The Bharatiya Janata Party needs to take a step back and determine the following: does it want the tone and thrust of its campaign to recover power to be set by Varun Gandhi? Should a first-time aspirant to Parliament’s stump speech carry sufficient heft that a national party can permit its entire message to be derailed? Because that seems the direction it’s heading in. The man the BJP has projected as its prime ministerial candidate, Lal Krishna Advani, managed to imply a comparison between Varun Gandhi’s arrest and that of the heroes of the battle against the Emergency — in particular, Jayaprakash Narayan and the BJP’s senior statesman, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. This almost certainly isn’t what he set out to do; but such hazards are inevitable if you allow yourself to be side-tracked into focussing on Varun’s speech and the Uttar Pradesh government’s reaction. The party’s president, Rajnath Singh — who isn’t known for his judicious choice of word or sentiment — managed to heroically claim that the problem with the arrest of Varun wasn’t, say, that due process may not have been followed, but that everybody else, not Varun, was “trying to communalise” the Lok Sabha polls.

There might well be reason for a major party to use this occasion to look at the use of the National Security Act in UP politics; as this paper has documented, it has been used questionably by almost every dispensation in power there over the past two decades. But that isn’t where the BJP has allowed the debate to drift. Instead, we have Venkaiah Naidu calling Varun’s hateful statements “debatable” and Sushma Swaraj, who had earlier distanced herself from Varun’s comments, saying that she objected only to their tenor, which was “intemperate”, and not their illiberal content. This incoherence in its reaction isn’t going to help the BJP any; it will merely confuse the party’s core base, and alienate undecided voters.

... contd.