Team Rajnath

Those searching for a larger message in BJP president Rajnath Singh’s announcement of his new team are likely to find no more than this: the inner-party jostling that xwas bared to public view after L.K. Advani’s exit as party president has not arrived at any honourable settlement yet. There is to be no respite from the positioning games that have so completely preoccupied and paralysed India’s main Opposition party for the last couple of years. As Singh seeks to clip the spreading wings of one potential rival and downsize the profile of another one, he abdicates an opportunity. Despite the well-known constraints, in spite of the RSS looming so large, having secured a full three-year term, Rajnath Singh could have used this exercise to bring in some new people to decision-making positions, even signal the growth of the party beyond the Big Two. Instead, he seems to have been chiefly guided by the need to secure his own survival. This is an attempt to cut his rivals to size — in order to appear taller himself.

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has been dropped from the party’s central Parliamentary Board and the Central Election Committee — an indication of the alarm bells he set off in the party by his hectic efforts to carve out a ‘national’ political persona, addressing a rally in Mumbai now and in Thiruvananthapuram the next day. Arun Jaitley ceases to be the party’s chief spokesperson, and that change may mirror nothing more significant than the envy triggered by his primetime visibility. Sanjay Joshi’s ouster from the crucial post of party general secretary, only months after he was reinstated at the RSS’s urging after being accused in a sleaze scandal, may be read as a balancing act between rival camps.

Parties in crisis have been known to be fertile spawning grounds of new political debates. It is when a party is at its lowest ebb that it can be forced into rethinking old certitudes and striking out in previously unimagined directions. Rajnath Singh’s petty tinkering shows that the BJP continues to resist that challenge.