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Stuck in a lotus position
Pope?s famous line, ?Damn with faint praise?, is inapt to characterise the encomiums showered on the erstwhile BJP president, L.K. Advani, as he was escorted to the door.
Pope’s famous line, “Damn with faint praise”, is inapt to characterise the encomiums showered on the erstwhile BJP president, L.K. Advani, as he was escorted to the door. More appropriate is Daagh Dehlvi’s couplet: ‘‘Khabar sun kar merey marney ki woh boley raqeebon se/ khuda bakshe bohat si khoobian thi marney waley mein” (On hearing of my death she told my rivals, may God bless him. Many were the qualities the dead one had). He is the third in an inglorious line. Mauli Chandra Sharma was driven to resign as president of the Jan Sangh on November 3, 1954. Balraj Madhok, a former president, was expelled by the Jan Sangh’s president, Advani, on March 13, 1973. All at the behest of the RSS.
In his statement on September 18 in Chennai, Advani complained of ‘‘an impression that has gained ground that no political part or organisational decision can be taken without the consent of RSS functionaries’’. But he said in Mumbai on December 31, ‘‘I am disappointed with myself for not communicating properly in conveying my sentiments to the Sangh.” The duty to explain and account to the RSS was thus explicitly acknowledged. This knocks the bottom out of the Chennai complaint.
In the Jinnah statement, Advani’s audience was not Pakistan but India. It was his bid to emerge as a moderate leader. The RSS, as well as colleagues in the BJP, detected the ideological deviation. The RSS was restive for sometime at the personality cult in the BJP. It decided to clamp down. Hence, its marching orders to Advani. Hence, also, its emphasis on ‘‘collective leadership’’, a principle that Advani’s successor, Rajnath Singh, loudly accepted the very day he became president (December 31).
Advani’s Chennai grievance and announcement on September 18 distracted attention from a far more important statement made on the same day and at the same place by a personality of equal stature, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It exposes the roots of the BJP’s existence and is of grave consequence to India’s parliamentary democracy. As if in refutation of Advani’s grievance, Vajpayee declared for all to know that, first, the Jan Sangh and, then, the BJP was ‘‘established jointly with the RSS’’ that he hailed as ‘‘an exceptional organisation unequal in the world’’.
Vajpayee is absolutely right. The Hindu Mahasabha leader, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, an acolyte of Savarkar — on whose behalf he kept pleading with Home Minister Sardar Patel after Gandhi’s assassination — was ill at ease in the Nehru cabinet. When he decided to cut loose, he turned first to the Mahasabha and urged it to open its doors to all, formally. He had good reason for this stratagem. He was privy to the Constituent Assembly’s resolution of April 3, 1948, in the wake of that assassination, urging the government to take steps “to prevent” activities by any “communal organisation” which “excludes from its membership persons on grounds of religion, race and caste”. The Mahasabha refused. The RSS offered a way out; but on its terms. It would lend its cadres to Mookerjee’s outfit. This is the fons et orego of the joint establishment of the Jan Sangh.
The RSS supremo, M.S. Golwalkar, had made no secret of who would hold the reins. He had bared both the RSS’s ambition and technique as far back as in 1949. Asked point blank, ‘‘Is it a fact that the Sangh plans to capture power?’’, he replied, ‘‘We have kept before ourselves the ideal of Bhagwan Shri Krishna, who held a big empire under his thumb but refused to become an emperor himself.’’ The ideal can be fully realised if the Jan Sangh or the BJP, kept under the RSS’s thumb, captured power as its surrogate.
Deceit was inherent in this strategy in several respects — commitment to secularism, to democracy and to autonomous functioning. This explains the BJP’s unique record of volte faces. When the Jan Sangh members of the Janata Party resigned in April 1980, the honourable course before them was to revive the Jan Sangh. Instead, they laid claim to the legacy of Jayaprakash Narayan, whom the RSS had cheated by refusing to open its doors to all.
At the founding convention on April 5, 1980, Advani asserted that there was no question of reviving the Jan Sangh, while Vajpayee declared that the BJP ‘‘is pledged to pursuing his (JP’s) unfinished tasks’’. He told a Mumbai monthly in August 1980 that the BJP was different from the Jan Sangh in many ways. Fundamentally, ‘‘having tasted power once, we realised that unless we became a party of the national mainstream and enjoyed support from all sections, we could not become a national alternative.” The BJP must have a different image, he said. ‘‘The Jan Sangh was functioning more or less as an opposition group with a Hindu bias.”
This was very much in line with Advani’s interview to the RSS organ Panchjanya (Deepavali 1980 issue). He said, ‘‘A party based on ideology can at the most come to power in a small area. It cannot win the confidence of the entire country.’’
But given their links to the RSS, people were not convinced of their sincerity or their capacity to keep this promise. On July 20, 1985, Vajpayee gave up: ‘‘When did we get away from the Jan Sangh?’’ The BJP faced one electoral debacle after another. It was revived only by Advani’s resolve to exploit the Hindutva and Ayodhya issues. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in the Ayodhya case, the solution he had hitherto promised was no longer practicable — legislation to build the temple. The RSS, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal felt cheated.
If electoral defeat in 1984 prompted a communal course in 1986, debacle in 2004 revived ideas of return to moderation, albeit with chants of Hindutva. Hence, the Jinnah statement. But, the RSS had had enough and issued the marching orders. As the BJP’s Mumbai session ended, Organiser attacked “pundits prescribing the BJP to become a Right-wing tool for power, discarding all ideological baggage”. The BJP cannot become a Right-wing secular party. It must remain the RSS’s front with the Hindutva plank, dooming both the BJP and the RSS to gradual irrelevance. As a front of a unique body, the RSS, the BJP is a unique political party. With its brand of politics, India’s parliamentary democracy has suffered a lot and will continue to suffer more.
Ironically, no one had done more than Advani to hitch the BJP’s wagon to the RSS’s star. He imagined that this gave him latitude. The RSS disabused him of this notion as it had both Sharma and Madhok. Having been disgraced thus, what respect will Advani now command as leader of the opposition? Ghalib described the fate of such poignantly. Nikalna khuld se Adam ka sunte ae they lekin/ Bohat be abroo hokar terey koochay se ham niklay (One had heard of Adam’s departure from heaven/ But it was in utter disgrace that I left your quarters).
