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COVER
STORY, BJP
Sulking
Saffron
Sushma
Swaraj is a front-ranking leader. But she is out and dispirited
because she doesn't enjoy the prime minister's trust.
Govindacharya
is a dejected man, distrusted in the party and wants to quit politics
to return to his first love, the RSS.
M.L.
Khurana
wants to be leader of the Delhi BJP, doesn't want to take no for an answer
and has floated his own outfit. As the BJP wakes up to the problems of
dissidence and ideological confusion, what will the crisis add up to?
And will the RSS worsen the situation?
by
Swapan Dasgupta and Farzand Ahmed
It's
not often that Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee loses his cool. August
8 happened to be one such occasion. Addressing the BJP Parliamentary Party,
he suddenly burst out: "You always complain about me but I too have
complaints about you. You are not effectively countering opposition propaganda
against the Government." He then went on to refer to a newspaper
report-raised by a Haryana Vikas Party member in the Rajya Sabha-that
he would be carting an ass and an elephant to the US during his state
visit to that country in September.
 |
| Advani,
Vajpayee and others in the BJP know that the only way to bridge the
gap between the listless party and the government is to re-energise
the team. |
That very
day, Home Minister L.K. Advani also lost his cool. When a delegation of
BJP MPs from Orissa called on him to press for the transfer of the erstwhile
princely states of Saraikela and Kharsuan from the newly created Jharkhand
to Orissa, he ticked them off sharply. "Why have you raised this
issue now?" he asked. "What were you doing earlier? I have no
time for this." The stupefied MPs retreated in haste.
Perhaps it
was an exceptionally bad day. Perhaps the two BJP stalwarts of the NDA
Government were feeling the strain of the peace talks with the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
in Kashmir going horribly awry. But perhaps it was their political antenna
that informed Vajpayee and Advani that something was also going wrong
nearer home-in the very BJP that both of them had nurtured and brought
to power.
Kashmir
epitomised the problem. Ever since Jan Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mookerjee's
"martyrdom" in 1953, the integration of Kashmir was an issue
very dear to the saffron cause. The BJP had made the capitulation to Rubaiyya
Sayeed's kidnappers by the V.P. Singh government in 1989 and the "surrender"
in Hazratbal by the P.V. Narasimha Rao government in 1993 campaign planks
to show the bankruptcy of a soft line towards terrorism. Now the same
story was being repeated under a BJP-led Government. No wonder party MPs
thumped their tables in approval when Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh
Yadav called for "hot pursuit" of terrorists.
For Yadav,
it was a pre-meditated stridency. Mindful of the declining fortunes of
the BJP in Uttar Pradesh-a persisting trend since the 1999 general election-he
was throwing an ideological lifeline to disillusioned saffron supporters.
Propelled by the imperatives of government and coalition politics, the
BJP has vacated an important ideological space that the Congress under
Sonia Gandhi has proved incapable of filling. Yadav sought to seize the
opportunity.
Not that
the BJP is unmindful of the problem. Despite the familiar record of alienation
the political system generates between the Government and the party, the
BJP has proved incapable of tackling it. "There is a growing Hindu
anger," warns Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Secretary-General Praveen
Togadia. The VHP called for an all-India bandh against the massacre of
Amarnath pilgrims and directed its flak against Advani.
more...A
Sense of Permanent Grievance
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