EDITORIAL: Sangh Poori Bahar

But who will give direction and friends back?

The RSS has decided on a “phased withdrawal” from the BJP’s day-to-day affairs, it will “micro-manage” the party no more. The BJP is to be given back to the BJP. Whatever the reason for the RSS’s decision — be it the pragmatic realisation that uncontrolled intimacies and blurring lines between political party and “cultural organisation” were helping neither, or belated acknowledgement of the autonomy of a political party — the prospect of India’s main opposition party emerging from the shadow of an unaccountable organisation is good news. For the BJP, however, it may still not be good enough.

The terms of the withdrawal are likely to be controversial and contested. A BJP that has lost a sense of self and an RSS that has become accustomed to bending the BJP to its will — can the two extricate themselves from the tangled mess and tell the tale? Will the RSS hand back the reins, as it has promised it will, to the BJP’s Big Two? Not so long ago it had urged a generation shift, declaring Vajpayee and Advani to be too old to lead. But even if it were possible to execute such a transfer of power, many of the BJP’s problems remain.

Can Vajpayee and Advani put the genie of factionalism back into the bottle? Can they revive the party’s somnolent second rung, or invent a new one? Too many of the BJP’s state units are convulsed by bitter infighting. Be it Rajasthan, UP, Madhya Pradesh or most notably Gujarat, there is no sense of common purpose in the party any more. The fact also is that none of the once-celebrated second generation leaders in the BJP has shown any signs of being able to rally the whole party behind him or her.

The BJP must ask itself why its allies are distancing themselves from it, one by one. The TDP now considers it an electoral liability; Jayalalithaa prefers the inchoate Third Front; the INLD and AGP have opted out of the NDA; the Trinamool wavers, so does the Shiv Sena and JD(S). It must also wonder why it has been so diminished in the bastions of UP that it straddled so confidently so recently. It must ponder its own bizarre backtracking on policies it advocated vigorously when in power, be it SEZs or the nuclear deal. The BJP has problems, other than the RSS.