Where should the BJP go? The most obvious plank of its strategy has to be the platitude: first hold on to what you have through governance, a lesson at least the Madhya Pradesh government is unwilling to learn. Second, the current equations of caste politics put it at a disadvantage; its only hope, as in the past, is to break the mould rather than conform to it. In short, Rajnath Singh’s short-term objectives in UP will not do BJP’s long-term goals any favour. Third, voters respond to parties that are seen to be filling an ideological and leadership vacuum, rather than those that exacerbate it through a politics of nay-saying. It may be time for the party to think out of the box and take up positions beyond its usual cliches.

The BJP was the first ruling party comfortable with capitalism. But if it were a little more imaginative it could have appropriate a lot of the space the Left is occupying by mounting a critique of the crony capitalism that the pro-poor Congress is engaged in. An integrated tax structure and unified market was Jaswant Singh’s great idea. While the BJP initiated the rather ill thought through idea of special economic zones, it is still not too late for it to oppose the creeping granting of arbitrary diwani rights to private companies over land that might over time be as significant in scale as granting rights to the East India Company. As the CPM in Bengal has realised, with the growth of capitalism, land is going to be the axis around which social conflicts revolve. The best hope for a political party is to combine a consistent pro-capitalist line with a consistent anti-crony capitalist line. This will bring into the BJP’s ambit a constituency it has so far neglected: small to medium landowners, whose interface with capitalism is going to be the next big structural and political challenge.

... contd.