Author: Ashok Malik
Publication: Indian Express
Date: January 23, 2004
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=39703
Introduction: The BJP needs to stop
believing its own bluster, do some brainstorming
Many years ago, when Soviet books
could be had cheap - indeed, had at all - when Harkishen Singh Surjeet
still dreamt of socialism and when my parents entertained visions of their
son, the would-be maths genius, I was given a book called Figures are Fun,
written by one Y.L. Perelman. The name probably has some resonance for
middle class folk of my generation, force fed a regimen of Soviet- style
popular science and maths in an impossible quest to make esoterica seem
easy.
Well Surjeet's dreams are long dead,
as in fact are any hopes that I'd turn out to be any sort of whiz. Yet
the ghost of Y.L. Perelman lives on in the strangest places, the strangest
ways. Over the past two weeks, Figures are Fun has been the inspirational
mantra for political punditry in India. The elections are at least three
months away, but no matter - the numbers are flowing thick and fast.
First we are told the BJP is officially
aiming for 300 seats but privately for 200. The Congress is officially
aiming for 200, privately for 150, very privately for 125 and still more
privately for anything above 99. One bright spark then decides Mulayam
Singh Yadav will win 40 seats in Uttar Pradesh - apropos of nothing.
A ''Congress insider'' - never mind
what that means - talks of the party winning 12 seats in Tamil Nadu. Somebody
has even pointed out that the Congress came second in all seven Lok Sabha
seats in Delhi in 1999. Surely there must be some profound significance
to that.
Fun with figures is turning out
to be ridiculously funny business. Since every third person in Delhi is
a political analyst, expect more such number bumpers. There will be myriad
predictions, all born of ''gut feel'', ''political instinct'', ''grassroots
intelligence'' or whatever you heard at the local subzi wallah's.
This is politics as phoney war,
campaign as bluff and bluster. Political parties usually use it to confuse
the opponent. There is the nagging fear that, in the case of the BJP, it
has ended up fooling the party itself.
An analogy may be needed here. In
the Uttar Pradesh assembly election of 2002, Rajnath Singh ended campaign
speech after campaign speech with the line, ''Jo bhi ho, sarkar hum hi
banayenge (Whatever the results, we will form the government).'' The BJP
was, of course, clobbered, as was an equally complacent Congress in 1996.
Is the BJP similarly overdoing its
cockiness? It has decided that if the NDA loses seats, it will simply invite
more parties to join. The single-item common minimum programme? Agreement
on the ''lead-ership of Atalji''. The equation between the BJP and any
ally, current or prospective, will be oh so facile: you give us the numbers,
we supply you the prime minister.
It's all a little too pat. For a
party that is calling elections, the BJP has been almost sluggish. Only
this week did Pramod Mahajan fly down to Lucknow to meet Kalyan Singh and
try and undo a divorce that has, really, helped neither the party nor its
prodigal son.
The first overtures to Jayalalithaa
have also been made. Even so, that she got the BJP president to fax her
a request for an appointment and then released it to the press, indicates
how hard, even bloodyminded a customer she will be.
Jayalalithaa will probably want
to be wooed by an Advani, if not Vajpayee himself, before she deigns to
give the BJP a seat or two.
Admittedly, the BJP is better placed
to return to power than at any stage in the previous four years. The economic
indices have seldom looked better, the Congress seldom more hangdog. That
aside, if the Congress does collect enough allies to form an NDA-type combine,
it could, paradoxically, work to the BJP's advantage. ''Vajpayee vs Question
Mark'' will then be converted into ''Vajpayee vs Sonia'' - a presidential
contest with only one possible winner.
Nevertheless the BJP needs hard-headed
brainstorming. It has to watch out for five potential pitfalls.
One, this will be the first election
in which the party will face a genuine ''anti- BJP'' vote - however large
or small - as opposed to an ''anti-Hindutva'' or ''pro- secular'' vote.
Two, ''Shining India'' is a good
marketing gimmick; don't make it a self-deception trick. A level of anti-incumbency
is written into liberalisation. Agriculture contributes 28 per cent of
India's GDP, services 52 per cent. Yet agriculture employs 68 per cent
of the workforce.
As the economy is reconfigured,
this discrepancy will be addressed. Eventually, it will also effect the
population problem, given farming societies, from Minnesota to Manchuria,
are big breeders. This grand process will enrich India - but it will take
two generations, maybe three. It will demand an immense human price. Somebody
will have to pay it - and the government of the day, any day, cannot entirely
escape.
Three, the BJP has to define the
limits of coalition-building. Can the NDA just grow and grow, accommodating
everybody and anybody? What about the BJP's own expansion? Take Bihar.
Sooner or later the BJP has to take a call on whether it wants to fight
Laloo directly or stay enmeshed in Lohiaite quarrels.
Four, the BJP has to set itself
a target, the minimum number of seats it must win in order to lead a coalition.
In 1999, it won 181 seats; what will be the threshold in 2004 - in the
150-160 range?
Finally, what if the BJP wins too
few seats to be able to call the shots in an alliance, NDA or NDA Plus?
Its thrust then should be to keep the Congress out of office, offer outside
support to the least-unfriendly coalition. Indeed it should already, if
most discreetly, identify its back-up (non-BJP) candidates for prime minister.
Don't advertise plan B, just make sure it's there somewhere in M. Venkaiah
Naidu's bottom drawer.
War jargon and poll parlance are
often interchangeable these days. Fittingly, BJP spokesman have spent the
past two weeks wearing the sort of grin that was Don Rumsfeld's pre-Iraq
war trademark. Playing for long term stakes, the Pentagon's planners had
time to recover. History gives you a second chance. An election, the BJP
must remember, doesn't.
