The Aam Admi Party's (AAP's) suicidal tendencies are bound to help the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) more than any other party because the
saffron outfit is politically better placed to exploit them.
If
the AAP hadn't been driven by competitive egos, it might have been able
to build on its success in the Delhi elections to spread its wings to,
say, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Haryana for a start.
Such inroads by a
feisty competitor could not but have unnerved the BJP, under pressure
as it is from challenges from traditional rivals like the Congress and
the regional parties of the Hindu heartland on the land acquisition law
and other issues.
Now, however, the BJP can breathe easy. Since
the AAP has ceased to be a major danger, at least for the present, the
Narendra Modi government can pursue its agenda at its own pace.
Indeed,
the prime minister may well feel that providence is on his side. First,
the Congress virtually collapsed to hand him a majority in the Lok
Sabha last year. Now, the only party which gave signs of being a
formidable rival is imploding.
The BJP's other advantage is that most of the other parties are suffering from leadership problems.
While
the Congress will have to contend with the exigencies of dual control
at the top posed by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, it is yet to be seen whether
the revamped Janata-2 comprising several parties of the "cow belt" plus
Janata-Secular of Karnataka will be able to take off.
It is
possible that Janata-2 will present a serious challenge to the BJP in
the Bihar elections towards the end of the year with its caste-dominated
vote banks. But whether regional heavyweights with inflated egos like
Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Sharad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, H.D.
Deve Gowda and others will be able to stick together for any length of
time is open to question.
It is obvious that compared to these parties, the BJP has in Modi a leader whose political longevity is seemingly assured.
Moreover,
there is not much doubt about his durability unlike others who once had
an apparently bright future like, say, Indira Gandhi, whose massive
1971 success was blighted, first, by the Navnirman movement against
corruption in Gujarat in 1973, the railway strike of 1974 and, finally,
the Emergency of 1975-77, which rung the curtains down on her reign.
Similarly,
Rajiv Gandhi's 415-seat tally in the 543-member Lok Sabha fell apart
like a house of cards in 1989 following his suspected involvement in the
Bofors howitzer scandal.
Modi, in contrast, appears to be
reasonably secure at the moment with no one in sight who offers a
genuine challenge. He even seems to have succeeded in partially curbing
those in the saffron brotherhood who had been targeting Muslims and
Christians on being emboldened by the BJP's majority in the Lok Sabha.
As
a result, the "Godhra moment" - the deaths of Hindu pilgrims in a train
fire which sparked off the Gujarat riots of 2002 - for which Mani
Shankar Aiyar of the Congress has been waiting hasn't materialized.
Aiyar had likened the anticipated "moment" with the Reichstag fire which
led to the Nazi crackdown on the Jews in Hitler's Germany.
Modi's
only problem at present is the slowness of the reforms process which is
negating the pre-election promise of achhey din (good days) via a
fast-paced development programme.
The other is the less serious
one of the RSS-types imposing their fetishes on the nation by, among
other things, banning beef and films like Un-freedom, which depicts
"unnatural passion" or homosexuality, and "Fifty Shades of Grey" for
depicting excessive passion.
If the censor board chief, Pahlaj
Nihalani, is behind the ban on the films, it was Home Minister Rajnath
Singh who favoured the ban on the BBC documentary, India's Daughter, on
the December 2012 rape victim.
Since then, Singh has been toying
with the idea of a countrywide ban on beef even if the beef-eating
"festivals" organised in Kerala and West Bengal have shown that not all
Indians, including Hindus, share the inhibitions of the RSS.
These
issues may be of interest mainly to the chatterati, but social
network-savvy BJP cannot be unaware that no segment of society can be
ignored in these days of the twitter and YouTube, not to mention the
24/7 news channels with their insatiable thirst for sensationalism.
Not
surprisingly, the RSS wants the government to circumvent the
judiciary's deletion of Section 66-A of the IT Act, freeing the Internet
from official control.
Considering how much emphasis Modi places
on his foreign interactions, he must be conscious of the need to retain
his "modern" image, which is likely to suffer if he allows too much
latitude to the primitives in the Hindutva camp.
One way to
counter their localism is extensive globalization - the General Motors
want to make India its regional export hub - so that the winds of new
technology, new attitudes and new vision sweep away the cobwebs of
age-old fads and prejudices.
(04.04.2015 - Amulya Ganguli is a
political analyst. The views expressed are personal. He can be reached
at [email protected])
