No full stops in Mumbai

For the faithful, the BJP’s national executive at Mumbai was going to provide a sense of direction after a shock upset. But a much larger constituency was also looking to Mumbai — with anxiety and with hope. To be sure, the defeated party is far more vulnerable to the lure of old pieties and proven formulae, the belligerent call to arms, pull and tug of rival factions, quickfixes, blamegames. Will the BJP be able to rise above these? A defeat, especially one as unexpected as the party’s May 13 rout, is a setback, of course. But in the life of a party, it can also become an opportunity to think deeper about its disconnect with the people and resolve it in new and imaginative ways. The sound bites from Mumbai must be judged, therefore, on what they say about the party on this one criterion, above all: its willingness, or lack of it, to accept responsibility for defeat and its openness, or lack of it, to evolve.

The signals from Mumbai are not all reassuring. For those who hope to see the BJP recover and hold up its end of the polity as a right wing modern party, far too many of the ‘‘back to basics’’ phrases and nostrums bandied in Mumbai warn of a party recoiling and seeking succour in jaded ideological slogans. With the political resolution wasting all its breath on attacking the United Progressive Alliance on a host of undoubtedly deserving issues — from Super PM Sonia to ‘‘tainted ministers’’ — it was left to L.K. Advani to talk BJP. The leader credited with crafting the party’s spectacular vault from the margins of the system to its power centre, was once again the navigator. He laid out the two balancing acts the party is called upon to perform: between its ‘‘core ideology’’ and political expansion, and between governance and ‘‘prudent politics’’. His diagnosis was that the BJP had strayed too far from its ‘‘ideological constituency’’, that it must revive its ‘‘emotional bonds’’ with the parivar and reclaim its distinct identity. It must become again the ‘‘Hindu party’’ the world is already convinced it really is. On cue, the BJP has pledged to launch forth against all those ‘‘who reject hindutva as the basic identity of the Indian nation’’. That, it says, is the party’s ‘‘task ahead’’.

The problem is not just this: that in the stated intent to rework the balance between the ‘‘core’’ issues and attempts at outreach, the balance seems already weighted against the latter. It is also that the Mumbai articulations may trigger a larger disillusion: was ‘‘development’’, bijli-sadak-paani, also just a tactical add-on to the party’s ‘‘core’’? Will issues that matter most to the people always remain so, in a politics that unabashedly subsists and thrives on issues of identity? Hopefully, the last words on this have not been said in Mumbai.