In its desperation to win the Lok Sabha election, the BJP strikes alliances of convenience to gain a national spread.

By Swapan Dasgupta and Ashok K Damodaran

On the afternoon of Thursday, December 11, senior Congress leader K. Vijayabhaskara Reddy arrived at AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalitha's Poes Garden residence in Chennai. Pleasantries over, the two leaders got down to business: discussing the revival of the Congress-aiadmk alliance in Tamil Nadu. The normally imperious Jayalalitha was polite to the visitor, mildly reminding him it was the Congress that had unilaterally snapped ties with her party after the 1996 election. Reddy mistook this pronouncement as an admission of Jayalalitha's own vulnerability and decided it was time to drive home the advantage. The Congress, he blustered, should now be the senior partner in the alliance. An unfazed Jayalalitha retorted: "Considering the state of your party, you deserve no more than one seat. But for old time's sake, I am willing to concede two." Reeling under the shock, Reddy could only mutter: "Madam, I hope you are joking."

Jayalalitha was, of course, being deadly serious. What neither Reddy nor Congress president Sitaram Kesri knew was that Jayalalitha was already in the process of making alternative arrangements. On December 17, even as Kesri was gloating over his alliance with Laloo Prasad Yadav in Bihar, political circles were caught unawares as the BJP and the AIADMK announced that they would jointly contest the Lok Sabha polls in Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry.

It was a coup. Long considered a political untouchable and a Hindi heartland party, the alliance with the AIADMK was a significant achievement for the BJP. The party has been struggling to convince a sceptical electorate that the 12th Lok Sabha will not be a mirror image of the last one. Along with the understanding with Naveen Patnaik's breakaway Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Orissa, it was, as party president L.K. Advani put it, "a psychological breakthrough". It has paved the way for the BJP's understanding with Ramakrishna Hegde's Lok Shakti in Karnataka and cleared the path for disgruntled Congressmen to climb aboard the Atal Bihari Vajpayee bandwagon. In Andhra Pradesh, at least two former chief ministers are said to be toying with the idea. "The politics of anti-BJPism has been given a formal burial," said BJP spokesperson Sushma Swaraj. In fact, Congressmen were so shocked at the decision of their traditional ally to sleep with the enemy that party spokesman V.N. Gadgil bitterly predicted that the alliance would spell doom for both parties. And in Orissa, Janaki Ballav Patnaik, who now faces a new threat from the BJP, tried to comfort his partymen, saying that the BJP was like "a bonsai tree that would never grow in height". What the new alliances amount to is more than the BJP scoring political brownie points and shedding what Advani earlier used to mythologise as "majestic isolation". Thanks to a series of incremental deals, beginning with Kalyan Singh's decimation of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh last October, the BJP and its allies have today become a factor in almost all major states, barring Kerala and West Bengal. On paper at least, more than 440 constituencies have the option of voting for a pro-Vajpayee man with a fair chance of winning.

In 1996, when Vajpayee failed to prove his majority, the BJP had three allies -- Samata Party, Shiv Sena and Haryana Vikas Party (HVP) -- and was unable to win fresh support. Now, it is beginning to resemble another United Front (UF), except that there is a dominant party at the core. "Earlier, people doubted our ability to win a majority. Now those misgivings have disappeared," says Advani. But in the process, the BJP has paid a heavy price for negotiating the end of its pariah status. In its effort to gain power at any cost, Kalyan Singh offered cabinet berths even to criminals. Vajpayee may say that if the ministers don't maintain standards, they will have to go. But that will have to be at the cost of the Government. In short, the party has changed its chal, charitra aur chehra (rhythm, character and face), but not in the way general secretary K.N. Govindacharya had envisaged.

For a start, the BJP's image as an ideological party with a commitment to Hindutva has been eroded. Today, Advani espouses the virtues of "aggregation" and Vajpayee describes the BJP as a "middle-of-the-road" party. For long, the BJP practised the Rashtriya Swa-yamsevak Sangh's (RSS) brand of "pure politics" but recent developments show that the pragmatic viewpoint is finally prevailing. As one RSS leader said, "The BJP believed that electoral success eluded it only because it was not playing conventional politics and wanted to give it a try." While this shift may have resulted in the loosening of the RSS' hold, it has also led to amorphousness.

Today, free marketeers, Hindu chauvinists, neo-socialists and apolitical elements rub shoulders with plain opportunists and criminals in an uneasy coexistence. Ayodhya may have been put on the backburner, and the party is unlikely to dabble with potentially divisive disputes over shrines in Mathura and Kashi. But there are other problem areas. The economic policy of the BJP, for example, verges on incoherence, thanks to contradictory pulls and pressures. Thus, contrary to the leadership's insistence that the BJP is a "party with a difference", the reality is that it resembles any other party.

In social terms too, the party has changed dramatically. Till 1989 at least, caste played a nominal role in the BJP's calculations. Now, it too has been bitten strongly by the Mandal bug, with the leadership attempting various exercises in "social engineering". Of course, its appeal to particular castes has contributed to the BJP's growing clout among backward castes and Dalits and has removed the stigma of its being a Brahmin-Bania party. But it has compromised its reputation of being above sectional concerns. Caste considerations alone led to Madan Lal Khurana being snubbed when he tried to reclaim the chief ministership of Delhi after his acquittal in the hawala case.

