Two contrary tactics are apparently guiding Narendra Modi. On the
political front, he is willing to accommodate outsiders in senior
positions even if it means breaking the rigid mould of a cadre-based
party. Outside politics, however, he is filling crucial posts in what
can be called cultural outfits with acknowledged saffronites.
Although
such opposing trends can create problems in the future, for the
present, the prime minister, who also virtually runs the party via his
Man Friday, Amit Shah, is focussed on winning elections. And, for this
purpose, he has discovered, as in Delhi, that the Bharatiya Janata
Party's (BJP) talent pool is somewhat lacklustre where impressing the
voters is concerned.
Hence, the induction of the feisty, if
somewhat overenthusiastic, Kiran Bedi, a rank outsider, into the BJP and
that, too, as a chief ministerial candidate even if it creates a
flutter among the party faithful.
Modi is evidently banking on
the possibility that the BJP's organizational discipline will hold with
some help from the party's ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS). As for Bedi herself, she has understandably lost no time
to praise the RSS to secure her place in her new habitat.
The
former police officer - or a "thanedaar", as a BJP member called her
before being berated - is not alone in crossing the floor from a
"secular" to a camp deemed to be its opposite by its critics.
Not
long ago, Rao Birender Singh, a grandson of Sir Chhotu Ram, one of the
foremost leaders of undivided Punjab in the pre-1947 period, broke his
four-decade-long association with the Congress to become a member of the
Modi cabinet.
More recently, a former minister of the Manmohan
Singh government, Krishna Tirath, joined the BJP. So did Shazia Ilmi, a
prominent member of the Aam Admi Party (AAP), along with Vinod Kumar
Binny, also formerly of the AAP, who has been given a ticket to fight
the Feb 7 elections.
Furthermore, there is speculation that
Dinesh Trivedi, a former railway minister who belongs to the Trinamool
Congress, may cross over.
There have been others, too, who have
made a similar journey and made a success of it. Notable among them are
Sushma Swaraj, who was a member of the Janata Party, and Maneka Gandhi,
who is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
It is too early to
say whether these wild card entries will gradually turn the BJP from a
cadre-based to a mass organization. But Modi's immediate expectation is
that electoral success will dissipate much of the unhappiness among the
party members even though some amount of resentment is bound to remain.
From
this standpoint, it is a high-risk gamble because no one can guarantee
the foolproof nature of the tactic involving defectors in a lively
democracy like India's.
It may be that as a shield against the
charge of diluting the saffron ideology by taking in outsiders, the
government is resolutely promoting insiders where institutions like the
censor board or the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) are
concerned.
In the process, however, it is courting the danger of
earning opprobrium by nominating people whose credentials have been
called into question. The reason for such selections is that, as in
politics, the saffron brotherhood's cupboard is rather bare.
The
argument that the Congress, too, indulged in such favouritism is
tantamount to saying that one wrong justifies another. Moreover, the
Congress was lucky that its nominees were somewhat more circumspect in
the sense that none of them sang the praises of Sonia Gandhi during a
live telecast, as the new censor board chief has done about Modi.
For
the BJP, however, it will not be easy to walk the tightrope in managing
"opportunistic" outsiders while fending off the criticism which the
seemingly undeserving entrants into institutions like the censor board
and the ICHR will face.
It might have been advisable, therefore,
for the party to demonstrate the same uninhibited eclecticism it has
shown towards new members also in the matter of the composition of the
established bodies.
Since belief in strict neutrality is a
Utopian dream, few will deny a ruling party's prerogative to place its
own men in positions of power, whether in Raj Bhavans or in educational
and cultural institutions.
But spreading a wide net to include
people of distinction in the various bodies in addition to members of
the saffron brotherhood would have earned the government much praise.
The fear that the divergence of ideological views between the Left and
the Right would have paralyzed the institutions is somewhat unreal at a
time when Modi himself is steering the country on an economic course
which is not favoured by some of the saffron outfits, like the
anti-foreign investment Swadeshi Jagran Manch.
Such clashes of
ideologies are a feature of all democracies. What is to be avoided is
not so much the articulation of conflicting opinions as the need to
ensure that merit and capability are rewarded and not organizational
loyalty alone.
(24.01.2015 - Amulya Ganguli is a political
analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached at
[email protected])
