When the second rung is silent, the first must speak out. BJP president, L.K. Advani, has already done so, when he stated in his closing address to the party executive at Chennai that if the BJP has to grow organically, it would need to be autonomous. The impression that the party is tied to the RSS’s apron strings does neither organisation any good, he remarked.That not one luminary from the party’s next generation found the courage to agree with him can only be explained in terms of the politics of opportunism. It also signals that the umbilical cord between the party and its mentors in Nagpur remains intact. Nobody who aspires to an important role in the party’s future would wish to blot his or her copybook vis-a-vis the RSS. So they have kept mum and hope to survive for the Big Fight in the days to come. Given this situation, it requires those persons who are not in the race for power and who have come to occupy positions of moral authority within the party, to speak up. That is what Atal Bihari Vajpayee did in his address at the BJP headquarters in Delhi on Sunday. He named no names, but his message went all the way to Nagpur.“Our friends”, he said, “have made an attempt to limit the thought process”. Here is a recognition that politics is not just about the pragmatic exercise of power, or strategies to get to it. It is also about ideas and the free exercise and articulation of those ideas. This process, as Vajpayee pointed out, must be open-ended, since it is an evolving phenomenon. What the former PM pitted himself against was the tendency to fit politics into ideological straitjackets. His was a reminder to his party men and women that there is life beyond the unthinking pursuit of power.
