While most parties exercise a great deal of caution while admitting new members, the BJP now seems to revel in the fact that everyone likes it so much ...
The BJP's compulsions is being so uncommonly broad-minded are, of course, obvious. It is driven, first of all, by a keen desire to shed its 'untouchability', a label which it acquired after the Babari Masjid demolition ... The stigma had hurt it very much. Secondly, it seems to have realised that it is now or never. If the party misses the bus in 1998, it may never make it to the Centre Hence, the desperation to get to the seat of power by any means, by aligning with whoever is willing, irrespective of his background.
... After the ... "coup" in Uttar Pradesh, the party seemed to have suddenly discovered the elixir of power - defections - which it coyly termed as evidence of the "affection" felt for the BJP ... The party's present stand, however, does not make either political or electoral sense. It is difficult to understand how the BJP can expect to gain by associating with such elements as the imperious lady from the south famed for the money she spent on her son's marriage, or with the Congress(O)- Janata Dal-film hero-Lok Shakti leader from Karnataka, or with a political novice in Orissa, whose only claim to fame is that he is his father's son.
Although such tie-ups are not uncommon in Indian politics there has always been a vague ideological rapport guiding them. In the BJP's case, such rapport is evident in its alliance with the Shiv Sena. Even where it entered into an agreement with, say, the Akalis or the Samata Party, these were seen as mainly local arrangements motivated by a common anti-Congress or an anti-Laloo stand. It is something else, however, to extend this policy to the national plane and be totally undiscriminating in one's choice of allies.
Even if the purpose is clear ... the damage to the BJP's reputation can be considerable. What is immediately obvious is that the risk it has taken by its unalloyed opportunism can undo all the patient work which the Sangh Parivar, with the RSS at its head, has been doing all these years to build up a reputation for probity and austerity. Worse, it is a one-way street. The lost name cannot be recovered later. If the BJP does miss the bus, it will rue for ever the slippery path it took in the hope of attaining power ... The Jan Sangh had little hesitation in being a junior partner in the non-Congress alliances of the sixties and seventies and even merged itself in the Janata Party in 1977. There was no sign of its great devotion to Ram then or to Hindutva alias cultural nationalism ...
The crushing defeat in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections induced second thoughts in the BJP about persisting with its vacuous policies of integral humanism or Gandhian socialism, it did not take any hasty step apart from endorsing the VHP's Ramjanmabhoomi agitation ... The party remained non-controversial enough to be a part of the second Janata experiment at the Centre in 1989.
Although Advani's rath yatra of 1990 led to the BJP's estrangement from its former allies in the non- Congress camp, the party's relatively clean image persisted ... Even if the BJP's success in spreading this impression is ascribed to its mastery of subterfuge, such deceit still had a vaguely ideological motivation ... What has happened now is the worst thing that can happen to a party, for it has deliberately thrown away what is known in today's terminology as its "Unique Selling Point (USP). The party's action is all the more inexplicable because corruption still remains one of the most potent factors in Indian politics in influencing the choice of voters ... This is all the more so because corruption has now been compounded by the criminalisation of politics ... But if the mere quest for power can make it throw all norms to the winds, what will power itself do to the party ?... The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi ... the Babari Masjid demolition and the BJP's current precipitous fall from its self-proclaimed ideals, taken together, can pave the way for the BJP's return to the periphery. (Source: The Hindustan Times, 5 January, 1998)
