What is in store for the lotus party?

BJP and its prime ministerial candidate L.K.Advani are dreaming of a majority in the parliament that is apparently a pipe dream. In fact the party and a number of its leaders should be worried about the future as the success of Narendra Modi is fast assuming the shape of threat to their ambitions. Meanwhile former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee can sit back and enjoy after a long and arduous political journey.

by LALIT SETHI

The BJP clan, most of it, if not all of it, is almost in ecstasy? Why is this so? The reasons are not hard to surmise even if there is an undercurrent of some people, with great hopes, feel that they have been left out in the cold and their future hopes and prospects have been sealed for good. Are they or will they be ready to play second fiddle to the King designate, now that Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee has called it a day and age has forced him to give up all desires and hopes of being captain of the team once more if ever the Dilli Durbar beckons his team to lead it again and preside over the South Block Office of Prime Minister in Raisina Hill of New Delhi.

At the end of the BJP National Executive and National Council sessions in New Delhi at the end of January, Mr. L.K.Advani, the newly anointed supreme leader of the party, has spelt out his vision of winning 360 seats in the Lok Sabha in the 2009 general elections. Is it a vision or “misvision” because it is patently far from the ground realities and is based on the logic or rather illogical premise that the BJP had won 297 seats on its own since 1989- that is, in a number of elections in 20 years. He does not add that repeatedly it had lost many of those seats and even in 1989, the BJP was well below the 200 seats mark. He expects his loyal allies to garner 64 more seats and counts out at least two former allies, the DMK and Telugu Desam as they are unlikely to smoke the friendship pipe with Mr. Advani and company, besides many present doubtful friends. On his own reasoning, the BJP is likely to remain in wilderness as it cannot jump from 130 odd seats today to even 200 seats next year. He has ruled out National Democratic Front allies winning more than 60 seats; so where is the BJP-led government? In dreamland?

He and his party men have accused the present government of neglecting farmers which his shining degree did with utter contempt. The present rulers are said to be unable to cope with the Naxalites. The threat was not even on the BJP radar, especially of the Deputy Prime Minister and Union Home Minister, Mr. Advani himself. They are more audacious, but that was bound to happen because there was no strategy to nab them then; there is some in evolution now perhaps.

His loyalists feel let down and left in the lurch because their lord and master is no longer in the best of health to fight the daily, weekly or even annual battles in Parliament or outside. Nor is he in any shape to roar from the ramparts of the Red Fort on Independence Day with his August 15 oratory or witticisms laced with poetry extempore, nor expound pearls of wisdom on internal and international affairs.

Who are the people who feel that they have lost ground and chances of the highest office? One of them could be the venerable Jaswant Singh, a prince of a small state in Rajasthan, polo playing and golf playing in his heyday and watching these very games with feathered hats from grounds and courses in Delhi and several world cities. He had made a name for himself in being the special envoy of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in negotiations to build bridges with the US and later his Foreign Minister, but he was tripped up by Vajpayee’s alter ego and principal secretary, Mr. Brajesh Mishra, who wanted to run the Foreign Office from the PMO, but Jaswant Singh was not the one to take orders as he had a style and command of his own. So he was switched to what was his allegedly his first love, Finance, and he agreed with great reluctance.

Mishra killed two birds with one stone, having brought in the ex bureaucrat, Yashwant Sinha, to the External Affairs, to carry out his orders and allow financial affairs to be rescued from a near mess. Yashwant Sinha, himself a loyalist of the late Chandra Shekhar, and a plant on the BJP, is another man who has often questioned the primacy of L.K.Advani by claiming that his new party has many tall leaders. He will apparently have no cabinet berth if ever BJP comes to power.

The present party president, Mr. Rajnath Singh, has reconciled himself to the formalization of Mr. Advani as the top leader and even welcomed the rise and rise of Narendra Modi, who may upstage many a hopeful in the party, including the arrogant Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi, who thinks he is the RSS flag bearer and being a professor of physics from Allahabad the ablest of all. But a political party is not a classroom, which he would like to make of it. Thus the Narendra Modi bandwagon is on the march with his chaste Hindi and strong Gujarati. He is believed to be a tall Gujarati leader of national stature after a long, long time since the days of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and later Morarji Desai. He may streamroll anyone who comes in his way and may even trip up Mr. Advani if the BJP can realize its dream of coming to power in the belief that the incumbency factor will work against the Congress led United Progressive Alliance, though there is many a slip between the cup and the lip in this quest for power.

Mrs. Sushma Swaraj is pleased as punch because she has been able to persuade a male chauvinist party that the BJP is to reserve 33 per cent seats for women at all levels in the party hierarchy, though she cannot assure the women that they will even be able to get party nomination for even ten per cent of electoral contests for legislatures and Parliament, but she may succeed at levels of Zila Parishad and Municipal Corporations and Committees, if at all. Hers is a victory of sorts and a challenge to other parties to do as much. She is known to be an Advani loyalist, but being one of the few women among top leaders and being eloquent and yet a bindi wearing Bharatiya nari, she has had no hesitation in obeying Atal Bihari Vajpayee and held many important Ministerial offices in his government.

Vajpayee was believed to be an expert on world’s woes even though he is a down to earth man who has walked the streets of Delhi, Lucknow, Gwalior and many other cities and tasted savories or chaat in the bylanes of metropolis. Whether he used a bicycle ever or not, but he traveled by all other means of public transport-even taking a bullock cart to Parliament House when there was almost little or no security on the approaches to those august chambers. That was possibly 35 or more years ago in the Indira Gandhi era.

In later years, he not only became the External Affairs Minister in the Morarji Desai Government, but rose to great heights as leader of Opposition and thereby shadow Prime Minister. In the aftermath of the Indira Gandhi assassination, he even lost his safe seat of Gwalior as Rajiv Gandhi decided to ask the Maharaja of Scindia, Madhav Rao, and contest the election and defeat the veteran of many an electoral battle. It was then that Vajpayee chose Lucknow as his constituency, a place where he had started his journey as journalist by editing a small newspaper in Hindi; much later he took on the reins of the RSS mouthpiece, Panchjanya, in Delhi.

As Prime Minister ten years ago in his first innings-not counting the 13 or 14 days prior to the Deve Gowda and I.K.Gujral running a United Front Government for 22 months-Vajpayee became entitled to use grand BMWs, a couple of which remain with him as former Prime Minister, courtesy the present Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. From bullock cart to BMW might have been a long journey spanning the career of a youthful leader to one in his seventies. But he has no regrets as he has seen the gamut of life, private and public, in the changing lights and shadows, with sorrows and joys thrown in. He is not battle scarred, but just retired from the war, leaving the baton somebody slightly younger and more fitful.