Hindutva's crisis of strategy By Praful Bidwai Uma Bharati was expelled from the Bharatiya Janata Party after defying its leadership in a fiercely combative manner.
Rather than "explain" her recent anti-BJP outbursts, the self-styled sanyasin, in her characteristic style, turned the tables on the party's parliamentary board and hysterically lashed out at its senior leaders for committing the same "indiscipline" that she has been accused of.
In her three-part reply to the show-cause notice, Bharati accused the party of having strayed from the ideological path advocated by Deendayal Upadhyaya and become "a party that has no ideology and no principles".
She didn't spare even Vajpayee for having committed a "mistake" over Kargil.
Advani, she said she "would rather die than offer flowers at (Mohammad Ali) Jinnah's mazhar".
The thrust of Bharati's criticism of the BJP is three-fold.
She accuses its leadership of discriminating against and excluding the socially oppressed middle castes (or Other Backward Classes-OBCs), underprivileged classes, and women-who together form 90 percent of Indians.
Second, she takes the BJP to task for jettisoning suraj (good governance), swadeshi (economic self-reliance), and its commitment to building a Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Third, she urges Messrs Vajpayee and Advani not to be "silent spectators" to the hijacking of the party by a "herd" of thoughtless, self-centred "unprincipled" people, whom she likens to "terrorists".
Instead, the duo should relaunch the party because the BJP "experiment has failed".
She reminds them that Upadhyaya had vowed to "create a new Jana Sangh" if the existing party is corrupted by power.
It is irrelevant to ask if Bharati's criticism of the BJP is shaped by her temperament and motivated by her resentment at having been denied the Madhya Pradesh (MP)Chief Ministership.
What matters is that she has pitched it at a level where it's likely to appeal to many party cadres and that she has made a major issue of her OBC identity.
By all accounts, her "Ram-Roti" yatra to Ayodhya, designed to expose the BJP's lack of commitment to its own trade-mark identity, is drawing good crowds.
There's some sympathy in BJP ranks for Bharati because the 2003 MP Assembly election, in which the party won a three-fourths majority and ended the Congress's decade-long rule, was very much her personal victory.
Among BJP campaigners, Bharati alone was able to capitalise on the popular anti-incumbency sentiment against Digvijay Singh.
She quit the Chief Ministership following an arrest warrant issued by a Hubli court in August 2004 for her involvement in a communal incident.
She expected she'd be given back the post after being discharged by the court.
When she wasn't, she unfurled the banner of revolt.
A year ago, she was suspended from the BJP for openly defying party president Advani, but was readmitted because the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh interceded on her behalf.
When she staged her second revolt last month, the RSS wasn't with her.
She had antagonised it by accusing its senior leaders, Suresh Soni and Sanjay Joshi, of partisanship.
Besides, the RSS was wary of overtly interfering in the BJP's affairs so soon after its clash with Advani.
It didn't wish to be seen as endorsing her "indiscipline" in defying the parliamentary board's decision to nominate Shivraj Singh Chauhan as Chief Minister-when the bulk of party MLAs ratified the choice, admittedly made in a manipulative manner.
BJP leaders calculated that the long-term gains from her exit would outweigh the short-term losses from accommodating her ambitions.
The volatile, explosive Bharati would be too much of a liability in government-even if she's a great vote-catcher.
At one level, the "Bharati problem" arises from the fact that individual leaders in that "disciplined cadre party" tend to build personality cults around themselves and behave as if they were indispensable.
The party simply has no clue as to how to handle them.
The BJP itself projects some leaders-e.g.
Vajpayee-as larger-than-life figures.
At another level, the "Bharati problem" is rooted in the BJP's grave leadership crisis and inner-party battle for succession to the Vajpayee-Advani duo.
A solution to the succession tussle has long defied the party.
This was witnessed during the disastrous, aborted presidency of Venkaiah Naidu, an Advani prot‚g‚ who never graduated beyond tasteless one-liners.
His ignominious departure from that post after the BJP's defeat in the last Lok Sabha elections only aggravated the leadership crisis and jockeying for power.
