Neither tired nor retired

With Vajpayee and Advani refusing to quit, the second rung in the BJP is sinking, sinking, drinking water.

Hardnews Bureau DehraDun/Delhi

Soft rain fell on Murli Manohar Joshi’s enlarged face in a poster beaming at new arrivals in Dehra Dun’s tiny railway station. Nothing untoward in the most famous BJP leader from these hills greeting delegates to his party’s national executive meeting in Uttaranchal’s capital earlier this month. The incongruity struck only when Joshi walked out of the crucial meet on the very first day. The party had not even shown him the courtesy of an invitation for a public meeting where all important leaders were to speak.

 Such meetings are usually an occasion for the BJP to review past performance and plan for the future. The Dehra Dun conclave was unique not just because it offered nothing either by way of a political vision for the future or a considered review of the past. What it did achieve was to showcase hidden contradictions and conflicts within the party.

There were the late-day shadows of the party’s twin towers. Much to the frustration of the ‘second rung’ leadership, the message from both Atal Behari Vajpayee and LK Advani was clear – they are neither ‘tired nor retired’. Vajpayee did it characteristically by saying, in a closed door meeting, that old age was catching up with him. At the same time, he stressed, nobody should be consigned to the wastepaper basket only because of age.

Advani was more direct. He ruthlessly subdued Rajnath Singh, kept Joshi out of all important deliberations, and delivered a public snub to Arun Jaitley. Jaitley has been openly critical of the BJP’s handling of the monsoon session in Parliament, mainly regarding two crucial issues – the Pathak Committee report and the Indo-US nuclear deal. The criticism was widely being perceived as an attack on Advani as he is the leader of opposition and directly in charge of strategising during Parliament session.

On the nuclear deal, Jaitley is known to have clashed with Yashwant Sinha in the parliamentary party meeting. His view reportedly was that the BJP should never have hobnobbed with the Left, which is what Sinha did to formulate the ‘Sense of the House’ proposal on the nuclear deal. Even on the Pathak Committee report, Jaitley openly contradicted Advani’s statement. Advani was soft on Natwar Singh while Jaitley attacked Natwar and theCongress in his speech.

In his remarks to the national executive, Advani hailed the party’s handling of the nuclear deal as an “important success” of the BJP. To drive the knife deeper into Jaitley, he heaped praise on Sinha for his role in “forcing” Manmohan Singh to make a statement on the nuclear deal. “I would like to make a special mention, in particular, of two of our esteemed MPs— Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie,” said Advani, while applauding Sinha.

Both incidents reflect that the RSS’s efforts to infuse “young” blood in the BJP have not had the desired effect. Advani may be out of the party president’s office, but he is still calling the shots. So is Vajpayee. In fact, Vajpayee’s sudden outburst of energy in Dehra Dun has lasted long enough to irritate the younger lot even further.

A case in point is the upcoming by-election in Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh. The seat was left vacant when Shivraj Singh Chauhan quit the Lok Sabha to become the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. The basic contest among the current lot of aspirants is between Sushma Swaraj and Varun Gandhi, with both Vajpayee and Advani favouring the latter for their own reasons.