Newspapers are having a field day over the Haren Pandya controversy as headlines announce that Narendra Modi has already ‘won’ — at least in Gujarat’s Ellisbridge, where he has ensured that his bete noire within the party has been denied a ticket. While Modi may indeed have ‘won’, there can be no denying that the BJP has lost, and badly at that, in terms of its image as a disciplined party. Having allowed Modi to assume almost superhuman proportions by condoning his every action, even when it went against all established canons, the BJP now finds itself held hostage to the man’s limitless ego. There is more than a little delusion in BJP party president, Venkaiah Naidu rushing to pronounce that ‘with Pandya opting out’ everything is hunky dory once again for the party in Gujarat. While Pandya, by losing out on a chance to contest from a seat where he seems to enjoy a fair amount of popular support, has paid the price for this capitulation to Modi in the short term, the BJP will certainly do so in the long term. This is because the issue impinges on its commitment to fairness of treatment to its constituents. The signal sent out to the rank and file is that inner-party democracy is as good as non-existent. Of course, all this could be seen as internal concerns of the BJP which should not concern the voter, and certainly not the newspaper reader. We would beg to differ, given the personality of the man who now has his party by the short hairs. Look at his trajectory over these past ten months. Despite strident calls for his resignation in the wake of Godhra and the riots that followed it, he remained unscathed. Nowhere has he demonstrated even the slightest inclination to introspect over the effect his leadership has had on Gujarat’s society and politics. On the contrary, he has stridently striven to polarise the state further, employing every public occasion to widen the sectarian divide. Given this background, the soft gloves with which his party now treats him amounts to awarding him a carte blanche to carry on with his nefarious brand of politics. This is a prospect the nation cannot view with any degree of equanimity.
