Well before the Uttar Pradesh elections were beginning to look like a complete washout for the BJP one witnessed a curious phenomenon play out in the media – a series of unattributed reports that sought to prempt the outcome to suggest that a negative outcome would be of no consequence to a possible second term for the current incumbent.
How the BJP chooses to conduct its internal affairs is a matter between it and its members. To those of us on the outside and sympathetic to its cause, the opaqueness of this conduct is of mild curiosity most of the time but of late it has turned into a matter of acute concern.
It would be redundant to recount all of the episodes and reasons, it would also be speculative given the backroom intrigue surrounding most of them.
But it is in order to point out where the concern mainly arises from:
#1 – The manner in which the BJP has emulated the Congress in turning “failure” into a resume enhancer. This is not the first time it was sought to be argued that choice of Organizational Leadership was divorced from success or failure in elections.
#2 – The manner in which the BJP has further emulated the Congress in scapegoating regional leaders
#3 – The manner in which the BJP and some in the Sangh look to the Communists as a role model for touting the flawed idea of collective leadership as an excuse to either undermine mass leadership or to pass the buck on accountability.
All of the above have in varying degrees contributed to the drift in BJP since the loss in 2004.
Nitin Gadkari’s elevation as BJP President brought the promise of a refreshing change. To some degree that did happen. For the first time you had a BJP leader on television in Delhi who didnt sound angry or outraged all the time. It is hard not to like Gadkari given his disarming humor and relaxed demeanor. He also brought a sense of energy to campaigns.
But a dispassionate appraisal of the Gadkari term would reveal 3 marked failings:
#1 - Failure to chart a clear path to power in Delhi - BJP has failed to recover ground it previously held in with the exception of Goa. It has not broken any new ground with the exception of the odd bypoll win in Telangana.
#2 – Failure to make bold moves - BJP continues to take muddled positions on most issues with a reactive stance. In states where it has attempted a recovery it has failed to project new credible leadership while it its attempt to recycle old faces has fallen flat.
#3 – Failure to a create a positive “for wave” - Far too much energy and time has been spent on scams, expressing anger and outrage rather than on creating a positive wave “for the BJP”.
The BJP in Delhi has come to be a party of “scam chasers” much like Accident Lawyers in the West who are “Ambulance Chasers”. The “anger” constituency has far too many claimants. And “anger against Congress” is an opportunity with diminishing returns. There is a fatigue factor from frequent superlative claims of scams where the only visible impact is disruption in Parliament and a circuitous Legal Process that barely lends itself to political one-upmanship.
A second term for Mr.Gadkari may have its merits (see discussion below on weak party system) but the opaqueness of the process of decision making and the backroom intrigue surrounding it leaves us no more enlightened on how he or the BJP proposes to address the above three marked failings.
Making this opaqueness worse are the juvenile political games being played in the media. How the BJP proposes to manage its affairs is its business, but this backroom intrigue is clearly not helping it keep our sympathies or earn new sympathies.
One doesn’t have to look too far to extrapolate on what happens to a Party that is unable to reconcile mass politics with dogmatic loyalties to a clique. Those who look to the Communists as a role model on how to run the organization must realize a fate not much unlike the Communists will likely befall them.
A far more relevant role model for the BJP is the “weak party” system that is predominant in western democracies where concentration of power is federated across regional leaders within a political party and where the national organ of the political party plays largely a secondary role of campaign coordination and funding.
In such a “weak party system” it doesnt really matter who the National President for the Party Organization. A key aspect of that model though is the Institutionalized Mechanism by which all the regional power centers and the national organ coalesce around a Mass Leader ahead of an election once chosen. While the process of federating power has been underway in the BJP for sometime it is clear that its core DNA is still at odds with the imperatives of mass politics.
The sooner the BJP reconciles this contradiction and comes to terms with the imperatives of Mass Politics within a “Weak Party” system the better prepared it will be for 2014 or whenever the next General Election may be.
Filed under: Gujarat Polls 2012, Narendra Modi, Nitin Gadkari
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