Gadkari ignores South

Neerja Chowdhury
First Published : 23 Mar 2010 11:08:00 PM IST
Last Updated : 23 Mar 2010 12:57:42 AM IST

Nitin Gadkari’s new team last week was meant to show how he planned to translate his intentions into reality and move and shake the BJP. But it was a case of “khoda pahar nikli chuhiya.” Four months into the party presidency, Gadkari had a revolt on his hands, and that too in Bihar, where critical state elections are due in six months’ time.

Considering that Gadkari took three months to finalise his team, after innumerable rounds of consultations with states, the public expression of unhappiness has not done anything for Gadkari’s authority as BJP chief.

But first on the plus side. The average age of the Gadkari team has come down, and that is a step forward. The increasingly youthful face of the Congress under Rahul Gandhi had posed a challenge to the BJP and was a cause for worry for the Sangh family. Two, women have been given one-third representation and there are 12 women office-bearers and 40 women in the national executive, with the party constitution having been changed under Gadkari’s stewardship, and this will exert its own pressure on other parties.

But the question being asked is: Who are the youth and women — and indeed others — the BJP president has chosen to bring to the fore to lead the party? And in so doing, the extent to which he has moved in the direction of fulfilling the promises he made when he took over.

Gadkari had spoken about a performance audit. He had said people would be judged by their actions, and not by how many drawing rooms in Delhi they frequented. The elevation of Hema Malini as vice president — she brings glamour to the party’s campaign at election time but is hardly visible otherwise — or the appointment of Smriti Irani and Vani Tripathi, both actors, has done little for the morale of women slogging in the states for years who had become hopeful that they might finally get recognition.

The parity given to Vani Tripathi and Murlidhar Rao — both made secretaries, when Rao had headed the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and given years of his life to creating a movement for Swadeshi in extremely trying times — was hardly a signal that the new dispensation intended to reward performance or commitment to the basic values of the “parivar’.

It can be argued, quite legitimately, that Gadkari had after all to work with known faces, and that new leaders were not going to drop from heaven. But the hallmark of an effective leader is how he utilises the existing material at hand to infuse the organisation with new energy.

Gadkari had also set himself the goal of increasing the party’s vote bank by 10 per cent. Yet the South is virtually unrepresented in the new team, and this 10 per cent accretion cannot come only from the northern states where the BJP already has a presence. In the north too, there is no general secretary from UP for the first time, when important elections are due there in 2012 and the party has to pull itself up by the bootstraps if it is to bid for power again. Instead, two out of the 10 general secretaries are from Madhya Pradesh where no elections are due.

In Bihar, where elections are due in October, and where the established caste equations which brought the NDA to power last time have become skewed, the party has a problem on its hands. Former Union Minister C P Thakur has publicly made his unhappiness known. An unhappy Shahnawaz Hussain, made only a spokesman, chose to boycott the first meeting of party spokespersons. Purnea MP Udai Singh has not spoken up but he too is reportedly resentful at not being given his due.

Two from Bihar have been elevated to party posts, but both happen to be Kayasthas, and this has fuelled a revolt in other communities. But it has also shown that the new party chief is either unmindful of caste as a political reality of Indian politics or is deliberately not going to bother himself with it.

The exclusion of Shahnawaz Hussain as a general secretary in the new Gadkari team has ramifications that go beyond an individual. It is an open secret that Hussain was tipped for a general secretary’s post and it seems that his name was dropped at the last moment at the instance of the RSS.

It goes without saying that Shahnawaz’s credentials for the job are better than those of many others. This is not just because he is young (41) and has been a member of the Lok Sabha three times, the youngest ever union cabinet minister during Vajpayee’s premiership. It says something for his enterprising spirit, that he could win as a Muslim in a party like the BJP, which is viewed with suspicion by the Muslims. In the last two elections he won from Bhagalpur which has a sizeable Muslim population.

His elevation would have given the party a talking point that it is serious about reaching out to the minority community. After all, soon after he took over, Gadkari had declared that he wanted to build bridges with the Muslim community.

In some way, Shahnawaz’s exclusion as general secretary comes as a real setback to the party in its journey to become a mainstream organisation.

It has also gone to underscore the party’s bias against Muslims even as Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Najma Heptulah were made vice-presidents. But that is not the same as being made a general secretary. It has shown that Muslims in the BJP can have only a tokenistic role and rise upto a point but not beyond it.

It goes without saying that the RSS has had a major say in fashioning the New Team. The three RSS pointspersons in the party have retained their positions — Ram Lal as general secretary, organisation, and V Satish and Saudan Singh as joint secretaries, organisation. Gadkari had reportedly elicited the views of the organisational “mantris” in the states on whom to include. However, the trio that essentially influenced Gadkari were Ram Lal, Rajnath Singh and Suresh Soni, joint general secretary of the RSS who was all powerful during Rajnath Singh’s presidency, and who continues to wield considerable clout, though many felt that this would wane given Gadkari’s direct access to RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat. The team was reportedly finalised only at 3 a.m .on the day of the announcement.

Nitin Gadkari had raised expectations as a no-nonesense man who meant business. Even as he has tried to synthesise the pulls and pressures that any head of a political organisation would have to, the team he has announced, and this was his first test, has been disappointing.

What is more, he has failed to come across as his own man.

neerja_chowdhury@yahoo.com

About the author:

Neerja Chowdhury is Political Editor, The New Indian Express