Modi, time to pack up

By every possible measure, Narendra Modi’s continuance in office has become unfeasible, untenable, indefensible. In terms of rajdharma, in terms of justice, in terms of morality and now — after over 60 of his MLAs have come out against him — in terms of plain party politics. Numerous former MPs of the NDA, who have been thrashed at the hustings, are limping back to headquarters with a single refrain on their lips: That they were defeated by the Gujarat riots. In hindsight, the BJP must be ruing the day it looked the other way when Modi allowed the goons a free rein in his state after the horrendous Godhra attack. The decision to let him off the hook and even cheer him on, taken at the National Executive meet in Panaji a few weeks after the riots, must now seem hopelessly shortsighted. Modi’s politics of whipping up communal passion may have won the party a state in Gujarat Elections 2002, but it was one of the big factors that caused it to lose the country in General Elections 2004.

Yet the party maintains that it has no proposal to replace the chief minister, even as BJP Party President Venkaiah Naidu cracks the whip on the dissidents in Gandhinagar. He asks them not to embarrass the party. Doesn’t he get it? The biggest embarrassment to the party was and is Modi himself. He is damaged goods. It is not just the Opposition, or civil liberties bodies who have asked for his resignation, the highest court in the land has termed him a Nero who did nothing when Gujarat burned. Unless this is acknowledged by the party, unless the party permanently shelves its temptation to use him as its favoured mascot, he will continue to be a blot on its reputation. Senior leaders of the party have acknowledged this indirectly. Former Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani clarified on Friday that while the BJP stands by its ideology of cultural nationalism, the ideological struggle against “those who seek to project it narrowly” will continue. Former HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi has directly criticised Narendra Modi’s ill-conceived and offensive diatribe against Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins, which he felt went against the party’s image in these elections.

Modi, given his temperament, will blithely duck the bouncers that are coming at him, thick and fast. That has been his style. He has always survived them to bat another day, and often to loud cheers from the spectator stands. But if the BJP wishes to return to the electorate as a responsible party of governance; as one opposed to the politics of communal violence — as any right-thinking party regardless of its ideological orientation must be — it’s time to inform him that the game is over. That the party has paid too high a price in order to give one wrong man his turn under the sun.