made some members uncomfortable. The BJP had a choice, a good one, given that elections weren’t too far away in any case: supporting the deal, advertising itself as a mature and consistent political outfit, and campaigning against the UPA on other issues. Anti-incumbency, as the BJP should know from its own bitter experience of 2004, plays a very important role in deciding outcomes of elections in India. But the 2004 defeat seemed to have curdled the BJP’s policy brain. Post-defeat, it opposed VAT, which it had started working on while in government; it didn’t help pass the patent Bill, work on which had started during the NDA’s term; it frequently made noises about high GDP growth being a mirage; and, generally made everyone forget that the BJP could be admirably liberal on economic policy. Expelling these blunders, rather than MPs, will make the BJP a better party.