Advani failed to establish his authority after taking over the party's reins.
He gravely undermined himself by lavishing praise upon Jinnah.
However, the BJP would be deluding itself if it thinks that Bharati is just another malcontent or dissident on a par with, say, Madan Lal Khurana, Keshubhai Patel, Shatrughna Sinha or Babulal Marandi, who have all challenged the party leadership in various ways.
Bharati is a case apart because she embodies a special combination of "Mandal" and "Kamandal" or "Mandal" and "Mandir"-OBC self-assertion politics, and fanatical Hindutva.
That's why she could mobilise an effective electoral challenge to the Congress in MP and acquire a supra-regional political profile.
To put things in perspective, only two BJP leaders personified this combination as pro-Hindutva OBCs.
They both produced a "magic moment" for the BJP in the Hindi heartland, by greatly expanding the social coalition underlying its electoral success.
These were Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh in the early 1990s, and Bharati in MP.
They were critically important in allowing the BJP to grow out of its narrow traditional base-the upper-caste, largely urban, Hindu middle class.
If the anti-Babri mobilisation expanded the BJP's potential appeal on a pan-Hindu platform, Singh and Bharati, both Lodhs or Lodhi Rajputs, helped realise the potential in a major way.
Kalyan Singh was progressively marginalised and expelled from the party.
He returned to it as a weak, subdued, factional leader.
Now Bharat too stands expelled.
Two other BJP leaders, Sushil Modi in Bihar, and Narendra Modi in Gujarat, are OBCs too.
But the Gujarati Chief Minister let militant, murderous Hindutva overwhelm his OBC profile.
The main participants in the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom were upper-caste Patels and Banias.
Sushil Modi faced serious competition from Nitish Kumar, who proved more formidable in attracting the votes of the Most Backward Classes.
Bharati's defiance of the BJP and their parting of the ways has eclipsed the upturn in the party's political trajectory represented by the Bihar Assembly elections.
Less than two weeks after the results were announced, the BJP has returned to crisis mode.
But even greater is the BJP's self-inflicted damage on its "social engineering" project-of extending its appeal from the savarnas to marginalised layers, especially OBCs, Dalits and tribals, and beefing this up with religio-political nationalism.
It's no aberration that the author of the project, K.N.
Govindacharya, has quit the BJP.
He was responsible for conceptualising and planning Advani's Ram rath-yatra in 1990, which prepared the ground for the party's meteoric rise to power nationally.
He and Bharati are close allies.
Through Bharati, Govindacharya is trying to promote an organisation which could be an alternative to an increasingly "pro-corporate" BJP.
He has just floated a "steering committee" of the "Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan", including former Jharkhand Chief Minister Babulal Marandi, Shailendra Mahato and others to correct India's currently "lopsided foreign policies".
Bharati's expulsion effectively spells the end of the "social engineering" strategy.
But the BJP has no alternative strategy which is half-way coherent or which can create a political space for it vis-a-vis the Congress and others in the Hindi belt.
The BJP's gains in Bihar, where it has emerged as Number Two, with 55 seats, compared to the RJD's 54, came largely from allying with the Janata Dal (U).
These gains are unlikely to be lasting or replicable.
The BJP thus faces the prospect of being pushed to the periphery of the Gangetic heartland-a Western Indian party mainly implanted in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
Even in MP, its base will be eroded by Bharati as and when she throws up a new political organisation.
It's easy to laugh at Bharati's assertion that "I am the BJP", as many party leaders did.
But it does contain an element of truth, at least in MP.
There, the BJP's victory could soon turn sour.
Bharati can be expected to launch repeated onslaughts on the BJP's leaders and its "compromised" political character.
These attacks, and her attempt to position herself as an authentic Hindu nationalist, might win her support from sections of the RSS.
In any case, the attacks will certainly put the BJP on the defensive.
There's no persuasive reason to believe that BJP leaders will become any the wiser and develop a new strategy to overcome the party's political marginalisation.
Going by their Parliamentary performance, they are content to oppose the government for the sake of opposing.
They are clutching at straws.
That does not a strategy a make.