BJP patriarch L.K. Advani publicly announced on Monday that he was quitting all party posts, and sent the party into a blue funk. Many in the Hindutva party had thought that if he withdrew from contention in the leadership stakes, it would be good riddance. Now people seem less sure.
Mr Advani has shot off a letter to party president Rajnath Singh about his decision. Mr Singh has refused to accept the senior leader’s resignation with the same stout heart with which he announced Mr Modi’s coronation in Goa. Does this suggest room for intra-party rapprochement, or does it reflect deep-seated ambivalence?
If Mr Advani is being gently pressured by busybodies to re-consider after they twisted the knife at Goa, it will be interesting to see the terms on which BJP’s tallest leader will be beseeched to bend without cutting his nose. These things matter more at age 85 than at 58. Whichever way it ends, it is easy to see that, for the BJP, an era has ended. But not in a manner that anyone would have liked.
The real question is, how will the events of the past two days go down with voters who like to vote BJP, or voters who are broadly anti-Congress but not pro-Left? After all, Mr Advani represents a set of ideas that are not the same as those he espoused 15 years ago as the mascot of hard Hindutva, and are meant to project a broader appeal for the BJP.
At the party’s national council meet in Delhi in March this year, he spoke of “NDA plus”, a strategy to attract election partners from even within the current UPA and from parties that are with neither the NDA or the UPA at present. He also urged that BJP make overtures to the minorities. With the decision to anoint Mr Modi, these thoughts will not be on the minds of those who run the show in the BJP these days.
The party has to ponder if the UPA, even if weakened, can be successfully challenged on the basis of Hindu extremism mixed with an unbridled pro-market line that Mr Modi appears to represent, and the RSS (or BJP) cadres clearly seem to want. The appointment of Amit Shah,
Mr Modi’s acolyte and former Gujarat minister of state for home when anti-Muslim violence erupted in 2002, to oversee the Lok Sabha poll in UP, is emblematic of the present line. These are some of the questions that trouble the JD(U), a key NDA partner, and raise the issue of the NDA’s coherence now.