Author: Koenraad Elst
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: May 19, 2009
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/177112/BJP-apes-Congress-fails.html
Right-wing parties all over the world have
a common trait: Once in or near power, they betray their own support base.
The BJP is no different. It is needlessly described as a 'Hindu chauvinist'
party which it is not. To prove its 'secular' credentials, the BJP chose to
become the 'B' team of the Congress. And was rejected by the voters
With great satisfaction, the world has taken
note of the defeat of the Hindu nationalists: "The Indian voter has rejected
Hindu chauvinism." Subtleties such as the likelihood that the BJP has
been abandoned by many of its supporters for not being Hindu chauvinist enough,
don't come into the picture. The typically Indian failures of the BJP that
explain its defeat, I now leave to Indian authors to discuss. What has caught
my attention is a trait the BJP shares with Right-wing parties all over the
world.
The label 'Rightist' is open to various definitions,
the themes with which Rightist parties attract voters are different from country
to country, and even on a single theme, their positions may differ between
countries. But they have one behavioural trait in common: Once in or near
power, they betray their own support base.
In France, Mr Nicolas Sarkozy came to power
on a distinctly Rightist platform, which he largely disowned once installed
as President. Thus, he had promised to oppose the entry of Turkey into the
EU, but the first thing he did was to nominate as his Foreign Affairs Minister
Bernard Kouchner of the opposition Socialist Party, a declared supporter of
Turkey's entry.
In Britain, the Conservative Party is a copy
of New Labour on all issues of consequence. People who favour its traditional
positions now turn to the UK Independence Party or even the proletarian British
National Party. Those who insist on loyalty to the old party-line, even top-ranking
veteran Norman Tebbitt, are threatened with expulsion.
In the US, the real (so-called paleo-) conservatives
have been frozen out of the Republican Party and are being starved by institutional
boycotts. The party shuns matters of principle and limits its supposed conservatism
to mindless flag-waving. While the party base favours Christian politics,
the part elite downplays ideology and promoted as presidential candidate the
faux war martyr John McCain, a liberal in the Culture War. Like other plutocrats
eager to suppress labour wages by exploiting illegals, he laughed at the party
activists' demands for curbs on immigration. Consequently, conservative mobilisation
for the party during the elections was lacklustre and defeat inevitable.
Doesn't all this remind you of the BJP? The
party favours mindless flag-waving over ideology and takes its constituents
for granted. It assumes that they have nowhere else to turn and will follow
the party in all its erratic policy shifts. Well, not really erratic, there
is a transparent logic in the party's betraying its core party-line: It dreams
of enjoying the warmth of approval from its enemies, who happen to dominate
the cultural and media sectors. It tells its voters: Since you are lambasted
as reactionary communalists, we don't want to be on your side. But no matter
what non-Hindutva postures it adopts, the hoped-for approval from the secularists
remains elusive.
In 1991 already, right after the election
victory that made the BJP the leading Opposition party, it discreetly disowned
the Ayodhya movement that had earned it this breakthrough. The media scapegoated
Mr LK Advani for the subsequent Babri Masjid demolition, though everybody
knew that it had taken place in spite of him. He had gone there to demonstrate
to the secularists that he was the one man who could control Hindu anger and
prevent it from demolishing this symbol of secularism. When the crowd bypassed
him, he broke down in tears, and ever since, he has been deploring the event
as the 'blackest day' of his life. Disowning his role of flag-bearer of Hindutva,
he should have bowed out gracefully. Instead, his clinging on to the leadership
reminds us of Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, the aged French Rightist leader who has
sacrificed his party to his own pitiable ambitions.
While Ayodhya was 'merely' a symbolic issue,
the more political demands were likewise cast aside. When in power, the BJP
didn't make the slightest move towards a Common Civil Code, abolition of Jammu
& Kashmir's separate status or Governmental non-interference in Hindu
schools and places of worship. The single attempt at doing anything pro-Hindu
- Mr Murli Manohar Joshi's exercise in rewriting the Marxist-distorted textbooks
- turned into a horror show of incompetence.
During the latest campaign, the BJP downplayed
ideology (except erratically in the Varun Gandhi incident) and betted all
on 'good governance'. Some BJP State Governments have provided that, to be
sure, and in these States the BJP has been rewarded. But it could never be
a decisive election-winner because Congress hasn't done too bad in that regard
either. Ever since Mr Manmohan Singh read out the 1992 Budget, the world sees
his signature written all over India's economic success. Even BJP contributors
to that success, like erstwhile Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie, won't
deny him that honour.
In these circumstances, only a clear ideological
profile, mature but distinct, could have won the election for the BJP. If
it didn't want that ideological distinctness and was content to remain the
Congress's B-team, the party could have learned from Mr Sarkozy to show this
only after the election. Before, it should at least have kept up the pretence
of being a party with a difference.
- The author is an Indologist based in Brussels.