More ominously, in its search for winnable candidates, the BJP has meekly acquiesced in the criminalisation of politics. Uttar Pradesh is the most glaring example of this degeneration. In the recent elections to the Legislative Council, the BJP list included relatives of known criminals. The induction of party-hopper Sanjay Singh, a Congressman turned protege of V.P. Singh and later a minister in the Chandra Shekhar government, has been justified by the BJP as part of its efforts to woo Thakur votes in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

The choice of allies too shows a growing trend towards expediency. If the alliance with the Shiv Sena was necessitated by the need to avoid splitting pro-Hindutva votes in Maharashtra, there was little by way of ideological justification in the other electoral arrangements. The logic of the alliances with the HVP in Haryana, Akali Dal in Punjab and BJD in Orissa were dictated by anti-Congressism, and the understanding with the Samata Party in Bihar was prompted by the need to defeat Laloo. If others make anti-BJPism their political mission, argue party leaders, why should we not take preventive measures? Fair enough, but the BJP can then hardly pretend that its alliances are qualitatively superior to the ones forged by its opponents.

In case the BJP-led coalition is voted to power, it too could be plagued by internal strife. On Kashmir, for example, there is little meeting ground between the BJP and Samata Party's George Fernandes. And while the party strongly believes in the creation of a national market, it is unwilling to let market forces come into full play. Globalisation has become a bug-bear for the party. It is still to reconcile itself to India's membership of the WTO but doesn't know how to deal with commitments made by previous governments. On the issue of full convertibility of the rupee, the party has taken a public stance against it but its leaders privately admit this is negotiable. While the party is committed to a minimalist role for the state, in practice it has never encouraged a truncation of the bureaucracy. And its economic thought ranges from the RSS, which comprises extreme Gandhians, to the BJP's own support base whose opinions swing wildly, depending on how well or bad the economy is doing.

The amorphousness is already taking a toll. Till the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, put everything else in the shade, the BJP had attempted to project the state governments it ran as models for the rest of the country. Again in 1996, Advani went on a "Su-raj (good governance) yatra" prior to the general elections. However, there is nothing in the record of the state governments run by the BJP and its allies that can be called exceptional. Bhairon Singh Shekhawat is rated as an able political manager, but the BJP would be hard put to highlight his government's distinctive achievements. The BJP-run governments may not have performed disastrously, but they are nothing to write home about.

Many of these obvious wrinkles are certain to be glossed over in the euphoria that surrounds election campaigns in India. As opposed to 1991, when the BJP achieved an electoral breakthrough on the strength of its dogged espousal of Hindutva and its campaign for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, such contentious matters will not be in the forefront this time. Issues like the repeal of Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code are as much part of the BJP charter as the Ram temple which the party cannot afford to renounce. But as a party leader said, "These continue to be on our charter. At the same time, these are decisions that we cannot implement on our own in the near future. So they will have to wait till such time as we can do things unilaterally." Simply put, not until the BJP gets the two-thirds majority required to push through constitutional amendments.

Again, as opposed to the last two polls, the 1998 campaign will be distinctly presidential in character. For the first time, the BJP-led alliance has a star at the helm. There is no one in either the UF or the Congress who can match Vajpayee's charisma or his pan-Indian appeal. His popularity was a major factor in the aiadmk teaming up with the BJP, a party with a meaningful presence in only two Lok Sabha constituencies in Tamil Nadu. The Tamils, claims AIADMK deputy general secretary T.M. Selvaganapathy, "have always voted for the strongest party at the Centre which can ensure stability. Earlier, it was the Congress. This time it is the BJP". In harnessing this popularity into votes and parliamentary seats, the BJP has cut corners and built up a confused coalition of divergent interests, some of which are distinctly unwholesome. Like the Congress in the past, it too will attempt to generate an emotive wave and play on the tina (there is no alternative) factor. All contentious issues and points of conflict will either be scrupulously avoided or deftly skirted. In psephological terms, the BJP and its allies must poll well over 25 per cent of the popular votes (it secured 24 per cent in 1996 and 21 per cent in 1991) to have a realistic chance of forming a government at the Centre.

The ploy could well work. After 18 months of instability, people want a respite from uncertainty and may give the untested BJP a chance, if only for the sake of fairness and stability. Certainly, the BJP is leaving nothing to chance and Vajpayee has even kept the door open to post-poll alliances. For the sake of political power, the BJP has transformed itself dramatically and capitulated to the great Indian consensus. As one party leader admitted, "While the Kesri Congress is on the decline, its saffron clone is on the rise." In positive terms, this has meant eschewing the divisive features of its ideology. In less flattering terms, it has signalled its willingness to overlook the seamy underside of political culture. For the sake of victory, the BJP has diluted its commitment to change and radicalism. And as long as it needs help from allies, many of whom otherwise have little in common with the party, that is the way it will be. As Jayalalitha said the day after the alliance was sealed, the tie-up was only for seat sharing and had nothing to do with ideology. In national terms, it means that India will continue to blunder along famously.

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