Stand up, BJP

The question is: will L.K. Advani stay as BJP president or go? On the face of it, that would seem to be the narrower question from the past ...

The question is: will L.K. Advani stay as BJP president or go? On the face of it, that would seem to be the narrower question from the past few days. The larger one is whether those debates that he has touched off, deliberately and perhaps not a little inadvertently, will have the opportunity to play out to their full and fulfilling possibilities. On Jinnah, on a subcontinent8217;s shared history and its shared future, on what the terms of a reinvented BJP might be for the 21st century. But, even framed in these larger ways, the question is still and urgently about Advani.

The past few days have shown just how difficult it is for the BJP to confront the challenge. Though the discomforts have been visible for a long time now, and especially since its Lok Sabha defeat in 2004, the party was still unprepared for the starkness with which the choice is articulated after Advani8217;s visit to Pakistan. Now, the party must decide whether it wishes to fall back into the known RSS-VHP corner and revive the old slogans that ironically enough Advani gave the words to, or to take his lead now to explore a larger middle ground. The BJP would do well to remember a few things. Hardline Hindutva politics has lost its framing context, perhaps irretrievably. Seasoned strategist that he is, Advani has seen it before his party. Today, the Ramjanambhoomi movement fails to work up furies even in its erstwhile bastions. Today, the people are impatient with a politics that persists in dredging up the 8216;8216;secular-communal8217;8217; divide. A reason for this is that as India gets a more confident sense of herself as a country on the move and on the world stage, there is diminishing space for a politics of grievance and resentment. The reason also is that in the fragmented polity that the 1990s have left us with, only those political parties will grow that can recognise and respond to the voter8217;s various and divergent concerns. Political choice in India today is arranged along several and equally pressing continuums.

There is a space for a modern right of centre party in India8217;s polity that has a more inclusive appeal and the BJP can fill it. But to do that, the party must first delineate its distance from Hindutva8217;s lunatic fringe, on the one hand, like the VHP-Bajrang Dal. On the other hand, it must put light between itself and the more fluid RSS. A modern organisation cannot afford to have a centre of gravity that is outside of itself. The choice is actually quite simple for the BJP: grasp Advani8217;s hand and become a larger version of itself, or allow itself to be commandeered and diminished by pettier visions.