Despite being such a fraught and unpredictable profession, politics is full of clich?s, which, like most clich?s, have more than an element of truth in them. Last April saw Parliament?s Public Account Committee (PAC) chairman Dr Murli Manohar Joshi prove yet another clich? right?that it?s never too late to reinvent yourself in politics.
For years, Joshi had been the awkward third wheel to the Atal-Advani tag team in the BJP. While Vajpayee occupied the moderate slot, Advani was the hardliner, what did that make Joshi? Also a hardliner, with a professorial disdain for the less erudite among his colleagues. What he was valued for, despite all attempts to freeze him out, was his eye for detail and academic diligence in constructing an argument. Even senior ministers in the UPA government concede that Joshi?s intellect is formidable.
It was, therefore, less of a surprise in hindsight to realise that the 2G scam, a graveyard of reputations, would restore him to the bosom of his often cold party. Joshi started off as a favourite of the Congress and a pariah in his own as he soldiered on with the 2G investigation, often defying the party?s line of waiting for a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). By April, however, when Congressmen and the BJP realised what a powder keg the PAC report was turning out to be, the positions were reversed.
The BJP has embraced Joshi to the extent that he is the pivot of their anti-corruption campaign against the government. The party, in fact, needs to draw lessons from their senior leader, not just on what to do to become relevant again, but also what not to do.
The first lesson to be learnt is never veer from your domain expertise. Joshi, always referred to as ?Dr Joshi?, lest anybody forget the fact he is a former professor of physics, has never been a wildly popular leader. His core strength was intellect and academic application. He is cussed to boot. All qualities that he played up in his standoff with the Congress on the PAC report on the 2G scam.
The BJP?s core strength is its organisation, party workers who are willing to serve them even through a barren trek of being out of power. They need to be taken care of. The 2004 elections, which saw two-thirds of the NDA?s Union Cabinet lose elections, was lost because of the leadership?s arrogance vis-?-vis the party workers.
The other lesson to be drawn from Joshi quite simply is to know your audience. The 2G scam was dismissed by several Congress leaders as ?too complicated to be explained to the general public?. They thought this would be like the Indo-US nuclear deal, with barely an elite intellectual class understanding the intricacies of it and writing about it for the benefit of that class only. Joshi, however, understood that the issue, which saw a complicity between politicians, bureaucrats and big business, appealed to the middle class, the core audience of his party.
As TV grabs of big corporate honchos, the solicitor general and the CBI director waiting outside the committee room of Parliament were beamed across the country, it gave an impetus to a middle class rage against corruption.
In any reinvention, however, one thing is certain, you have to deal with what you have, and not what you wish was there. Joshi took the ball on 2G and kept running with it. He was, his colleagues say, determined to put out a report whether or not a JPC was granted on the issue. Now his party needs to show a little bit of that steely resolve, and his doggedness to wait out for that 15 minutes of fame promised by Andy Warhol.
nistula.hebbar@expressindia.com