With the Bharatiya Janata Party appearing to have run out of ideas to woo voters, it is the RSS that has made a quiet but assertive entry into mainstream party affairs. And if the Hindutva conglomerate’s hand-holding of BJP’s internal businesses is indeed successful, then Narendra Modi could be declared the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate for the 2014 polls sooner than expected.
According to a report in The Economic Times, party leaders Sushma Swaraj and LK Advani have been told by the RSS top brass that the party must lose no time in declaring Narendra Modi as its Prime Ministerial candidate.
According to the report, leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj had argued that it will become difficult for her to function effectively as the leader of the Opposition in the Parliament after such a move as the Congress is almost always ready with a strong arsenal of criticism against Modi. Adding to her woes will be regional parties including the SP, DMK or TMC, who may not mind backing the BJP in the House, but would be hard pressed to back a BJP with Modi at its helm.
The BJP, however, possibly has its back against the wall in the face of the RSS’ onslaught. Though BJP president Rajnath Singh has said in the past that the PM candidate would be announced only before the polls, with the party failing to come in the way of UPA’s Food Security Bill and having managed to rake up issues like Coalgate only sporadically, they need a poll push urgently.
Representational image. Agencies.Representational image. Agencies.
If we were to figure out BJP’s poll agenda from its public discourses in the recent past, the only impression that the party gives is of being one that wants the Congress out of power at any cost. They virulently criticized the Food Security Bill, called it ‘half-baked’ and yet let it pass. In the Rajya Sabha, leader of Opposition Arun Jaitley pointed out how several state schemes are better than the UPA’s prized bill, notwithstanding the fact that his own party has backed it in the all-important lower house of the Parliament.
The party also has reservations about the Land Acquisition Bill, but let it pass.
The final straw was probably the tongue lashing that the BJP faced in the Rajya Sabha from an otherwise silent Manmohan Singh. Now that the UPA has hinted that it won’t let the BJP bulldoze it and someone as tepid as Singh has stood up in strong defence of the government’s policies, the BJP might be realizing that it needs to come up with a Plan B really soon. Because criticism of government policies can take them only that far.
The party’s answer, therefore, lies in Narendra Modi. While Modi’s arsenal is not immensely expansive and as he keeps harping on Gujarat and criticizing the UPA, he at least has a fair share of followers who seem to have implicit faith in his vision – even if it was limited to Gujarat until now. And with Modi comes the issue of religion and RSS.
While the Sushma-Advani section of the BJP might have dreaded and therefore tried to keep the RSS at an arm’s length from the party’s national politics, history is witness to the fact that the BJP has never really been able to come out of the wings of its parent organisation. And when it had attempted to do so, it had met the fate that Vajpayee did in NDA’s last term in governance. An article by Radhika Ramaseshan in the Economic and Political Weekly deftly points out how every time the BJP tried to outrun the RSS in national politics, it ended up with bruises. Ramaseshan explains how Vajpayee, pitted against KS Sudarshan of the RSS, literally lost his political career for trying to work his way around the RSS and its politics of religion:
From fronting the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) as a countervailing force against Vajpayee’s economic reforms agenda and scuttling projects like the Rs 1,300 crore Sankhya Vahini electronic data carrier project to wanting to decide his economic team and setting deadlines to build the Ayodhya temple, the RSS and Sudarshan were Vajpayee’s greatest bugbears.
The last straw that broke his back was when the Sangh manipulated the BJP brass to secure Modi’s position as the chief minister after the 2002 pogrom. Vajpayee desperately wanted Modi out because of the ill fame the pogrom brought to his “liberal” credentials and his government. But he found no backers in the BJP.
It is difficult to contest the fact that the BJP at present is faced with a crisis similar in magnitude to what Vajpayee faced during his last term as the prime minister – it won’t take long for voters to make out that the party’s agenda has no muscle and apart from the anti-Congress rants, its political plot is in desperate need of a direction. The party, like its opponent Congress, is faced with a deep crisis of leadership – unlike the regional parties who all have one face that connects to and manipulates voters.
The RSS probably recognised the problem early enough and, following several meetings with Modi, expressed their endorsement for the Gujarat CM as the face of the party nationally. A report on The Hindu says:
Sources said that during the meeting, the RSS discussed issues related to organisational unity and to keep other top leaders on the same page so that a message goes down to the cadre that everyone is working in unity with Mr Modi as the campaign head for the national elections.
The relationship between Narendra Modi and the RSS can be considered fairly symbiotic too. An appropriation of the history of Modi and RSS’ relationship hints at troubled ties, but at present, each needs the other to further their political ambitions.
The upcoming elections in 2014 is probably the last chance the BJP has to return to power. What the possibility also does is renew RSS political ambitions which had been shunted into cold storage following Vajpayee’s disapproval in 2004 and Advani’s loss in the 2009 general elections. Unlike Modi, Advani too had attempted crossing over to the ‘secular’ playground by copiously praising Jinnah on his trip to Pakistan – a move that the RSS rightly read as a precursor to a political cold shoulder.
In the absence of a convincing number of regional allies, Modi needs the backing of a strong political faction to influence his unsure party leadership and help him reach the grassroots – that ally is the RSS. And the duo have been quietly working towards a bigger political future for the Gujarat CM.
Though the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Chaurasi Kos Yatra failed to create much of a flutter, the event did come to one use – that of clearing the way for Narendra Modi’s tour across Uttar Pradesh. It couldn’t be pure coincidence that while the buzz around the VHP yatra was just dying down, the party announced that Modi will address four rallies in Uttar Pradesh, including a key meet in Lucknow, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s erstwhile constituency.
Having flagrantly declared himself a ‘Hindu nationalist’, there is little doubt that Modi’s poll position will be rooted as deeply in the politics of religion as in the politics of development. A key element in his poll paraphernalia, therefore, will be Hindutva’s flag-bearers including both the VHP and the RSS.
In a communally sensitive state like Uttar Pradesh, therefore, the Hindutva issue will just be an undercurrent in Modi’s otherwise pro-development campaign itinerary. Also, with a lukewarm acknowledgement of the issue in a politically charged state such as UP, the Gujarat CM will be testing the waters for how far Hindutva takes him outside his home state.
If Modi is indeed made the BJP’s PM candidate, the party and the Gujarat CM will both need a robust pro-Hindutva chorus to drown all the anti-secular critics against Narendra Modi and invoke a Congress-has-wronged-Hindus voting trend.
An ET article points out that there has been an 11 percent drop in voting ever since un-enthused RSS supporters stopped turning up to vote. ET quotes a BJP leader:
“We have suffered greatly from the fact that our committed voters, many of whom are RSS members, haven’t been coming out to vote in the last couple of elections. In Karnataka, for example, there has been a nearly 11% drop in voting, most of them our people, and the results are telling,” said the leader, who did not wish to be named.
What kind of dividend the Modi-RSS partnership reaps for the BJP is yet to be seen. However, it is fairly clear that if the BJP does hope to profit in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, their best option is fall in line with their partnership.
