(The Daily Star, January 04, 2007)

by Praful Bidwai writes from New Delhi

If there's one organisation in India, which can pretend that it always lays down the agenda, it's the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). At its national council meeting in Lucknow, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee exhorted it to win the coming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections as a prelude to returning to power nationally.

BJP leaders themselves manufactured this pretence and highlighted the issue of who would lead the party in the next general election.

Mr LK Advani set the ball rolling when he told a TV interviewer that he should be the BJP's next prime minister; yet he doesn't expect Mr Vajpayee to nominate him. Soon, Messrs MM Joshi and Rajnath Singh, anointed BJP president for three years, also threw their hats into the ring.

Mr Singh used colorful, semi-rustic imagery, of baratis (the bridegroom's party) only waiting to carry the bride, satta ki sundari (deity of power) to Delhi.

Meanwhile, Mr Narendra Modi strutted around as if he were Mr Vajpayee's successor, being the only senior second-generation leader to wield state power.

However, it's preposterous to regard the issue of BJP leadership in 2009 as relevant. One must be irrationally exuberant to be convinced that the BJP will probably come to power in the next election.

At Lucknow, the BJP returned to hard-line Hindutva, focusing on "Muslim appeasement" via the Sachar Committee report. There were raucous warnings about India's "second partition," appeals for a Ram temple at Ayodhya, and a berating reference to India's Hindus as "second-class citizens." Leaders spewed venom on Muslims and hysterically opposed a Kashmir "sell-out."

The BJP is desperate for an electoral "magic wand." It has been in steep decline since its 2004 defeat. Its performance in several by-elections, loss of power in Jharkhand, and demoralization of state units all point to this -- not to speak of Pramod Mahajan's fratricide, and backward-caste (OBC) leader Uma Bharati's defection. It is only in urban Uttar Pradesh that the BJP has registered (modest) gains. During the recent municipal elections, it won eight of 12 mayoral positions. (It had won six in 2001.) In smaller towns it was defeated by the Samajwadi Party.

This was no triumph. The elections weren't representative because the Bahujan Samaj Party, UP's number two, didn't contest them. It backed select candidates, including many from the BJP, to defeat the SP.

The BJP benefited both from the anti-incumbency against Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, and the communal polarization triggered by recent events. (For instance, Minister Haji Yakub offered Rs 50 crores to kill the Danish cartoonist who ridiculed Prophet Mohammed).

There's a strange confluence of interests between the BJP and SP. The harder Mr Yadav tries to woo Muslims (who are suspicious of him), the more the upper-caste Hindu shifts towards the BJP. Mr Yadav offered 5-star hospitality in Lucknow to the BJP brass; they accepted it.

Yet, the BJP's moderate gains can, at best, only partially offset its long downslide. Its assembly strength has plummeted from the 1991 peak of 221 (of 419 seats) to just 88 (of 403).

The BJP should know that Sachar isn't Shah Bano (a 1984 Congress attempt to please Muslim religious hardliners.) The Sachar Report is a serious, solidly documented analysis of anti-Muslim discrimination. It pleads for pluralism -not sectarianism.

It's unlikely that the "appeasement" card will work given the present national mood, which favors integration, inclusion and equity. There's widespread support for peace with Pakistan and a border settlement and cooperation with China.

The Ayodhya plank won't sell. As the Sangh Parivar's own countless futile attempts to organize yatras on the issue show, the public isn't interested in it.

The BJP's return to hard-line Hindutva represents a terrible retrogression. It's not in the interest of democracy and pluralism that India's largest opposition party should embrace such a narrow, divisive, communal agenda.

In line with this ideological-political shift, the BJP has also executed an organisational shift. It has amended its constitution so all its secretaries at the national and state levels are pracharaks (full-time RSS propagandists).

Mr Rajnath Singh has further strengthened RSS influence - not least because he lacks a strong independent base. The RSS, in turn, is only too happy that it can revive the three contentious issues -Ram Temple, Uniform Civil Code, and Article 370 - which were put on hold for dishonourable reasons of "expediency."

The Lucknow conclave leaves the BJP's structural crisis unresolved. Ideologically, the party is trapped between orthodox, Islamophobic, Hindutva typical of small-town traders on the one hand, and pro-globalisation Big Business on the other.

Politically, it's divided between Hindutva, and opportunistic electoral alliances. Organisationally, it remains completely dependent on the parivar.

As this column has argued, the BJP's ascendancy from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s was founded on three mutually reinforcing factors. First, the Congress's long-term decline owing to its compromises with communalism and market fundamentalism. This, coupled with the Left's stagnation after the Soviet Union's collapse, shifted India's political spectrum Rightwards.

Second, the Ayodhya mobilisation in the late 1980s allowed Hindutva to percolate, and the BJP to break out of its narrow upper-caste Hindu-Hindi belt confines. And third, the party's "social engineering," of combining "Mandal" with "Kamandal" (Hindutva), won it OBC support.

None of these factors operates today. The Congress has revived itself. The Left has expanded. Regional parties with subaltern agendas have grown. And the centre of gravity of Indian politics has shifted leftwards. Social justice has displaced Ayodhya.

The BJP is disoriented by all this. Until recently, it was in outright denial of its 2004 defeat. It still lacks a political strategy -and leadership.

Its president is a narrow-minded provincial politician, who isn't even remotely acquainted with the India that's outside the Hindi belt.

Lurking behind him is Mr Narendra Milosevic Modi, who, sadly, enjoys a high level of acceptance within the BJP as its de facto number two leader.

The BJP is caught between such appalling aspiring leaders, and geriatrics out-of-sync with reality. This is an unenviable state.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.