Opinion Transition pangs

The BJP acquired a new power centre. Now, it is being compelled to rearrange itself around it.

March 25, 2014 12:40 AM IST First published on: Mar 25, 2014 at 12:40 AM IST

The BJP acquired a new power centre. Now, it is being compelled to rearrange itself around it.

For the most part of the build up to this Lok Sabha election, the BJP has looked like an organised phalanx, purposefully headed towards an election in which it has the perceived advantage. That storyline has just become a little untidy. In the last few days, as it denied its founding member and veteran Jaswant Singh his preferred constituency, compelling him to stand as an independent, as it sidelines party patriarch L.K. Advani, forcing him to choose Gandhinagar without giving him a choice and denying a ticket to his loyalist, and as it overrides the public discomfiture expressed by Sushma Swaraj on the candidates’ list, the cracks are beginning to show in what looked like a formidable and well-oiled machine.

These sputterings and small explosions may not affect the voters or influence the electoral outcome. They may not gather enough force to build up to a single moment of reckoning. But clearly, in the BJP, a transition is under way.

There may be no unifying theme yet that binds the ongoing turbulence in the party. Certainly, the BJP’s attempt to project the revocation of the membership of Sri Ram Sene chief Pramod Muttalik, for instance, hours after he was welcomed into the party, as a sign of the party’s greater responsiveness to public opinion, is unpersuasive. India has changed, said senior leader Arun Jaitley while explaining the BJP’s decision.

That may, in fact, be only a gratifying narrative for those for whom Muttalik’s vigilantism is a vivid and unpleasant memory. After all, what makes the Sri Ram Sene’s antics more problematic when the BJP evidently has no trouble accepting similar canvassing by organisations like the VHP or Bajrang Dal?

Yet, the turmoil in the party, framed by the additions, deletions and replacements in its list of candidates, shows that the BJP is indeed shedding old associations that have lost their utility in the new framework that is being shaped and dominated by Narendra Modi.

A power struggle had been foretold from the day Modi was declared the party’s prime ministerial candidate. From being one among many ambitious and talented leaders in the BJP, he became the one they now had to rally around, even if unwillingly. Jaswant Singh has likened the BJP under Modi to the dark days of the Emergency. That may well be the voice of the old guard in a party that is renewing itself under a new leader. Or it may be a note of caution that, for its own sake, the BJP (Modi) may do well to heed.