As the Indian middle class celebrates the nuclear tests, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has reason to hope that its method of politics can work again. If the hype surrounding the explosions eerily resembles pre-Demolition Indian politics, it is because the ruling party desperately needs a more hysterical reaction this time from the masses.Pokharan II owes its genesis more to domestic political necessities of the BJP than the country's geopolitical compulsions. The testing of a device which the country has had for a long time happened when the BJP was struggling at a crucial political phase.The Hindu revivalist party has just entered into an inherently incoherent coalition by shelving its core aspirations and principal agenda. What forced the BJP into such an arrangement was the realisation that this was the closest it could get to power at the Centre. As a result, it had to compromise on what it called its ``principles'' and keep quiet on the issues that have defined its rigid existence as a Hindunationalist party.One way to look at it, the BJP and its ideologues would like to do so in public, is that the party is changing, becoming a softer, voter-friendly BJP. A New BJP with its hardline Hindutva sacrificed at the altar of realpolitik. The question is: what is the BJP without its core programme? A pale shadow of the Congress in saffron? And if so, how long can it continue to be so?The more or less helpless situation the BJP finds itself in does not help its present, let alone the future. Pushed around by difficult allies and hampered by the compulsions of coalition politics, the aggressive political party was beginning to look weak and timid. It needed to find a way out of the mess, not just for the time being but for a longer time frame.So Pokharan II happened, reminding the BJP about itself, its agenda which has been forced out of the coalition mainstream, about its aspirations and its future. Though the nuclear tests have eliminated J. Jayalalitha and related problems from the newscolumns overnight, they have a longer and bigger mission for the BJP. It has to do with the electoral frustrations of India's most ambitious political party.Think about a party which comes to power at the Centre through parliamentary democracy and suggests an alternative form of government within a month. Unnatural it may sound but the BJP at the beginning of its five-year term started talking about the presidential system. Not without reason: the last Lok Sabha elections revealed the limits of the BJP as a political party.It did break new ground in the south but the Maharashtra experience pointed ominously to what the future holds for it. The consolidation of the non-BJP votes was enough to rout the ruling coalition in the state. The picture from UP looked pretty on the charts but an alliance of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party practically difficult but sociologically natural - can spell doom for the BJP which relies heavily on the state to reach the threshold of power in NewDelhi.The post-V.P. Singh politics has made things difficult for the BJP whose captive vote bank remains upper-caste Hindus. A majority of the so-called Hindus that the BJP tries to woo does not have a place in its idea of the great Indian past. If at all they had, it was as the oppressed and the untouchable. In an India of lower caste aspirations, the BJP's natural field of expansion is limited and the parliamentary elections sent out the signals clear and loud.The BJP is left with the predicament of running a congenitally inconsistent coalition, its agenda dormant under the imposto of parliamentary acceptability. It cannot change the course of things the way it wants or to amend the Constitution to suit its idea of the nation. So the option is to break the system or to wait for another wave to save it from the island where it is marooned. The suggestions about the parliamentary form of government was a shot at the first option, and the nuclear tests an attempt at the second.Both mirror thefrustrations of a political party which has reached a plateau. That's where the waves leave you. The BJP reached it by creating a wave of hysteria with the movement to demolish the Babri Masjid. It registered an unnatural growth before the wave crashed on the shores of time.Now as its agenda rusts on the back burner of a coalition, the BJP needs another emotional wave to take it further to try and establish a nation of its concepts. Emotions sell where reason does not and the BJP has always depended on paranoia masquerading as nationalism. The images which are used can change conveniently - from the Muslim invader to the enemy Pakistan or the Chinese dragon.The pitfalls of pseudo-national awakenings across the world have been well recorded but history is a bad teacher. Whipping up war hysteria is a great way to mobilise votes and world leaders under domestic pressure have consistently resorted to aggressive diplomatic posturing.The BJP wants Pokharan to carry it beyond the limits of democracy. So anuclear device is packaged as symbol of national pride and signal of a great new awakening.Camouflage it with nationalism, decorate it with pride, the euphoria over weapons remains a primitive celebration of hatred. The movement to demolish the Masjid was not rooted in love either.
