The BJP’s ideological reinvention was never going to be easy. While the BJP may jettison Jaswant Singh for his inscrutable handling of the mole affair, it would be a loss if it jettisoned his larger message. How did the BJP manage to so decisively transform India? Even for those of us for whom the BJP’s potential for spreading the insidious poison of communalism remains a serious concern, this question is worth asking. Jaswant Singh gave a sense of what a credible ideological reinvention of the BJP might have looked like: liberal in economics, capable of a steep learning curve in some areas of governance like infrastructure, and committed to integrating India into the global economy as quickly as possible. In an odd sort of way it was the first government in the last two decades to be supremely confident about India’s prospects. The party that thrived on the politics of anxiety left office with an India less anxious about its place in the world. Shedding its virulent anti-minority strain was always going to be a challenge. But the BJP knew that it had to evolve out of this kind of politics for two reasons: the compulsions of coalition politics and the fact that this plank can be used as mobilising strategy only episodically.

Jaswant Singh’s observations on Gujarat are too tepid for the enormity of the crimes committed there, but his underlying aspiration is more plausible: community should not be the axis of the distribution of rights and privilege; the politics of community balancing is always an unstable equilibrium that creates divisions rather than real benefits. While in some sections the BJP’s anti-minorityism is over-determined, it could have evolved into the more principled line: not that those minorities are pampered (this is its own hate propaganda) but that the state needs to evolve to a point where the distinction between communities becomes irrelevant to the determination of rights. The BJP underestimates the potency of this stand, if it can be carried with conviction and not marred by hate. The irony is that while Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh and Advani have tried to ensure that they evolve, they curiously abandoned any concern for the party’s evolution.

... contd.