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Journalism of Courage
There is a Vaghela-esque quality to Delhi strongman Madan Lal Khurana’s current plight. For as long as anyone can remember, the BJP in the Capital has meant the Khurana-Vijay Kumar Malhotra-Kedar Nath Sahani troika with Khurana easily surpassing the other two in mass appeal and organisational ability. Who can forget his innumerable press conferences in Volga restaurant, his countless bandhs on every issue under the sun or his tireless efforts to supplant the hand with the lotus in the vast JJ colonies spawned by the Congress?
Yet, like Shankersinh Vaghela in Gujarat, Khurana today stands marginalised by the new power equations that have emerged in the Delhi unit of the BJP. And like his erstwhile party colleague, Khurana is finding it difficult to accept that almost 50 years of unswerving loyalty to a creed has few rewards in the battle for supremacy between old BJP stalwarts and a new generation of increasingly ambitious RSS leaders.
Khurana is sulking. But the harsh reality of politics leaves no roomfor emotional tantrums. The message to the one-time Delhi supremo is clear — fall in line or else die a Vaghela-like death.
The irony of the sudden downturn in Khurana’s fortunes has taken the Punjabi lobby in the BJP by surprise. Consider the background. Khurana, a refugee from Jung in Pakistan, began his political career as a vistarakh of the RSS student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad, in the Allahabad University way back in the ’50s.
In the ’60s, he joined the band of Punjabi refugees in Delhi and soon rose to become general secretary of the Delhi Jana Sangh. He dominated first Municipal Corporation politics and then the Metropolitan Council where he was the Chief Whip, Executive Councillor and Leader of the Opposition by turns. His first foray into national politics ended in disaster when he lost the Sadar parliamentary seat in the Rajiv Gandhi wave of 1984 but since then, he has not looked back, proving his popularity in the Capital by winning the South Delhi seat twice and later,the Sadar seat also twice.
His bete noire, Sahib Singh Verma, is a study in contrast. A former Socialist from the Lok Dal stream, Verma’s first contact with the Sangh parivar was in the post-Emergency period when he contested the Municipal Corporation elections on a Janata Party ticket from the Jana Sangh quota. A relatively unknown Jat, his desire for a Lok Sabha ticket was stoutly opposed by Khurana in 1991 but with some clever lobbying, Verma managed to bag the Outer Delhi nomination only to lose the seat despite the saffron spread in the Capital.
The breakthrough came when Khurana was chargesheeted in the hawala case in January 1996 and forced to resign from the Chief Minister’s post. Verma was the consensus choice to succeed him largely because the BJP at that point was hunting for new support groups to consolidate its hold in Delhi. The Ram wave of 1991 had demolished two members of the Congress triumvirate in the Capital H.K.L. Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler. The BJP now wanted the head of theremaining member, Sajjan Kumar. What better way than to prop up a Jat Chief Minister to win the hearts of the rural population of Outer Delhi?
The strategy paid off. In the 1996 parliamentary elections, an ebullient Verma ensured a stupendous victory for “outsider” K.L. Sharma from Outer Delhi, thus destroying the last of the Congress strongholds in the city.But there was an underlying motive in the choice of a nonentity like Verma. The rising political fortunes of the BJP had kindled hidden ambitions in the RSS which was in the throes of major changes after the death of Balasaheb Deoras. From a benign parent body content to let career politicians run the BJP, the Sangh leadership became increasingly involved in the day-to-day functioning of the party. And in the new scheme of things, there was little room for strong politicians with mass bases, even less for those convinced they were indispensable. The tide had turned for Khurana.
The writing on the wall was obvious to all except the man himself.Repeated attempts to get back the Chief Minister’s chair proved futile. The excuse each time was Verma’s Jat base. Khurana’s supporters maintain that this is a myth propagated to preserve the hegemony of the non-Punjabi lobby that is seeking to establish its writ in Delhi. As proof, they cite the results of the Corporation elections in 1997 in which the BJP lost 20 of the 42 seats in Outer Delhi, the majority of them in the so-called Jat belt. In fact, the party’s worst performance was in this constituency where just one year before, in the general elections, it had captured 15 of the 21 assembly segments.
The perceived alienation of the Jats continues to be cited as the reason for backing Verma against Khurana. Thus, when the middle-classes turned on Verma after a long, hot summer of power cuts, water shortages and rising crime, he was replaced not by old hand Khurana, but by outsider Sushma Swaraj. The arithmetic in Delhi would seem to defy the logic of the Sangh parivar. According to party insiders, theJat population in Delhi is just 2 per cent while the Punjabis constitute 28 percent. Sangh strategists have obviously calculated that the Punjabi vote, the bulk of which is middle-class urban, is in the bag. The Jats, on the other hand, still need to be won over.
But can the party afford to take the Punjabi vote for granted in an election in which objective factors seem to be against it? The Vaghela drama appears to have given the BJP-RSS leadership the confidence to humble Khurana in his own bastion. By recapturing Gujarat without stalwart Vaghela in the recent assembly polls, the Sangh feels it has proved that its organised cadre is more valuable than a popular face. The November elections will be an acid test of the premise which determines the delicate power equation between the RSS and the BJP.
