The Varun imperative

The Bharatiya Janata Party needs to take a step back and determine the following: does it want the tone and thrust of its campaign to recover power to be set by Varun Gandhi? Should a first-time aspirant to Parliaments stump speech carry sufficient heft that a national party can permit its entire message to be derailed? Because that seems the direction its heading in. The man the BJP has projected as its prime ministerial candidate,Lal Krishna Advani,managed to imply a comparison between Varun Gandhis arrest and that of the heroes of the battle against the Emergency in particular,Jayaprakash Narayan and the BJPs senior statesman,Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This almost certainly isnt what he set out to do; but such hazards are inevitable if you allow yourself to be side-tracked into focussing on Varuns speech and the Uttar Pradesh governments reaction. The partys president,Rajnath Singh who isnt known for his judicious choice of word or sentiment managed to heroically claim that the problem with the arrest of Varun wasnt,say,that due process may not have been followed,but that everybody else,not Varun,was trying to communalise the Lok Sabha polls.

There might well be reason for a major party to use this occasion to look at the use of the National Security Act in UP politics; as this paper has documented,it has been used questionably by almost every dispensation in power there over the past two decades. But that isnt where the BJP has allowed the debate to drift. Instead,we have Venkaiah Naidu calling Varuns hateful statements debatable and Sushma Swaraj,who had earlier distanced herself from Varuns comments,saying that she objected only to their tenor,which was intemperate,and not their illiberal content. This incoherence in its reaction isnt going to help the BJP any; it will merely confuse the partys core base,and alienate undecided voters.

Nor will indiscriminate accusations of bias help. The Election Commission may well have over-reached in its unsolicited advice to the BJP on withdrawing Gandhis candidature; but that doesnt necessarily imply bias; it could merely be activism. The Gujarat minister,Maya Kodnani,in an echo to her partys stand on institutions,accused the court-appointed Special Investigation Team that nabbed her for bias,as well. The BJP desperately needs to reclaim its campaign from the Kodnanis and the Varuns; it needs to rediscover its message and its coherence,and fast.