Flying high, J Class

My colleague noted that the plastic cups were offered for free by friendly industrialists, an act of generosity poor kulhar-makers could never match.

Party sessions held in Nagpur have been known to mark an epoch in the history of an organisation. It was at Nagpur, 80 years ago, that Jinnah and Gandhi came to a parting of ways, that the membership of the Congress was thrown open to the masses, and that Non-Cooperation was enshrined as party policy. The heyday of the Congress is over, and the Bharatiya Janata Party has taken centre-stage. So what message, if any, might one draw from the ruling party’s recently concluded conclave?

If you ask me, I think the chief danger facing the party is its creeping Congressisation. Please note that I am speaking of the party rather than the government. There are, of course, serious dilemmas confronting the ministry, and Union Home Minister L.K. Advani touched on them in his address. The first of these is the political instability that was the norm ever since the fall of the Congress (I) government in the 1989 election, an instability which peaked between 1996 and 1999. The second was the administrative immorality that has plagued this nation for decades. The third is the economic uncertainty ushered in by the revolving-door governments. Fourth, and finally, there is the internal insecurity sponsored by Pakistan.

The home minister said that these problems had been tackled fairly successfully. Fair enough, but these problems would have confronted any ministry, whether or not the BJP was a constituent of the ministry. (You might argue that other parties have done a worse job — or a better one! — but that is another matter.) My question, however, is what remains of the party’s claim of being ‘‘a party with a difference’’.

Advani himself tacitly admitted as much. While stating that the party had become the natural party of governance, a space once occupied by the Congress (I), he reminded everyone that this was not really enough. The party, he exhorted, should strive to become a party of ‘‘good’’ governance. (Did he, I wonder, have Uttar Pradesh in mind as he spoke?)

I am not too sure how many people in the audience imbibed that message. Returning to Congress history, I could not help remembering an acid remark made by Khan Abdul Ghafar Khan when he saw the Congress ministers of the Central Province driving up in state in their official cars to a party session in the 1930s. ‘‘As far they are concerned,’’ the Frontier Gandhi said, ‘‘Swaraj has already been achieved.’’

Unfortunately for the BJP, that attitude has crept in already. The flight from Mumbai to Nagpur on Sunday, August 27, was instructive for all the wrong reasons.

It was supposed to be an Alliance Air flight that would take off at 5.45 a.m. Passengers checked in an hour ahead of that. At 5.15, the decision was made to change the aircraft, an Airbus 320 was hastily pressed into service, and Indian Airlines was told to operate the flight. The ‘J’ class seats were then occupied by various politicians, the hoi polloi being relegated to the lesser ‘Y’ class. It was at 6.30, forty-five minutes after the scheduled time of departure, that the plane took off.

After we had all settled down, Captain Deshmukh apologetically offered a reason for the delay. Indian Airlines, she announced, had only been told of the change after 5 o’clock, and it had taken a certain amount of time to assemble the crew. As to why the change was felt to be necessary, it was because ‘‘a political party is holding its convention in Nagpur’’. This led to derisive laughter among the passengers who knew what she meant.

But mark what follows. Some time later, the captain’s voice was heard again on the public address system. One of the passengers, the captain said, had protested against the assignation of the reason and any talk of party conventions. However, the captain went on, she had only been offering passengers the same information that she herself had received, and it was always possible that it might have been incorrect. This led to even louder sniggers than the first announcement.

Sensibly, none of the VIPs snuggled in their ‘J’ class seats chose to challenge this; it would only have resulted in more bad press for their party. The point is that everybody on board knew that Captain Deshmukh was telling the truth. It was bad enough that they got the flight changed. (Was it because Alliance Air lacks those coveted ‘J’ class seats?) But it was even worse that some of them tried to cover up the original sin, and even attempted to protest when someone else told the truth.

Having arrived in Nagpur, an observant colleague noted that food was being served in plastic ware. Shouldn’t the party, he noted, have used earthen cups, thereby supporting the cause both of the environment and of the local craftsmen? (This is one of my pet peeves, by the way, whenever I travel by train; I defy you to hold on comfortably to scalding coffee in one of those stinking, paper-thin plastic contraptions). Of course, my colleague noted detachedly, the cups were offered for free by friendly industrialists, an act of generosity which poor kulhar-makers could never match...

I understand that several senior leaders of the BJP are worried about such trends — an abuse of power (as in getting plane schedules changed), an unwillingness to hear the truth (epitomised in the ‘correction’ forced on Captain Deshmukh), and a slight distancing from the grassroots accompanied by a rush to embrace the ‘modern’ (plastic rather than old-fashioned clay). Taken individually, these may not matter much, but they are disturbing for the direction to which they point. That was one of the reasons why Advani spoke as he did.

But did anyone listen? Yes and no. On the flight back from Nagpur to Delhi, I noted that Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dhoomal was sitting in the ‘Y’ class (the last row), but some Members of Parliament and even their aides had occupied all the ‘J’ class. Who, I wonder, was the more accurate representative of the party?

Was the chief minister demonstrating his ‘‘difference’’ from his colleagues, or was it his fellows showing their lack of difference from the Congress(I)? If the latter, shall the BJP’s own fortunes be any different?

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