: It is often said that Indian political parties engage in vote bank politics. But the conduct of opposition parties suggests the reverse. Rather than think about how to ideologically reposition, organisationally rejuvenate, and stitch together a new social coalition, parties out of power fall into a kind of torpid languor. The guiding assumption becomes this: rather than run after the electoral bus, keep standing where you are and hope the bus stops where you are. The Congress was like this in opposition, and it was only a wafer-thin mathematical alchemy that propelled it to power.
The only lesson the BJP has learnt from the last election was this: loiter around and your chance will come. Its response to the failure of ‘India Shining’ is party whining. The waiting game is corrosive: it breeds laziness and creeping boredom, always a fatal combination. Nothing exemplifies this more than the BJP’s parliamentary strategy. It is dissipating itself in peripheral issues like the privilege motions against the prime minister. Politically it would have been better to let the Congress be hoist with its own petard and let the law run its course, rather than call for a privilege motion that will pay no dividends. Having given the Congress an opportunity to deflect attention from politically potent issues, the BJP would be better off in the long run if it stuck to a high-minded focus on policy rather than create bedlam centred on personalities. In doing so it is enhancing the suspicion that as a party it has nothing to say on important issues any more.
The BJP’s ideological reinvention was never going to be easy. While the BJP may jettison Jaswant Singh for his inscrutable handling of the mole affair, it would be a loss if it jettisoned his larger message. How did the BJP manage to so decisively transform India? Even for those of us for whom the BJP’s potential for spreading the insidious poison of communalism remains a serious concern, this question is worth asking. Jaswant Singh gave a sense of what a credible ideological reinvention of the BJP might have looked like: liberal in economics, capable of a steep learning curve in some areas of governance like infrastructure, and committed to integrating India into the global economy as quickly as possible. In an odd sort of way it was the first Government in the last two decades to be supremely confident about...
Pratap Bhanu Mehta
