Vision in deep freeze

Instead, it has remained a helpless spectator to Laloo’s audacious machinations to install a proxy government. While the former Chief Minister was cleverly manipulating time and space for himself with a little help from his friends at the Centre, the BJP was issuing daily Press statements and submitting untenable petitions to the President for the dismissal of the State Government.

In a democracy, there is no weapon as powerful as people’s power. But the BJP has yet to discover how to use it. The situation in Bihar was tailormade for a mass agitation. In the land of Jayaprakash Narayan, a satyagraha in the form of rallies, hunger strikes or a civil disobedience movement should have been the logical response of a political party on the warpath against the Chief Minister. By mobilising public opinion against Laloo Yadav, the BJP could have tried to turn the tide in its favour and pressurised the Centre into imposing President’s Rule.

Ironically, BJP president L.K. Advani’s rath yatra passed through Bihar just as Laloo Yadav was formally chargesheeted by the CBI in the fodder scam. Yet, the Patna rally organised by the state unit to greet Advani proved to be a damp squib, underlining the party’s failure to seize the opportunity to strike decisively.

The BJP’s inertia on the Laloo issue highlights the passivity of its current politics. Despite being the sole occupant of the opposition space against a motely combination of 14 parties dependent on outside support for survival, it has consistently shied away from going on the offensive against the government. Unlike Indira Gandhi, who shrewdly mixed popular agitations with wily backroom manoeuverings to break the Janata Party, the BJP seems to have left it to fate and the inherent contradictions in the ruling combine to propel it to power. Its hopes appear to rest solely on a mid-term poll forced by the pulls and pressures of an unstable coalition and the calculation that it can win because a scattered opposition is no match for its superior organisational network in a low voter turnout situation a conviction which has been bolstered by its successes in recent bye-elections.The reluctance of the BJP to plunge into mass action stems from its very nature. As a cadre-based party, which upholds organisational discipline and unquestioning obedience as supreme values, it is distinctly uncomfortable with the freewheeling unpredictability of mass politics. Like the Left parties, it lacks the necessary flexibility to deal with populist demands and needs well-defined structures and ideological order for its sanitised brand of politics. But the Left at least has a history of leading labour movements and organising strikes. The BJP’s experience of political agitations is virtually non-existent.

Significantly, the only time it went out and mobilised people was on a religious issue. The Ayodhya movement was the party’s first real attempt at creating a popular mood in its favour and although the motifs were overtly religious, Advani’s rath yatra in 1990 had a clear political underpinning as well, which catapulted the BJP to national centre-stage.

Unfortunately for it, the movement collapsed when Babri Masjid came down before time. What was to have been a carefully calibrated exercise to lead the party to power on a popular wave ended in disaster because the followers became the leaders and snatched away the momentum from the BJP top brass. The demolition of the Mosque on December 6, 1992 not only deprived the Ayodhya movement of its symbol but exposed the BJP’s woeful inadequacies in coping with a mass upsurge.

The inability to lead a political campaign on the streets is largely due to the party’s total dependence on the RSS for crowd mobilisation. The Sangh has never made any bones about its distaste for politics and while it readily lends its vast network to the BJP at election time for the limited purpose of helping the party to win, it does not want to be dragged into organising political agitations on behalf of the BJP.

Perhaps if the Samata Party had launched a stir to oust Laloo when the fodder scam began hotting up, the BJP could have done what it is best at tagged on to a movement led by someone else more at ease with agitational politics.

This is precisely what the party in its earlier avatar, the Jan Sangh, did after the Emergency when it jumped on to the JP bandwagon and became part of the Janata Government in 1977. Again in 1989, it quickly jumped on to the V.P. Singh bandwagon when the latter became the pivot of a movement against corruption.

Now too, the BJP is looking for allies with mass bases so that it can piggyback to power in the next general elections. By floating the concept of a National Democratic Front, the party hopes to woo the regional parties on whose popular support it can finally achieve its dream of ruling from New Delhi. In its efforts to keep potential regional allies happy, however, it seems to have lost sight of the fact that as a wannabe national party, it must push its own agenda and rouse public support for its vision, even at the cost of alienating possible coalition partners.

Its strategy may, of course, succeed and the country could have a BJP-led conglomeration in power the next time around. But in an electoral democracy, there is no substitute for a positive popular mandate borne out of a movement based on a broad political platform. A party that is content with backseat driving will always have limited appeal. The BJP will first have to understand the dynamics of people’s power before it can hope to replace the Congress as the predominant national party.