A BJP-shaped hole

The BJP’s inner turmoil continues to completely pre-occupy the party. As a result, it can summon neither the time nor the political energy to play the role in which it has been cast ever since it lost the mandate to rule — of an opposition that works, in Parliament and outside it. As crucial issues of public interest come and fade away, it appears that the party has lost the instinct and the gut to engage with them and to influence public opinion on them. A case in point is the sparse attendance in Parliament — this paper spotted some 16-odd BJP MPs — the day it left it to Kalyan Singh to initiate the discussion on the crucial National Rural Employment Guarantee Bill in Lok Sabha. As for putting the Manmohan Singh government on the mat, the Left does a far more committed job of that anyway. To be sure, the BJP continues to be a newsmaker, but not for its articulate and decisive interventions in our political life. It courts the headlines by the sensational ferment in its backrooms.

The suspension of Madan Lal Khurana is a significant moment in the BJP, therefore, even though this isn’t all to do with Khurana himself. The veteran’s bid to exhort his party president to shame and repentance over Narendra Modi’s role in the killings in Gujarat 2002, rings obviously insincere. If Gujarat and Modi were so much on his mind, what took him so long to say so? His citing of Jagdish Tytler’s exit from the Union council of ministers as the trigger for his own conscience is not persuasive either, given his known grousing against L.K. Advani in recent times for reasons that have nothing to do with Gujarat. Khurana’s defiance is only an inset in the larger picture that frames the BJP’s embarrassing disarray. It is one of the many faultlines that have opened up, personality-driven and ideological, and continue to gape. In no particular order, there’s the Sangh versus Advani with the bulk of the party poised uneasily in between, Keshubhai Patel versus Modi and VHP versus Modi in Gujarat, Uma Bharati versus Babulal Gaur in Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Munda versus some of the ministers in his own government in Jharkhand, and the second rung pitched against itself generally.

This is a tragic disarray. By being so overwhelmingly busy with itself, the BJP does the nation a disservice. It is time it recovered its equilibrium and retrieved the political initiative. The nation awaits a functioning party of the opposition.