The new face of BJP

Neerja Chowdhury
First Published : 23 Feb 2010 12:31:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 23 Feb 2010 08:57:18 AM IST

If there is a message coming out of Indore — the BJP’s national executive and council meet which saw the confirmation of the party’s new president — it is that Nitin Gadkari is his own man. And what is more, he is not in awe of his seniors. In some way, Gadkari does not conform to the usual image of the Indian ‘neta’. For a start, he wears pant and shirt — but like Shivraj Patil he changes his clothes often — and the southern politicians identify more with him. Secondly, he comes across as a no-nonsense person. Thirdly, he is uninhibited enough to get on the stage at a cultural evening and burst into a popular Manna Dey song (Zindagi kaisi hai paheli hai), in response to the request by his colleagues to sing something, as often happens at group gatherings, even though he is not an accomplished singer.

As a state leader whose exposure to national politics was limited, and who first came to Delhi a couple of months ago without adequate warm clothing because he had no idea how cold it could get, Nitin Gadkari is starting from ground zero. That is precisely what is going for him — that he is starting with few expectations. Those who begin with high expectations are often judged by that yardstick from day one and tend to run into problems very quickly. The other plus for Gadkari is that he has the backing of the RSS and everyone in the party knows that. For that reason, even those who may chafe at his appointment, may not mess around with him, at least to begin with. He has shown that he will give due respect to the party seniors but get on with creating his own team.

L K Advani has been appointed as the ‘acting chairman’ of the NDA since Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who is ailing, will continue to be chairman. Sushma Swaraj has been made the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha and Arun Jaitley the LoP in the Rajya Sabha. How — and whether — Gadkari uses the services of Murli Manohar Joshi, and Rajnath Singh in Uttar Pradesh, a state that will be critical for the revival of the BJP, remains to be seen. He has already made it clear that he will go by performance at the grassroots, not by sycophancy.

There are indications that he might bring back the once powerful and dynamic BJP general secretary K N Govindacharya who had to leave the party for calling Vajpayee a mukhota, though what role he will play is not yet clear.

At Indore, Gadkari signalled that he would like the BJP to become a mainstream organisation committed to vikas and good governance. He is also clear that the party needs to go for an accretion of at least 10 per cent vote in the next four years if it is to emerge as a serious player in 2014, and for this to happen, it will have to craft new social alliances at the state level. The party also wants to win back the goodwill it once enjoyed among the urban intelligentsia — the Rotary Club, Lions Club type of supporters — and interestingly enough, it has decided to revive the defunct ‘Friends of the BJP’.

The new BJP chief used Ayodhya as a way of reaching out to the Muslims and the Babri Masjid Action Committee was quick to reject his offer. He knows that the Muslims are not going to come scurrying to the BJP just because he urged them to allow a grand temple to be built at the disputed site, and offered to build a mosque baju maen. But he managed to get his message across — that the BJP under his stewardship intends to soften its hawkish stance, and adopt a more inclusive approach to politics — at least for the time being.

With the backing of the Sangh, Gadkari is better placed than many others to send signals of a party wanting to move towards moderation — as opposed to stridency, though, admittedly, these are relative terms. Today the Sangh too seems to be for moderation. It is worried about the drop in RSS recruits and the changing psyche of the youth in the country.

That Gadkari is pragmatic was demonstrated by the first political decision he took soon after being appointed party president. He opted to support a Shibu Soren government in Jharkhand, to add another government to the NDA tally and to keep the Congress out, even though it was the BJP which had led the attack against Soren. Today the BJP is in power in six states on its own, and in three states with allies, and the BJP chief ministers have found that governance can pay rich electoral dividends. Even Narendra Modi is trying hard to reinvent himself by focussing on Gujarat’s development. For all the problems that he faced on the naxal front, Raman Singh returned to power in Chhattisgarh because of his cheap rice programme. And the low key Shivraj Chouhan has made a mark with his schemes for the poor, women, backwards in Madhya Pradesh.

Most important, Indore saw the first response by the Gadkari led-BJP to the challenges posed by Rahul Gandhi and his team. For some time now, the BJP — and even more the RSS — have been concerned about the rise of Rahul. While the Congress has thrown up a large number of younger MPs, and state level leaders, who will be Rahul’s team in the future, likely to have a greater appeal for a young country, this is not the case with the BJP. Many senior leaders belonging to traditional BJP families had revealed that their children, fed up with the regressive rhetoric of the party, had voted for the Congress in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.

Nitin Gadkari, though in his early fifties, would like to project himself as the third generation leadership of the BJP, if Vajpayee and Advani are the first generation, and Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Venkaiah Naidu and Ananth Kumar — also in their fifties — represent the second generation. Of course, Gadkari’s team, expected to be announced later this week, will indicate how serious he is about passing the baton on. And if it has people like Shahnawaz Hussain, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, they will constitute the fourth generation of leadership.

Even younger leaders of the BJP — Anurag Thakur, Piyush Goel, Shaina N C and Vani Tripathi and they can loosely be called the fifth generation leaders — were given importance at Indore, and were seen at dinners hosted by influential well-wishers of the BJP, which could be possible only through prompting from the top. This is not to say that the manipulations are going to die down in the BJP. Or that overnight, BJP leaders will start to put the ‘nation and the party first’. Or that estranged communities are going to start gravitating back to the BJP in UP.

It is going to be a long haul for Nitin Gadkari. But after the demoralisation of two successive parliamentary defeats and the intense factionalism and lack of clarity which have weakened the party, the dust seems to be settling down in the BJP.

neerja_chowdhury@yahoo.com

About the author:

Neerja Chowdhury is political editor, The New Indian Express