The announcement made by BJP President Lal Krishna Advani to step down from his organizational post as party chief in December will come as a victory to those within the party who had propagated the principle of one man one post. The disgruntlement over Advani’s leadership has been brewing for quite sometime with a coterie of leaders waiting in the wings to pounce on him on one pretext or the other. Whether it is the issue of holding two posts or his battle with RSS on the Jinnah issue, this former poster boy of the Sangh Parivar has been under constant attack from dissidents who were obviously taking orders directly from other centers of power. It is clear that some senior party leaders had consulted the RSS top brass prior to Advani announcing his resignation.
The reach and influence of the RSS over the BJP has always been a powerful factor and one that was never put within the framework of a ‘crisis’ as has been made out today. Obviously the BJP owes its earlier electoral success in part to the RSS. From a single figure in Parliament, today the BJP rivals the Congress as the major political party. As long as the Ramjanmabhoomi battle cry was alive and as long as the BJP remained a party of ideology (and not governance) and remained outside of power, everything else worked out well for both.
But with its electoral success, the cobbling together of a coalition (NDA) to keep the Congress out of power, the BJP had to temporarily drop its three core manifesto of Ram temple, Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code in a spirit of give and take. The BJP as the major party had crafted the NDA alliance and ensured its survival by ensuring moderation and consensual style of governance. Ever since then the BJP on the plus side has found new allies but in the process, it has lost its identity. The present crisis stems from a dilemma it faces on the direction the party should take.
The RSS also faces a serious image problem which it has to introspect seriously. There should be better dialogue between the RSS and the Muslims. It needs to communicate itself better. Issues cannot be resolved through confrontation but through dialogue and by respecting dissent. What Advani said in Pakistan about Jinnah was in a way attempting to reach out to Muslims. In terms of electoral politics and in a narrow sense, it could benefit the BJP but in the long term it paves the way for a healthy democratic practice of encouraging dialogue between the Hindu and Muslim community. The RSS should have no reason to take offence at this.
In a democratic multi-party polity, any political party is ultimately accountable to the people and it has to function in a manner that enables it to keep its basic ideological stances intact and at the same time expand itself to reach large sections of people. The real cause of the open schism between RSS and BJP is the conflict between the ideological aspirations of the parent organisation and the dynamics of real politic. On many economic policy issues during the NDA government, there were open objections from the RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch against Vajpayee’s style of functioning.
The fear that there is an ongoing bitter ideological battle between the RSS “parivar” (family) and the BJP’s ruling elite has now come out into the open. For both, a meeting ground has to be found.
Whatever their own ambitions of power, the party may find themselves coerced into towing the RSS line for fear of losing the grassroots support of the parent body that has sustained them all along. At the same time, if they fail to ‘ignore the reality of politics’, they may be left high and dry by several of their current and prospective ‘allies’ when the time to form the Government arrives the next time round. It’s a tough task ahead for the Sangh brotherhood.
