Twenty-five of the BJP’s Uttarakhand MLAs are camping out in Delhi, claiming that their chief minister, B.C. Khanduri, is dictatorial, inaccessible and does not respect party organisation. Khanduri, who ran the Union surface transport ministry with great, near-military efficiency, is an Advani favourite, but has alienated those like Bhagat Singh Khoshiyari who resent his style and his elevation. It appears that national parties haven’t found a way to manage the inevitable wrangle between local leadership and central authority. In Bihar, Sushil Modi narrowly survived an ouster; in Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia faces opposition from the Jaswant Singh camp, and the Madhya Pradesh unit’s tug of war ensures that the famously dissident Uma Bharti can still harm the party’s chances.

For both the BJP and the Congress, national success rests on a sum of state victories: electoral math demands that each party apply itself to this painful slog through each state. Obviously, how parties structure opportunities has deep implications for the quality of democracy. The Congress usually gets a bad rap for its opaque process of selecting state leaders — its inability to groom and nurture regional politicians is interpreted as the peculiar failing of its insecure, overcentralised structure. But, clearly, the BJP is no paragon of intra-party fairness either. A few months back, they made a move towards institutionalising mechanisms to settle such conflicts when the Sushil Modi impasse was handled by secret ballot. But will the BJP build on that step as they decide the Uttarakhand matter after the September 13 panchayat polls?

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