Stealing The BJP Thunder

The Anna Hazare-Baba Ramdev led movement against corruption may have rattled the Congress establishment, but as a political force it presents a bigger challenge to the BJP-RSS. The vocabulary and idiom of the movement in unselfconsciously Hindu and should this take off, the symbolism does help make a connection with people. Yet this movement is not burdened by the sectarian agenda of the BJP/RSS.

The saffron party is therefore grappling with the desire to both reach out and ride the tiger (and claim it as its own) and the realization that it may not be possible to do so. Since 2004 there has been a great dharma sankat (crisis of faith) in the BJP and RSS as ideological issues have fallen flat. This movement therefore presents both an opportunity and a challenge.

It is the inability to shake off the RSS that has created the greatest existential crisis for the BJP. None of the minority bashing issues have worked on the ground since the great blood bath of the 2002 Gujarat riots. Since then the BJP has lost two general elections, in 2004 and 2009, and has failed at every attempt to stir what the cadre call “emotional” issues, such as give an anti-minority edge to the mood after the 26/11 Mumbai attack. Yet the RSS continues its back seat driving in the political party, chooses the president and expects a certain adherence to ideology.

This stunted ideology now pursued with an increasing lack of conviction shows up in odd deformities and bad choices. Most recently, for instance, the BJP president Nitin Gadkari (an RSS appointee) chose two leaders with distinctly communal images to be in charge of the party campaigns in Assam and West Bengal, two states with large Muslim populations. Vinay Katiyar (who was at the forefront of the Ram temple movement and former MP from Ayodhya) was given charge of handling Bengal along with newspaper proprietor and Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra. Assam was handed to Varun Gandhi, now known for his strong anti-Muslim rhetoric. As it turned out there was demand for neither and both were non-starters in the assembly elections. Indeed there is something ridiculous about sending a burnt out political personality like Katiyar to Bengal.

There is a section in the BJP that realizes that the soufflé does not rise twice on issues like Ayodhya and minority bashing; yet they lament that the party is burdened by its DNA and the expectations of the mother organization. They also say that the Anna Hazare-Baba Ramdev type leaders fit in well into the sacred landscape of the parivar, yet are not circumscribed by RSS ideology. A debate is currently on within the party ranks as to whether the anti corruption movement should be seen as a gust of fresh air that will shake up a jaded political class, or a wild card that can merely disrupt and divert temporarily. The optimists believe it could create a mood in the country that the BJP could then exploit. The pessimists say it would wean away a chunk of BJP support.

The latter is more likely as Anna Hazare has already been rebuked by some of his fellow travellors for praising Narendra Modi’s development record. The Gujarat CM seized the opportunity to reach out to the Maharashtrian in a quaintly worded letter in which he invoked the divine Shakti and Ma Jagadambika and wished Hazare “supreme health and long life so that many like me would benefit from your guidance”. Modi said he had respected Hazare for decades and top RSS leaders “invariably discussed his rural development activities so that it could be emulated.” He also said that Anna would be open to vilification for having praised Gujarat.

That was indeed proved true as some of Hazare’s supporters warned of withdrawing support if he continued to bestow respectability on Modi. The episode was actually a pointer to the Modi dilemma—in spite of great middle class admiration for his tough guy no-nonsense image, at the national level he remains a liability in an age of coalitions. As for Hazare, it would perhaps be a mistake to read too much into the Hindu symbolism he freely uses in his village experiments. At this stage be has created a mainstream agenda and not that of the Hindu right as is being suggested.

There is however no certainty on how long this odd group of anti-corruption activists will stick together—a Gandhian, a yoga guru, RTI activist—before they fall apart. Indeed it is also quite ironical that while people of a certain ideological inclination are condemning the brigade as saffronites there are others who say a bunch of Maoist sympathizers have held the nation to ransom. These are conservatives who object to the presence of Swami Agnivesh during the Jantar Mantar fast and lawyer Prashant Bhushan on the panel to draft the bill. The criticism and snide marks from across the spectrum suggests that the political class does not know what to make of this.

There is the obvious comparison with Jayaprakash Narayan’s Bihar movement and call for total revolution that gave the most serious challenge to Indira Gandhi, resulted in the imposition of Emergency, Indira’s defeat and subsequent Janata government. The JP project succeeded in part because of the organizational support and tactics devised by Nanaji Deshmukh, the grand old man of the RSS. (The Janata experiment would later on collapse because of the dual membership controversy but that’s another story)

Can the Sangh parivar again play a Nanaji-type role in steering and supporting this movement currently led by Hazare and Ramdev? After all it is no secret that one of Baba Ramdev’s closest advisors is K.N. Govindacharya, once considered the brains behind the BJP’s social engineering project that saw the party expand a social base of Brahmin-Bania to the Backward castes. Although a Tamil Brahmin by birth, the multi-lingual Govind is not an advocate of Brahminism; on the contrary he worked on the ground in tribal areas, played a role in pushing OBCs like Uma Bharti and Kalyan Singh to the front of the Ram temple movement, and was consistent in promoting what he called social engineering. He was eventually pushed out of the BJP because of a huge clash with the other talented Brahmin, Atal Behari Vajpayee.

But Govindacharya in his heyday was a phenomenon and his mental faculties are now being used to assist the Ramdev phenomena. The question now is whether he would seek to help the BJP that treated him so shabbily or would he be engaged in creating an alternative to what he now sees as a dead-weight of a party. The critical point about the Govind-Ramdev compact is that the yoga guru is an OBC (Yadav) too like other leaders the RSS ideologue promoted in the past.

This is significant as it has now been quite well established that the real energy of Hindu movements does not come from Brahminical institutions but from its living traditions and mass preachers. The existential crisis of the BJP has also been compounded by the shrinking talent pool of OBC leaders and the fact that at the national level the leadership is overwhelmingly upper caste.

There is another big problem that the party faces in trying to come to grips with this anti-corruption movement. Sections of the party say they can benefit from the tantalizing possibility of again riding on the mobilization of a mass preacher like Ramdev who has shown political ambitions. But there is nothing to suggest that Ramdev is naïve enough to be used by the BJP. Particularly as on the corruption issue the BJP also carries the millstone of the shocking record of its state government in Karnataka around its neck. This is particularly significant as Karnataka Lokayukta Santosh Hegde is on the panel to draft the Lokpal bill. His presence there is a constant reminder of how dodgy the BJP’s own record on corruption is.

So inspite of all the mounting troubles of UPA II, the BJP too is weighed down by problems. So much so that a crowd made up of the indignant middle class, residents welfare associations, well meaning rotary club types, servicemen and yoga gurus that the party would have seen as its natural constituency some years ago, is now attracted to this completely new issue based movement that gave them a brief cathartic release. With their thunder now stolen, obviously the BJP must see the challenge.