N-deal to FDI: why does the BJP again junk its instinct?and its strength?
Once again, just as the build-up to a fresh national election begins, the BJP has pulled the loser?s cap on to its own head, rediscovering its nuclear deal moment. To be so stupid for the second time within four years needs special talent.
Even BJP leaders ruefully admitted that the loss of the no-confidence motion over the nuclear deal allowed the UPA to neutralise the incumbency disadvantage in 2009. You could have gone to the polls claiming you were cheated through cash-for-votes in Parliament. But, for that, the underlying issue, the nuclear deal, had to have great emotional appeal. It turned out to be a dud. Even the fantasy that such a strategic alliance with the Americans would anger Muslims into dumping the Congress and its supporters was belied.
Why did the BJP repeat exactly the same blunder? Once again, it struck an entirely cynical alliance with political forces with which it has nothing to share but hostility. Simple logic suggests that you build new alliances and equations in the life of one parliament that expand your base and reach into the next election. Did the BJP/NDA achieve that by joining hands with Mayawati, the Left and even Ajit Singh, against the nuclear deal? It ended up, and inevitably so, fighting each one of these so-called allies in the 2009 election. The defeat over FDI indicates it learnt no lessons from that disaster.
Here is an idea. Trace the BJP?s history of post-2004 blunderings to one common fact: that it never accepted the 2004 loss with humility. From May 2004 onwards, therefore, it failed to build a political plan for a full five years in opposition. It has built, instead, a politics for each Parliament session. The central belief is the old one, that the UPA is about to collapse, just a case of ek dhakka aur do. That ?dhakka?, usually, would be something that pushes out one of the UPA?s fence-sitting allies. As a result, it has written off many Parliament sessions. And yet its target looks steadier than before, even with the loss of an ally, the TMC.
When the party was blocking the last monsoon session over the CAG report on coal allocation, I had gone to chat with some of the topmost BJP leaders. The analysis based on those conversations was published in National Interest (?Coal vs coalition? IE, August 25, http://goo.gl/53xi4). If you revisit that, you can easily see where the BJP has gone wrong. It had then calculated that the SP, TMC, and even Mayawati, were keen on an early election and would bring down the government in the winter session. Coal had also given them their first opportunity to target the prime minister. So they could take the corruption issue to an election in January-February 2013.
That hope is now belied. The BSP and SP have, instead, saved the government. And the UPA has been allowed to put coal and other scandals on the backburner, helped along by the BJP, which so quickly leapfrogged to retail FDI. Coal ceased to be a war cry as the winter session began. Retail FDI has now died as an issue midway through the same session. Mayawati was indulging in Lakhnavi euphemisms in calling this sour grapes. It is much worse.
Today?s aspirational India has no place for politics with such a lack of imagination and such boring predictability. Unless we see a dramatic turn in the weeks following the Gujarat election, it would seem that the BJP will again return to the next general election seeking a vote against the UPA rather than a positive mandate on the basis of a distinctive and competitively attractive agenda. It is because of this lack of imagination?and patience?that the only strategy it has had for nearly nine years now is to somehow bring down this government.
It started with Uma Bharti and Sushma Swaraj threatening extreme forms of self-flagellation, including shaving their heads, sleeping on the floor and eating parched gram if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister in 2004. This carried on. There was a ?strong? belief among the party?s higher counsels that the UPA would fall by October 2004. Why? Because their favourite ?bulls-eye? astrologer (somewhere in West Delhi) had said so. And then it continued on to the nuclear deal. In the current Parliament, one session was nearly written off by protests on FDI in retail (budget session, 2012) until Pranab Mukherjee announced a deferral, another was fully blocked by the demand for a JPC on telecom (winter session, 2010), yet another on coal, (monsoon session, 2012) and nearly half of the current one again on FDI.
The top 15 leaders of the BJP now are veterans in national politics. They are by no means intellectually challenged. Watch them in Parliament and in public debate, and they sound as good as any of their rivals, if not better. Yet, they allow a single agenda to drive their political responses: anti-Congressism. Driven by that one emotion, they even sacrifice (or suspend?) their essential ideology. On the nuclear deal as well as retail FDI, they made common cause with the Left. And how does it work in the end? Each time the BJP joins hands with the Left, it is suspending the key elements of its own essential ideology?pro-Americanism, on the nuclear deal (who but Vajpayee?s NDA first had the courage to call America a strategic ally, reversing five decades of the Nehruvian worldview), and free market championship, on FDI in retail. In each case, the Left could justify embracing the BJP because it was only bringing some most unlikely converts into its ideological tent. The BJP was going out on a limb, totally confusing its core voter. That is one of the reasons it was so thoroughly rejected in 2009 in all the major cities where it had hoped to win. The last thing a loyal BJP voter wants is to see his party as the B-team of the Left.
It is not as if the BJP has nothing substantive to offer. It has won several new states and renewed its mandate in many. Its chief ministers are, by and large, the most efficient and effective in the country. They even have a stellar record in implementing anti-poverty schemes?including MGNREGA. Their states have been, by and large, scandal-free. The party could build a story around these successes, along with modern, new, reformist ideas on the economy, foreign policy, national security. It has squandered nine years. Now its stalwarts can only wait for the formality of the Gujarat election results, and the inevitable rise of Narendra Modi. The story will then resume with an entirely new twist.
sg@expressindia.com