BJP’s mixing of politics and religion has backfired
Like geriatrics reminiscing over the exploits of their youth, BJP leaders refer to the Ram temple at regular intervals. The nostalgia is understandable. It is the only issue that brought the party some success in its nearly six decades of existence under two names, the Jan Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This period included the three years when it disappeared altogether by merging in the Janata Party in 1977. This curious record underlines the BJP’s unstable nature. It is possible that the party hasn’t yet stabilised, for the temple plank to which it is now clinging to stay afloat in turbulent political waters may not bring it much solace.
The reason is that the circumstances in which the BJP floated the idea in 1989 have changed. When the temple issue helped raise its tally of the Lok Sabha seats from two in 1984 to 86 in 1989, its main adversary, the Congress, was slowly sinking. As in 1977, some Congress stalwarts like V P Singh and Chandra Shekhar had left the party to become prime ministers of non-Congress parties. The BJP was, therefore, seen as an alternative by a sizeable section of the people.
But the BJP’s six years in power from 1998 onwards spelt its doom. For starters, the hope raised by the change from a Bofors-tainted Congress to a supposedly purer BJP was nullified by the likes of Pramod Mahajan. In addition, except for Atal Bihari Vajpayee, no other BJP leader seemed to have a vision that did justice to India’s pluralism. Yet, for this very reason, Vajpayee became persona non grata to saffron hardliners. Not surprisingly, the BJP’s share of votes began to stagnate at 20 per cent in 1991 and 1996 after rising from 11.5 per cent in 1989. It did rise to 25.5 per cent in 1998, but only to drop to 23.7 in 1999 and 22.1 in 2004.
If the BJP’s fate was typical of parties whose ascent to power is a first step towards an erosion of their credibility, the Congress’s loss of power seemed to have had the opposite effect of reviving its fortunes. No one can say why this transformation took place. Was it because Bofors became a distant memory? Or because Sonia Gandhi’s high ratings, next only to Vajpayee’s, indicated that voters expected the party to make a new beginning? Or was it because of the BJP’s mistakes?
If it is the latter, then the explanation lies in the fact that the BJP never thought through the implications of its temple agenda. It is a part of history that Advani clambered on to his kamandal chariot in 1990 to counter
V P Singh’s Mandal card. But, in his haste, both he and his party chose to ignore Vajpayee’s warning not to allow Rambhakts to become the vanar sena or monkey brigade that devastated Ravana’s Lanka. Indeed, this is exactly what happened. But it is not so much the country that has suffered — except during the communal riots of 1992-93 and in Gujarat in 2002 — as the BJP itself.
The BJP apparently never considered the possibility that an uncontrollable vanar sena in the form of the VHP, Bajrang Dal, Sri Rama Sene and others might emerge from the temple movement. Rather, it saw a straight line from rising voting percentages after the Babri masjid demolition to untrammelled power in New Delhi and ultimately to the establishment of Hindu rashtra. “We are all kar sevaks now,” a saffron scribe crowed at the time. If the BJP never anticipated any bumps on the road to power by whipping up religious sentiments, it was because it had never before reached such heights and had little understanding of the rarified atmosphere far from the madding crowd. Its transition from the political periphery to centre stage was so sudden, it may have muddled its thinking.
Since the BJP had no time to assess the long-term political fallout of its atavistic policies, one could hardly expect its nonpolitical brethren in the sangh parivar — VHP, Bajrang Dal, etc — to do so. Instead, these outfits, which made their appearance on the eve of the temple agitation, interpreted the BJP’s initial successes as a licence to impose their own version of Hindu rule in accordance with Golwalkar’s categorisation of Muslims and Christians as internal threats. They were so sure the time had come to push ahead with the pro-Hindu agenda that, led by the RSS, they ascribed the BJP’s 2004 defeat to a failure to do so.
For the BJP, the defeat and the tapering off of the voting percentage were signs that it had overreached and that Vajpayee was right when he had advised Advani against embarking on his yatra. Hence Advani’s donning of the former prime minister’s mantle of moderation. But, now, it is too late. Even if the BJP favours a tactical retreat, the vanar sena will not let it, for they have taken upon themselves the task of carrying on with their anti-minority and pro-Hindu agenda, which gels nicely with attacking couples celebrating Valentine’s Day. The BJP now apparently understands that breaking mosques and burning churches are not the best way to win friends and influence people, something it didn’t when Advani started out from Somnath to build a grand temple at the mythical birthplace of Lord Ram.
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