The recent meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s national executive and national council at Surajkund, near Faridabad, would appear not to have furthered the objective of preparing the party for the next general election. The conclave was held against the backdrop of the government’s unpopular decision to raise the price of diesel in the country and the controversial step of permitting foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail. The occasion was, thus, tailor-made for an offensive. But this needed coherence at the leadership level, which appears to be the saffron party’s most serious deficit at the present juncture.
When the BJP highlighted the coal allocation controversy and the corruption entailed in this process with such fanfare only a few weeks ago, it was assumed this was an issue whose echo would be heard all the way into the next election campaign. But the party appears not to have been able to sustain the momentum. What we saw instead were petty jibes from the podium directed at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi for associating with “foreigners” through a policy direction such as FDI. Such want of sophistication in the principal Opposition party does it no credit.
Former Karnataka chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa skipping the Surajkund meet and firing salvoes at the national leadership from Bengaluru too cannot have gone unnoticed. Not long ago Mr Yeddyurappa was the party’s blue-eyed boy who had made it possible for the BJP to get its first state government in south India. Corruption charges against him linked to the Bellary iron ore mines case, and instances of arbitrary land allotments in the Karnataka capital during his tenure, have served to underline that those who live in glass houses cannot throw stones at others.
BJP president Nitin Gadkari has also been charged by a Mumbai RTI activist with an RSS background with having business dealings with NCP ministers in Maharashtra who may be involved in irrigation department irregularities that apparently run into thousands of crores of rupees. The allegation surfaced as the Surajkund meeting was on and the decks had been cleared to amend the party constitution to permit Mr Gadkari a second term.
If all this was not bad enough, L.K. Advani, who had once sought to mobilise the country to build a Ram temple at Ayodhya in place of the Babri mosque and called his effort “the second freedom struggle”, urged the BJP to present a “secular” image of itself. This, he implied, was badly needed to expand the party’s influence among voters and to attract allies. This might seem to many a cry of helplessness since the BJP father-figure also held that the party was not yet poll-ready and that its leaders lacked credibility.