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BJP divisions may come to the fore at Madras meet

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

With the 'Hindutva' issues revived in the just-concluded winter session of Parliament, the upcoming national executive of the Bharatiya Janata Party may provide the forum for the moderates and extremists within the organisation, to win over the other.

"It could be persuasion, not a showdown, but the 'basic political issues' are sure to be thrashed out beyond closed doors," says an informed source.

At one level, hard-liners within the party feel that the moderates may have had too much for too long, that the BJP may soon lose its political identity of the past.

"With that may also go everything that the party has stood for, and not just Hindutva," adds the source. This includes 'value-based politics' and political accountability, which the hard-liners feel are becoming a thing of the past.

At a more personal level, though, the hard-liners of the RSS hue feel that the BJP has let an 'individual crown over the organisation'. The reference is obviously to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, whose personal image, if not outright charisma of the Indira Gandhi variety, is believed to have won the Lok Sabha elections.

The differences are boiling over, but a section of the hard-liners feel that if they remained silent, the moderates now controlling the BJP may render them redundant before long.

In this context, they refer to the Bangalore national executive at the end of last year, where 'Swadeshi ultimately gave way to economic reforms'. Likewise, political moderation may elbow out basic principles at Madras, once and for all, they fear.

"If left unchecked," says a Sangh Parivar leader not associated with the BJP, "Madras, coming after Bangalore and the Lok Sabha polls this year, may have ended the BJP as some of us had known for long. Instead, we may end up having a party which is no different from the Congress. The idealism and political morality of the party alone may remain on paper, that too only with the current generation of top-level leaders comprising Vajpayee and L K Advani."

This section of the hard-liners feel that Vajpayee is fighting a 'proxy war' through friendly National Democratic Alliance allies, to show the BJP hard-liners their place. "Left unchecked, again, we may end up committing the same blunder of the Congress Syndicate in the late sixties, when it thought, it could bridle a run-away Indira Gandhi whenever it wanted. History has another lesson, though."

In such a case, they say, in private though, the leadership may end up using the NDA allies and also a section of the BJP, if not the Congress, against the hard-liners. "And I feel that battle remains to be fought," says the hard-liner, with grave concern. "The alternative is for the ideologists within the party to give up the mock-fight, and concede defeat."

However, another section of the hard-liners do not share this opinion.

In their view, there is nothing that the BJP can do other than putting up a face of moderation, given the electoral realities of the times. "And Vajpayee's is the most-accepted face of moderation in the country today, much more than even Sonia Gandhi's, with her Nehru-Gandhi family image of liberalism and modernism," says a leader belonging to this group.

According to this group, "The RSS, with its high moral authority over the BJP, could apply the brakes anytime we wanted. We created an Advani, through the rath yatra, and we can now create another national leader of equal stature on the moral questions, or even on contentious issues like Swadeshi," says he. As he claims, "Even the 'creation' of Vajpayee as the moderate face of the BJP readily acceptable across the country, both by the common man and intended allies, was a deliberate decision taken after a lot of deliberation."

This section claims that the current crop of voters have favoured the BJP as a policy-oriented, ideology-driven party, and have not just voted for the ''face of any single individual''.

This, one leader says, "is more so in the case of non-traditional BJP states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the West and the East. Given time, we can drive deeper roots on our own, and possibly independent of our existing allies, one or all of them. That time is now being provided by the Vajpayee government at the Centre, and nothing more to it."

The BJP already has a base of its own in the northern belt, he points out, adding, "We only will have to choose the time, issue and the person."

However, the emerging moderate opinion within the party seems to look at these issues differently. They feel that the party has to keep to the centrist path for all time to come.

"For one thing, economic reforms is as irreversible as the Ayodhya demolition. Just as a temple may not come up on the disputed structure, so could the course of the reforms, not reversed," says a leader, drawing a parallel between the political and economic issues, now at stake.

Citing the poll results of recent years, they feel that the BJP might have come to the end of its growth period. "Now, it is time for consolidation, before we can push forward further," says this leader, referring to the stagnation in the number of seats between the Lok Sabha polls of last year and this (182 seats on both occasions), and the reverses suffered in states like Uttar Pradesh. "It is becoming increasingly clear that we need the allies as much as they need us, and moderation is the only way that it can be ensured."

In his view, this year's Lok Sabha polls have thrown up a performance-oriented yardstick for political parties, as different from policy and personality-orientation.

"The fact remains, despite the 'Vajpayee image', the 'BJP card', the NDA alliance and even the 'Kargil issue', we could not sweep the polls. And if we could not do it this time, we cannot do it next time, or in the one after that," muses he.

In this context, he also refers to the 'emerging voting pattern' of 1999.

"Though it was the Lok Sabha polls, and the prime minister's office was the central issue. Voters in most states seem to have expressed a greater opinion on the performance of their own state governments, not that of the main prime ministerial contestants, parties or personalities, as we would like to believe. Thus, in such 'homogenous voting regions' as the Hindi belt and the Deccan plateau, you had different states within the same region voting differently. Which was not generally the case earlier."

This being the case, says this leader, the BJP may have to work out a strategy which may project it as a national party for all intents, but would concentrate as much on the regional issues and image. "This could mean the dilution of the hard-line in most cases in most states, and Chennai should set the mood and trend for the same."

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