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THE NATION: BJP
Bangaru-- A Bad Performer
At
one level it was Bangaru's personality-he even abandoned the party president's
staid office for a garish new room-that didn't agree with the BJP's traditional
leaders. He was the outsider, the parvenu who was a nobody in his native
Andhra Pradesh, the lamb who was slaughtered by Narasimha Rao at Nandyal
in 1991, unsuccessfully contested a parliamentary election in 1998 in
Rajasthan and eventually made it to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat. A Madiga
Dalit, Bangaru was Vajpayee's chosen one.
Yet such was the antipathy to him that Bhairon
Singh Shekhawat, a former party vice-president, and Uma Bharati refused
to serve as office-bearers under Bangaru. M. Venkaiah Naidu, the general
secretary and fellow Andhraite who many felt should have been the beneficiary
of any party generational shift, was also moved to the Rural Development
Ministry.
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OUT IN THE COLD: Bangaru's term
as president left many old party hands upset
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Most important, Bangaru as president did little
to arrest the listlessness that had set in under Kushabhau Thakre, the
man he replaced. Since 1998, the party has lost much of its talent to
the government. This "brain drain" has been damaging. Where
party general secretaries, the nuts-and-bolts men of the BJP, were once
shrewd operators like Pramod Mahajan, Bangaru brought in ineffectual Sunil
Shastri and non-entity Maya Singh, a relative of the Scindias. He also
selected some people to the National Executive who, many old-timers feel,
"should be promptly turfed out now".
Nor was Laxman able to give a strategic or ideological
veneer to his actions. As Modi says, "The BJP's biggest challenge
is how to run the party when in government. No mechanism has been evolved
satisfactorily." As the party shed its singular but mobilisation-friendly
manner, Bangaru didn't address the core constituency. In depriving the
party of reliable hands like former general secretary K.N. Govindacharya-who
is on a two-year sabbatical and recently released an open letter that
resembled an ultra-left critique of liberalisation-he thought he was pleasing
the prime minister. Indeed, winning Vajpayee's approval seemed Laxman's
sole priority.
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IMPORTED SUPPORT: The party's rally in Delhi needed crowds from
Haryana
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The combination of Thakre's acts of omission
and Bangaru's acts of commission will weigh heavily on Krishnamurthi.
"We are a growing party," he says, "a cadre-based mass
party. But in the past three or four years, we have been so busy with
frequent elections, we have neglected training." Frequent training
camps and a chintan baithak (brainstorming session) are on Krishnamurthi's
agenda. Immediately, Venkaiah Naidu may revert to the party in the BJP's
version of the Kamaraj plan.
All in all, the bugle may have been sounded
but the army is scarcely in a state to fight. In the provincial units
(see graphic) there are many, and varied, reasons for this. Groupism was
the original problem; uninspiring leadership and Tehelka have compounded
matters.
In Gujarat it is as if the party has been sapped
of its very vitality. After the numbing defeat in the municipal and panchayat
elections in 2000-the BJP's first major loss in the state in something
like a decade-and the chaotic aftermath of the January 26 earthquake,
almost everybody agrees Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel is due for retirement.
Strangely, nobody can summon the gumption to actually tell him to go.
In Uttar Pradesh, Rajnath Singh's woes are different.
Even his detractors admit the dour chief minister has worked hard to redeem
the lost cause he was left with by his predecessor, Ram Prakash Gupta,
another of the BJP's innumerable weary, old men. Elections are due in
March 2001. Tehelka may not be an issue then-but it is demoralising enough
now.
In the states where elections are expected at
the end of April, the BJP may not seem to have much at stake. Even so
there is needless hype in West Bengal from a unit that has an overstated
sense of importance. In contrast, in neighbouring Assam the party has
solid support but no charismatic face to harness its potential and make
the decisive lunge for power.
To re-kickstart itself, the party yearns for
that dramatic gesture, perhaps a purge within or even one of the space
around the prime minister. As a BJP minister in Punjab sees it, "Tehelka
has put us on a level ideological field with the Congress. Only Vajpayee
can act as sanjeevani (a miracle cure) to revive the party after the Laxman
episode." A party's wounded soul wants to be tended to.
-with bureau reports
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