The Rankled File

• Arun Jaitley protests the appointment of controversial businessman Sudhanshu Mittal to a party post
• Uma Bharati resurfaces to say that it is her "rashtra dharma" to make L.K. Advani the prime minister
• Varun Gandhi, campaigning on a BJP platform from his mother's constituency Pilibhit, makes a strident hate speech against Muslims that shocks the political class even as it wins him admirers in the saffron camp
• The BJP produces a rival CD showing a Congress Muslim leader telling Muslims that supporting the BJP amounts to committing kufr (apostasy) in Islam

***

As if the Arun-Varun tamasha were not enough, fiery sadhvi Uma Bharati, one of the most colourful characters from the BJP's recent history, resurfaced to fish in the BJP's troubled waters. The same lady who had attacked both L.K. Advani and Jaitley before dramatically storming out of the party made a statement in which she "appealed to Arun Jaitley to work towards making Advani the PM".

By the end of the week, Jaitley, who had first indicated that he would never compromise on what he considered to be a matter of high principle, had apparently climbed down from that position when he went to party president Rajnath Singh's residence on March 19 to discuss candidates from Delhi and Bihar. According to sources, this came after intervention from the RSS. By the time of writing, the party was still trying to secure Mittal's resignation from the post of co-convenor for the Northeast, but he appeared to be in no mood to relent.

Mittal could well be a metaphor for the rot in our political system, the classic example of money purchasing political clout, according to party insiders. The man who was rumoured to have handled the cash for the BJP's legendary money-raiser, the late Pramod Mahajan, has been trying to graft the tattered remains of the Mahajan empire across the party and indeed the larger Sangh parivar. In a recessionary economy, he has his uses. His favours may extend from offering his tenthouse services for a low price to a BJP or RSS functionary to building a structure in a party leader's house. In this case, there have been rumours that Mittal paid large sums to the agp before the alliance with the BJP was finalised. But there are divisions in the Assam BJP over a "Marwari businessman" becoming so influential.

Meanwhile, well-placed BJP sources say that after Jaitley's protest against Mittal's appointment, efforts to persuade the latter to step down did not work. As one leader put it, like any good businessman, "he expects a return on his investment. So why should he quit?" At the time of going to the press, efforts to "persuade" Mittal were still going on. Sources close to Jaitley argue that "a fixer like Mittal may be present in other political parties. But you keep him standing at the doorway and do not invite him to the living room".

Yet, the timing of Jaitley's protest was clearly awkward. Coming as it did just when the election campaign seemed ready for take-off, it did not endear him to other second-rung leaders, some of whom are believed to have had dealings with Mittal. It also generated a certain resentment against Jaitley's style of functioning. Today, the BJP's most brilliant strategist is also seen as operating within a charmed circle and those out of it feel a bit excluded.

Jaitley's disdain for politicians of a certain profile also creates ill-feeling. What does indeed set him apart from his colleagues is the fact that as one of India's top lawyers he is also a successful professional and therefore can afford to take uncompromising positions. But then isn't politics supposed to be the art of compromise?

Yet, the BJP can now only hope that the Mittal episode will fade from public memory as the election gains momentum. Now that Jaitley-Rajnath have been photographed together, the party has calculated that the issue may have made a great story in the media, but won't really have an impact on the ground level, where again the election for the BJP will be about state-level arithmetic.

The Varun Gandhi episode, however, may have a greater resonance in electoral and political terms. A section in the BJP believes that western Uttar Pradesh and the terai belt where Pilibhit (the seat from where Varun intends to contest) is located is communally polarised across towns and villages. According to some calculations, this sentiment if properly stoked and exploited could help the saffron party, desperate to make a comeback in the electorally critical state. The fact that Varun chose to take this path in a seat his mother Maneka has won repeatedly is seen as an indicator of a rich communal harvest. But is it so? In UP, caste arithmetic has in recent elections subsumed all other strategies.

Varun Gandhi equating Muslims with Osama bin Laden, suggesting they are all terrorists with fearful names and threatening to chop off their hands, along with some other insults, may have won the approval of the Shiv Sena. But this is just the sort of language that alarms other NDA allies like the JD(U) in Bihar. Moreover, it makes the BJP unattractive to potential post-poll allies. It also undermines Advani's attempt to position the BJP as a middle-of-the-road right-wing party that is gradually abandoning ideological stridency.

Yet, the ideological ambiguity was evident in the BJP's response to Varun's hate speech. Most senior leaders of the party were either evasive or defensive about Varunspeak. It was only the BJP's two Muslim faces—Shahnawaz Hussain and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi—who outright condemned Varun. Shahnawaz took the strongest position. "In all my years of association with the BJP," he said, "I have never heard anything so shocking or such foul language against any community." To prove that two wrongs make a right, the BJP on March 19 produced its own CD alleging a communal speech by a Congress Muslim leader in UP. But then it did not quite match Varun's below-the-belt rhetoric. In this season of tamashas in the BJP, it created only a mild flutter.