Columns: The Usual Suspects

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India Today, February 8, 1999
Feb 8, 1999

THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Khurana's Revolt

Positioning for life after Vajpayee and Advani.

By Swapan Dasgupta

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the BJP operated on the lines of an elaborate, extended family. There were the leaders, the dedicated pracharaks, the untiring local functionaries, the dashing, the efficient and the usual quota of plodders -- a parivar bound together by a common orientation, a loose sense of mission and a remarkable degree of fraternity. Despite occasional successes in municipal polls and the odd by-election, power was always a distant dream. What motivated the parivar through the dark days of the Emergency and the lost deposits in successive elections was the dogged belief that this was indeed "the party with a difference", wedded to a resurgent India.

Madan Lal Khurana was a typical member of this parivar. An RSS worker for over 50 years, he was a pillar of the erstwhile Jan Sangh and then the BJP in Delhi. Khurana was the archetypal local politician who was familiar with every mohalla of the city. He may have occasionally made it to the Lok Sabha but his heart was always in the parish pump. What appealed to him was not the glamour of Lutyens' Delhi, but the hustle and bustle of the other, real Delhi. When the BJP swept the Delhi assembly election in 1993, there was no doubt who would become chief minister.

Why has this genial and pugnacious face of the BJP become a pathological dissident? Why is the Union minister for tourism and parliamentary affairs itching for his own expulsion from the parivar? At the heart of the matter is, of course, the RSS' inexplicable veto on his reappointment as chief minister of Delhi after he was exonerated in the Jain hawala case. But it's a little more complex than that. Khurana's outburst at the BJP national executive in Bangalore last month and his anguish at the "pseudo-Hindutva" of those who roast Christians to death in Orissa were expressions of a growing tension in the parivar. In a not-too-subtle fashion he was posing a fundamental question: Why is the RSS bent on violating the BJP's functional autonomy? It's a question the prime minister has been asking repeatedly. It's also a question that has been bothering the so-called hardliners like L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.

It is not that the RSS has always let the BJP go its own way. There was always a significant Nagpur input into the BJP. As the link man until his death in 1992, Bhaurao Deoras exercised considerable moral authority over the BJP leadership. But he operated as an elder statesman, advising, encouraging and cautioning. Today, unfortunately, guidance has become interference. From its rarefied and cocooned existence, the RSS has put intolerable pressure on the Vajpayee Government to pursue an impractical agenda. Vajpayee having said a categorical no, there seems to be a concerted bid to isolate the hard-nosed mass politicians by stuffing the party with pliant apparatchiks. A determined minority in the RSS has also concluded that even Sonia Gandhi is preferable to a heretical BJP.

It is possible that Vajpayee and Advani will be able to ward off these encroachments at a heavy price. But what about the future? If the dogmatists in the parivar have their way, will the BJP be able to retain the grand Hindu coalition of liberals and the RSS? Or will it revert to being an extension counter of Nagpur? The Khurana offensive is a positioning exercise for the future with the minister as the stalking horse. If the issue is not amicably resolved, it could signal the end of the BJP as we know it.

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