Opinion Fully made-over

Tuesday’s announcement by the BJP that L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee will no longer be part of its highest decision-making body carries some unsubtle messages. The party itself has sought to project the removal of the seniors from the parliamentary board as their elevation to a new panel, a Margdarshak Mandal or group of mentors. But given that the Mandal, which does not find a place in the party constitution, will be merely an advisory body, powerless to enforce its recommendations, that description of the party’s move seems somewhat incredible. It has also been suggested that its decision was guided by the imperative to open up the party to younger leaders. In principle, this explanation carries weight. After all, much of Indian politics is a greying place because there are no exit strategies for older leaders and few openings and routes of advancement for younger leaders. Yet, this does not seem to be the whole or even the main reason for the BJP’s decision to virtually delink itself from three of its founding fathers.

Look closer and it seems more likely that Tuesday’s decision marks the completion of the BJP’s transition into the party that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah seek to recast in their own image. This is not surprising and on the face of it, they are meeting with little resistance. For some time, however, Advani, had appeared to become the rallying point for the discomfort in the party to the Modi take-over. From that moment in June 2013, when the party veteran refused to show up for his erstwhile protege’s coronation party, to his opposition to Modi’s formal anointment as PM candidate, Advani cast himself in the role of the BJP’s seniormost rebel. His ouster now shows that while he may have accepted the inevitable, the new party refuses to give him his old place. It indicates that, with a clear and defined high command of its own, the BJP will have little time and decreasing space for those not entirely in tune with the new regime.

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The BJP may need to weigh the perils of uniformity against the gains from a more univocal and presumably more efficient machine. The Modi-Shah combine should know that just as they will now be able to take the credit for its every success, they must also accept direct responsibility for every setback to the party. And things may have just got a little more unsettled for an older relationship. The exit of the seniors will call for a rebalancing of the BJP’s equation with the RSS, in which seniority, and stature derived from seniority, have played an important role.