Yesterday’s issues

The news about Jaswant Singh’s expulsion was a genuine tragedy. Not just because it is sad to see anyone’s 30-year relationship with an organisation end with a brusque phone call,or because Jaswant Singh was one of the few members of the BJP’s second-rung central leadership that occasionally attempted to articulate a genuinely right-of-centre,genuinely sweeping,vision for the country. No,it is because it shows that the BJP is simply unwilling to come to grips with its crisis. In fact,the party appears,like a headless chicken running round in circles,to be completely unaware about what the crisis actually is. It is not a simple question of who is in charge. It is about how the BJP can look like a party of government again — how it can modernise itself. Today it looks outdated,antiquated,answering yesterday’s questions by raising yesterday’s issues. And when an opportunity arose to come together and delineate a common vision which could be used to play a constructive role in opposition — and then be run on in the next campaign — it decided instead to focus on a history book by the MP from Darjeeling.

Where will politics go,said Singh after he was expelled,if “soch,vichar and chintan” is devalued,if thoughtfulness is replaced with Stalinist-style party-line cant?

“Reading,writing and publishing is entering a dark alley,” he added. These are all valid concerns — though Singh himself cannot be absolved of guilt in abetting the BJP’s unwillingness to take an intellectual stand. Where was his principled opposition when the BJP betrayed its foundational ideology to take an opportunistic stand against the Indo-US nuclear deal? Then,as now: the BJP will suffer as long as it makes a big deal of tiny issues,while being lazy,intellectually and politically,about the big questions of our times.