... When the BJP government was toppled it was already in tatters. On most policy issues - subsidies, patents, liberalising the insurance sector - it had made bold pronouncements only to backtrack ... The BJP had earned sufficient opprobrium for colluding in the harassment, to describe it charitably, of the Christian minorities – the collusion being showcased by Advani's off-the-cuff exoneration of the Bajrang Dal in the Staines case. Advani was not alone in this delinquency - Vajpayee kept him company with a complicitous silence, preparatory to the Wadhwa Commission whitewash.

It would be naive to underestimate the BJP's fascist majoritarian character ... K.R. Malkani and Govindacharya have come out with categorical statements the (original) agenda only temporarily on hold – specifically until they come to power with a parliamentary presence to make allies unnecessary.

The calculation is transparent. Let the known hawks keep the flag flying, to reassure the committed BJP constituency. Keep the Sangh Parivar and the RSS happy.

Then have the Prime Minister and the party spokesman deny that the National Democratic Alliance has any truck with the Hindutva agenda. We are asked to take this on trust because Vajpayee is sensible and humane – a statesman. Unfortunately, if Vajpayee has renounced his membership of the RSS - a connection that goes back half a century - it has not been widely advertised. But the fact that Vajpayee is as much of a "Hindutva" junkie as Advani ... is not so much the point. The point is that the BJP cannot suddenly become a decent, liberal, centrist party without losing its core constituency.

Let us for a moment admit the possibility that the BJP, if left to its own devices, would be perfectly willing to jettison Hindutva and reinvent itself ... But the RSS will not leave the BJP to its own devices. The BJP's political agenda has been hammered into shape on the anvil of the RSS's ideology. The BJP's political identity is constituted by its fascist, majoritarian commitments. Let it not be forgotten that the BJP came into its own on the atavistic issue of demolishing the Babari Masjid and erecting a Ram mandir on its ruins ...

.. But there is a fundamental difference between the Congress and the BJP. The BJP is a committed and ideologically driven party, the Congress merely opportunistic. The BJP ideology is fundamentally opposed to the ideological underpinnings of secular, liberal democracy - minimally, the notion that citizenship and ...- rights are defined and guaranteed by legal, constitutional principles, not sectarian or communitarian loyalties. The Congress on the other hand, precisely be-cause it is relatively unstructured .... is less capable of undermining the basic framework of Indian liberalism.

... The absence of a third front and the bankruptcy of the left makes it a weak bulwark against the Sangh Parivar's agenda. The hope is that the "internal contradictions" of the "grand alliance" will undermine the politics of majoritarianism. (Source: The Statesman, 30 August, 1999)