The BJP had reason to overplay the Kashmir victory in the presence of an estimated 1.5 lakh delegates assembled for the party's three-day plenary at Bombay's sprawling Mahalaxmi race-course which concluded on November 12. It helped ease the battering the party's image had taken after the Gujarat fiasco, resolved after a Congress-style patch up with the rebels. The compromise, it was evident during the Bombay jamboree, had left the rank and file of the party sore with the leadership.
Hailing the EC's decision, Advani said: "Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had gone a step beyond Jinnah as the former's willingness to redesignate the Kashmir governor and the chief minister as sadr-e-riyasat and wazir-e-azam and holding elections on that condition amounted to undoing Kashmir's accession to India."
Beginning with Atal Behari Vajpayee's successful lobbying in Geneva against Pakistan raising the Kashmir issue in an international forum in 1993, followed by the unanimous endorsement by both Houses of Parliament of the BJP resolution to get PoK vacated, the EC decision was the BJP's third victory in a row, helping it to project itself as the custodian of national unity vis-a-vis the "pseudo secularists".
Advani's recent declaration (reiterated in Bombay) that Vajpayee would be the party's candidate for prime ministership if the BJP won a majority in the next Lok Sabha, had its desired impact upon the delegates. It established that the Gujarat episode was a brief eclipse in the party's growth, and it still had leaders with a sense of dedication and sacrifice. In the interim between the two plenary sessions in Bombay, the first in 1980 and the present one, the former Jana Sangh had transformed itself from a party for "Hindi,
Hindu and Hindustan" into a claimant for power, having already achieved the status of the main Opposition party at the Centre and holding governments in four states.
But growth has its attendant vices. The plenary (and the national executive in Pune preceding it) dropped the earlier plan to discuss the issue of "discipline", or lack of it, in the party and seek correctives. Instead, it was decided that the general secretaries of the party would interact with the states under their charge as the leaders felt the issue should not be discussed in the plenary. Yet the plenary denounced the revolt within the BJP as something that was "aided and abetted" by the Congress. It amounted to a rejection of Shankersinh Vaghela's consistent plea that at no stage was the Congress involved in the revolt. Still, the decline in party discipline seems to have caused much anxiety in the RSS. Its Joint General Secretary K.C. Sundershan, who attended the inaugural session of the plenary, is believed to have warned party leaders in private that the BJP was going the Congress way. However, divisive issues were swept under the carpet and the plenary seemed designed to restore the party's image of a cohesive organisation.
Nothing illustrates this better than Advani's vetoing the demands made by a few senior leaders that the BJP should oppose the Maharashtra government for re-negotiating with Enron after it had scrapped the Dabhol project. "Let us not issue a directive to the state government," said Advani. Although his warning shows the BJP's lack of a clear approach towards the entry of TNCs, it also indicates the party is determined to keep its alliance with the Shiv Sena intact.
Advani constituted an 11-member manifesto committee with Jaswant Singh, the party's deputy leader in the Lok Sabha, as its convenor, and General Secretary K.N. Govindacharya as its secretary to draft a manifesto—Vision 2001—spelling out the BJP's laid down policy and programmes. The contradiction was again obvious. While Singh is known to favour the unrestricted entry of TNCs, Govindacharya is a proponent of swadeshi which seeks to limit their entry to only infrastructural sectors.
Undoubtedly, great efforts will have to be made to reconcile the nascent differences between the swadeshi and the liberalisation lobbies in the party.
In a bid to infuse new blood into the BJP, Advani is also likely to give more representation to the younger generation in the party's national executive. In fact, about 40 new members to be inducted in the national executive (the party constitution enjoins that every five years, 25 per cent of the national executive should be new members) will be youngsters, as the party is trying to promote a new leadership in the coming years. There is a possibility that some senior functionaries like K.L. Sharma, S.S. Bhandari and K.S. Thakre may be asked to make way for the entry of junior people. Once the new committee is formed, the party will complete its target of having a political convention in each of its parliamentary constituencies to promote its electoral issues.
As part of its proposed agitational programme for the polls, the BJP will adopt a three-way strategy:
On the issue of the uniform civil code, the BJP governments in Delhi, Rajasthan and Gujarat are likely to follow the Maharashtra government and bring out a similar legislation bypassing the Centre. While Ayodhya has been reduced merely to one of the party’s electoral issues, not the issue as it was during the 1989 and 1991 elections, the party’s main agenda now will be to expand its social base, despite the collapse of the Mayawati government to which it had promised unconditional support.
Interestingly, Bihar Samata Party chief Nitish Kumar, MP, who commands a size-able support among backward communities in Bihar, mainly the Kurmis, and the party's national General Secretary Jaya Jaitely attended the BJP plenary, signalling a possible alliance between the two parties during polls in Bihar. Says Kumar: "We are opposed to Laloo Yadav and we are exploring various options, including seat adjustments with the BJP. But this is subject to endorsement by the national executive of the party."
Kumar's act of attending the BJP plenary showed signs of splitting the Samata Party itself with its parliamentary wing leader Chandrajeet Yadav suspending him in retaliation. In the BJP's assessment, Kumar will be an asset if he campaigns jointly with the BJP's backward class leaders, Kalyan Singh and Keshubhai Patel, Gujarat's former chief minister, who has been asked to join national politics as the party's vice-president.
"We might have failed to keep the Mayawati government in power, but we have proved that we are for the Dalits," says the party's senior leader, Sunder Singh Bhandari. A pro-Dalit and a pro-backward image on the one hand, and the champion of "national unity", as in the case of Kashmir, seem to be the strategy the BJP is banking on.
But the BJP's wooing the Samata Party and possibly forming an alliance with it also belie its claim of getting an absolute majority in the coming election. "As far as we are concerned, we have nothing to do with any other party except the Shiv Sena," said Advani, adding that the BJP was going to contest only 475 seats in the Lok Sabha, leaving out 62 seats of the total 545 Lok Sabha seats, two are to be nominated by the President, and Jammu and Kashmir has six seats where elections may not take place). "In the post-election scenario, we might have to strike an alliance with the Akali Dal, Jayalalitha, N.T. Rama Rao, Bansi Lal's Haryana Vikas Party and, if things work out, also with the Asom Gana Parishad," says a senior office bearer.
For the moment though, the BJP seems to have chosen, as a matter of its tactical line, to project that it is strong enough to come to power on its own and that "other parties are ganging up against it". This confidence stems from the prevailing confusion in the National Front-Left Front alliance on the one hand and the series of electoral reverses indicating a decline of the Congress under Rao. "The Prime Minister will neither build the temple nor the mosque (in Ayodhya) but he will certainly have a maqbara (grave) built for the Congress," says Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Rajasthan chief minister.
The Bombay mega-show might have cheered the demoralised crowd as its organisers tried to give an impression that it was a "farewell" for the Congress. Yet, there was no clear directive to delegates about the future plans of the party. Advani's new team—the national executive and the office bearers likely to be constituted next week—will be the first indication of what course of action the party will chart out in the months preceding general elections. After all, this is the committee which will take the party to the decisive polls.
