Is the BJP becoming a BCP - Bharatiya Congress Party? Recent events suggest so ... Atal. Bihari Vajpayee is positioning it as a right of Centre party. In any case, the party has already abandoned its core issues. Coalition imperatives give it a nice alibi ...
The impediment is not just the lack of a majority in the Lok Sabha. Nor is it the arithmetic in the Rajya Sabha, whose character makes a two-third majority impossible for the BJP for the next 10-15 years ... There are two schools of thought in the BJP. One, that India can be ruled only by consensus, and this requires compromise, give and take, flexibility, taking everybody along. This has been the Congress model. Vajpayee, Advani and many partymen subscribe to this view. The second group is still for the politics of ideology and feels it is possible for an ideology-driven, cadre-based party to come to power. It need not get limited to a pressure group, as others would have it believe. Ironically this group to which Govindacharya belongs is in a minority.
Power is changing the "chaal, charitra and chehra" of the BJP, to borrow the words of Govindacharya ... For the moment, Vajpayee is the symbol of this change. But it is not just the prime minister who is donning the Muslim prayer cap. His nominee Bangaru Laxman is welcoming Muslims into the BJP fold and Advani is trying to assure safety to the Christians. Realisation has dawned on the most hawkish of BJP leaders that it may be possible for the BJP to win an election but it cannot rule India if the minorities are hostile ...
Vajpayee is the symbol of this liberalism today because he is at the helm of affairs. But the hard fact is that it would not be possible for the party to make the transition without the support of Advani, or of other leaders of the party. The BJP would have split by now.
The whole process is not going to leave the RSS untouched. The Sangh leadership has already accepted the reality that if the BJP is to be the epicentre of power today, it has to coexist with others and that has its own dynamics.
The Sangh had to accept a Vajpayee today; they are all set to accept an Advani tomorrow and it.is an Advani cast in the Vajpayee mould ...
Govindacharya's latest formulation is more all encompassing than the RSS thinking has been in the past and it may give an insight into the RSS mindset. He advocates a proper mix of Hindutva, which he describes as "Hinduness and not Hinduism" - he has no objection to it being referred to as "Indianness, provided you don't force your nomenclature on me" - and Antyodaya (national reconstruction based on the upliftment of the last person) ...
He elaborates Hinduness in five themes representing the country's ethos: respect to all modes of worship; egalitarian sacredness of the animate and the inanimate; the idea that man is part of nature and not its conqueror, with an eco-friendly development and technology flowing out of it; special qualities of womanhood and a non- material goal of life, which give rise to morality and humanist values.
The "idealism" versus "ideology" streams may clash in the days to come, and may even part company. But the former, the consensus model, will dominate. At the end of the day, Vajpayee has to run a coalition government in Delhi ... Keeping out of the turf of the regional bosses is the (price) that any ruling party has to pay today for ... a coalition at the Centre ...
The BJP is becoming a BCP not because Vajpayee is a liberal and Advani wants to succeed him but because India is a plural society. (Source: The Indian Express, 2 October, 2000)
Mushirul Hasan on Primacy of Constitution for National Unity
.. The BJP president will have to come to terms with the widespread aversion to his party - an aversion ... shared by many castes, communities and political groupings. If (Laxman) has a special fondness for the Muslims and desires their 'expedient relationship' with his party, he will have to devise ways and means of redressing their grievances. If he wants them to soften their opposition, he will have to airlift the Hindutva ideologues to the Staten Island for rest and recuperation. In short, he will have to accept the primacy of the Constitution as the reference point for nurturing a national perspective .:
This brings me to the Congress-led Muslim 'mass contact' campaign of 1937 ... The campaign petered out not because of countrywide Muslim opposition, but because it was devoid of any social and economic content, and that it offered too little, too late. The secularist, radical rhetoric alarmed vested interests. The Muslim Leaguers perceived a threat to their very existence ... Second, the Congress effort was in large part confined to urban areas ...
Finally, the strategy fell prey as well to a divided Congress and to opposition from Hindu nationalists that feared the influx of Muslim activists ...
Important lessons must be learnt from the 'failure' of the "mass contact'. One of them is that national unity, grounded on the principles of democracy, secularism, social justice and equity, must be the cardinal political assumption in the nation-building enterprise. The other is not to stigmatise or essentialise a community, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, but to help build bridges of fraternity and understanding ... (Source: The Indian Express, 20 September, 2000)
