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The dilution of identity

Power, like money, is a great leveller. From building a web of opportunistic alliances to the vicious infighting that nearly decimated it in Uttar Pradesh, there cannot be better proof that the Sangh Parivar's original ideology and storied discipline have suffered remarkable dilution. This, or the fact that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh -- contrary to what those who have made a career from hyperventilating on an imminent fascist threat to the nation would have us believe -- retains at best nominal control over the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Reinforcing this assumption are the right noises that the new incumbents at the Centre have been making. The BJP leaders have taken their pre-poll promise of declaring a moratorium on all contentious issues further: the new buzz words are ''governance, not identity'' and ''hasten[ing] slowly,'' which can be read as a decision to win over vital segments of the political establishment -- including the Opposition -- and the general public before embarking on crucial policy departures.

Given this context, the actual danger to the longevity and stability of the new regime and the National Democratic Alliance's eventual evolution into an enduring centrist construct, will not be due to any fallout from a hidden agenda but from anti-centrifugal tendencies. Recalcitrant coalition partners fighting over the fishes and loaves of power will be the least of its worries, and merely a symptom of the core concern.

It is pertinent to remember that the 'untouchable' syndrome has cut the BJP to the bone. All its presumed aggro actually stems from a deep defensiveness, a wish to don the 'liberal' garb. The danger in this is that the baby could get thrown out with the bathwater. The position of not raking up contentious issues needs to be properly qualified or else it can turn into a euphemism for sweeping things under the carpet.

The BJP's Ayodhya campaign in the late eighties captured the larger public's -- and of even not a few genuine leftists -- imagination by dint of voicing hitherto unpalatable truths, by trying to free history from the deodorised versions peddled by so-called secular elites.

The latter's takes on reality ignored, if not suppressed, 'lived' experience at the grass root level: the fact that violence is not a once-in-a-while aberration -- as the patronising nation-builders proclaim -- but an inalienable part of the lives of millions of Indians; that a Muslim viewing a Hindu as a ''superstitious and cowardly kafir'' and the Hindu viewing the Muslim as ''dirty, fanatical and licentious'' can only be frowned upon in plush drawing rooms and not in the crowded mohallahs of a resource-starved polity.

There are a great many contentious issues that the BJP must address right away. First and foremost is the UP problem. Tremors there can lead to severe aftershocks in Delhi. However, in trying to set its house in order in this politically crucial state, the BJP should see it less as a fire-fighting operation -- it has been doing exactly that all along thereby aggravating the problem -- than as a dry run for building a cohesive coalition at the Centre.

In the just concluded election UP has once again proved a conundrum in that it has voided various smug assumptions. To begin with, neither the Brahmins and the upper castes (also the backward caste Lodhis to which Kalyan Singh belongs) nor the Muslims rallied wholly behind the BJP and the Congress respectively. A corollary is that the vote share of the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party was not confined to what is considered their traditional bastions -- respectively, the other backward castes and the Dalits.

This turf-cutting has important implications for any party -- especially the BJP -- that seeks to be pre-eminent in UP (and by extension in the country): primarily that it has to weld a broad social coalition like the KHAM etc of the Congress heyday. This won't happen by simply having someone like Kalyan Singh at the helm in Lucknow, which is obvious tokenism.

Post Mandal, the backward castes and the Dalits are a force to reckon with -- and not simply cannon fodder as they were earlier, whether it was the Nav Nirman or the Ram Janambhoomi movements, both of which saw their enthusiastic and large-scale participation. They rightfully demand a commensurate share in the prevailing scheme of things. The BJP can have two attitudes towards this basic reality: simply react to it or be, in a word made famous in a different context by one of its leaders, proactive. So far, it has just done the former.

To emerge as India's foremost party of governance, it should henceforth tackle this issue proactively: in other words, work towards building solid bridges between the elites and the subaltern sections. This would, of course, alter the equations in the favour of the subalterns, especially in the rural areas, but then that is what Vajpayee's latest statement on ''the necessity and willingness to take hard decisions... [or] to at least provide clean drinking water to every Indian'' entails. It will certainly demand abandoning the BJP's tunnel vision but then that -- as much as deregulating the insurance sector -- is what nation-building, in real terms, means.

In UP, this will concretely translate into strengthening the hands of Kalyan Singh. The reasons normally touted by both interested elements within the BJP and the media generally against Kalyan Singh is that he is a master manipulator -- albeit one who rescued the party at a time of crisis -- and someone who has openly flaunted his nexus with criminals. Both of these are true to an extent. They, however, mask the deeper reasons for the vehemence of the opposition to the UP chief minister.

By hitting hard at the lucrative transfer and education mafias in the state Kalyan has severely emasculated the clout of the entrenched political establishment, where every party including the BJP has a stake. Similarly, his decision to make banks proffer loans to farm labourers and small cultivators has dramatically reduced the control the rural elites have traditionally wielded over these vulnerable sections.

His attempts to streamline government departments again alienated the vocal middle-class, which considers state departments its monopoly.

If Kalyan carries out more reforms in this vein the socio-political structure in UP will be considerably altered to the advantage of the dispossessed. The BJP leadership continues to, subtly or otherwise, scupper these moves. But it would be foolhardy on their part not to read the writing on the wall and persist with this: Sakshi Maharaj's intention of forging a Kalyan-Mulayam axis cannot be scoffed at as an empty threat from a disreputable maverick.

Even if for no other reason than mundane self-preservation the BJP should wise up to hard realities on the ground. Playing at numbers or cobbling together superficial alliances with sundry 'spokesmen' of various castes or regions may help prolong its tenure at the Centre.

No sooner has the new government been sworn in and the alliance has already come under strain with the Janata Dal-United in Karnataka proclaiming the alliance with the BJP as having ceased. If the Great Hindu Undivided Family, Part II is not to go the way its first chapter did in just 13 months, the BJP should be willing to accept the need for social re-engineering.

Anil Nair