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Sangh Parivar in fighting's grip
**The BJP is unable to "moderate" itself by cutting its umbilical cord with the RSS. It remains wedded to the Hindutva ideology. It has no strategy to overcome recent setbacks and expand its social and electoral support.
SO disastrous has been the recent
performance of the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance government that some observers
have begun to write it off.
Scandals haunt it week after week — the latest being the insidious privatisation of Railway services, underselling of coal blocks, and the Army chief s charge that he was offered Rs.l4-crore bribe to approve substandard vehicles, with the implication that the defence ministry didn't act on this.
The Singh government is courting unpopularity because of its disastrous policies and callousness towards the aam aadmi, in whose name it won the 2009 Lok Sabha.
Dr. Singh has become a liability with his pet horses like nuclear power and public-sector divestment. He's obsessed with killing the food security Bill and denying minimum wages under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the UPA's biggest achievement.
The Congress performed badly in the recent Assembly elections and byelections. In Uttar Pradesh, it got only six more seats than the 22 it held in the 403-strong Assembly despite antiincumbency against Ms. Mayawati and the Gandhi family's energetic campaigning.
Mr. Rahul Gandhi isn't the Congress's "trump card." The party has neither core-base nor strategy in India's most important state. And Mr. Gandhi lacks vote-pulling power.
The Congress has just lost all seven Assembly by-elections in Andhra Pradesh because it dithers on separate statehood for Telangana. Andhra is vitally important: the Congress won 33 of 42 seats there, its highest number from any state. Nationally, the Congress's political strategy is in tatters, its organisation demoralised, and its leadership confused. It's again in decline, perhaps like in the quarter-century-long post-1987 phase. Ms. Sonia Gandhi is behaving as if she has abdicated responsibility. Unless she takes drastic steps to rejuvenate the Congress and restore its relevance, it will probably lose the 2014 elections.
However, the Congress's plight is no consolation for the Bharatiya Janata Party. It’s itself in bad shape. It performed poorly in all the Assembly elections barring Goa. In UP and Punjab, it lost both votes and seats.
In the Udupi-Chikmagalur Lok Sabha byelection, the BJP suffered a rout in its own bastion. It lost the seat vacated by Chief Minister Sadananda Gowda by 45,000-plus votes. It also badly lost Gujarat's Mansa Assembly byelection.
The BJP declared Karnataka its "gateway" to the
South, whose states together have 130 Lok Sabha seats. In 2009, it won 19 of Karnataka's 28 Lok Sabha seats, because it expanded its base outside the Lingayat caste.
However, with his sectarian politics, disgraced Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa has reduced the BJP to a Lingayat party, and alienated other castes. His monumental corruption, and collusion in illegal iron-ore mining, documented by the state ombudsman, is only exceeded by his family's greed.
The Karnataka High Court recently granted him some relief on procedural grounds. He has used that to blackmail the party into reinstating him as CM, using despicable methods like spiriting away his supporters to a luxury resort, and parading them before party president Nitin Gadkari.
This mockery of political decency has repulsed many BJP middle-class voters, and probably closed the party's Southern "gateway." The BJP may now be in terminal decline in Karnataka.
In today's BJR regional satraps call the shots. Much of the blame for this lies with Mr. Gadkari, the least respected ever of all BJP presidents, and one nominated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Mr. Gadkari has never shed his provincial outlook.
UP was his biggest test. He entrusted the choice of candidates and election micromanageme nttoRSS pracharak Suresh Joshi while inducting health scam-tainted minister Babu Singh Kushwaha.
Mr. Joshi's appointment antagonised Narendra Modi, his old adversary, who refused to campaign in any
state elections. Having lost in UP, Mr. Gadkari then messed with the party's Rajya Sabha tickets, handing one to a Nagpur-based businessman and another (in Jharkhand) to Londonbased NRI Anshuman Mishra.
The second move provoked a vitriolic attack from former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha. Mr. Gadkari beat a retreat and lost face.
BJP "second generation" leaders like Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, besides Mr. Modi, despise Mr. Gadkari. But they in turn, especially the first two, have no love lost for each other.
The BJP's central leadership is divided as well as rudderless. Mr. LK Advani hasn't tempered his ambitions despite his age and had to be forced out as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha by the RSS. He cannot be the final arbiter in the BJP's totally unresolved leadership crisis.
The BJP is unable to "moderate" itself by cutting its umbilical cord with the RSS. It remains wedded to the Hindutva ideology. It has no strategy to overcome recent setbacks and expand its social and electoral support.
It merely hopes that popular disenchantment with the UPA, combined with pure luck, might somehow help it emerge stronger than its present 116 Lok Sabha seats.
The BIP's fallback option is to woo regional parties like the Trinamool Congress, AIADMK, Janata Dal (United) and Biju Janata Dal to rebuild the National Democratic Alliance. After all, they have all allied with the BJP in the past against the Congress. But their support cannot be taken for granted. It depends on the 'M' (Modi) factor.
The RSS has systematically tightened its hold on the BJP party machine and appointed its loyalists as state organisational secretaries, but failed to rein in defiant leaders like Narendra Modi.
If Mr. Modi wins the Gujarat elections later this year, he will want to become the national party president and project himself as the NDA's Prime Ministerial candidate.
This bid could become viable in the unlikely event of the BJP winning 150-170 seats. That will confront the regional parties with a wrenchingly cruel choice. Will they legitimise a leader whose name is synonymous with the state-sponsored mass murder of India's Muslim citizens?
That would be shameful, but it can't be ruled out. Regrettably, Indian democracy's fate could depend on that hideous, if unlikely, outcome.
The writer is an eminent Indian columnist.