Punjabis was working in Baroda, and now four and one had become five.
A convention is for people to meet, get to know one another, to improve
unity in the party, said Neeraj Yagnik, a BJP worker from Indore who had
been closely involved with hospitality. But in recent years, people would
come to sessions and then go back to their halls or hotels all over town. This
time everyone is together, like one big family. Weve made the convention
like a village, with farms and fields alongside where fresh produce is being
grown. Everything is eco-friendly: CNG cars and bullock carts to take
delegates up and down, bicycles if they want to get around by themselves.
The convention organisers riffs on a swadeshi theme were no doubt
ingenious. Security guards at the convention wore yellow kurtas and turbans
and carried lathis; vendors roasted channa and bhutta and served up nimbu
paani with rock salt. There was no trace of a bottled soft drinkthe symbol
of an easy, unthinking, and untraditional consumptionin sight. But inside
the convention hall, the delegates found themselves listening to an intensely
serious disquisition on Coca-Cola.
Rajnath was not willing to concede, as some had argued after the failure of
Advanis campaign in 2009, the prospect of the exhaustion of the politics of
Hindutva or a rethinking of the partys self-definition. The BJP found itself
today in a predicament, declared Rajnath, similar to that faced by Coca-Cola
in the 1980s, when the company found itself steadily losing market share in
the cola wars with its big rivalPepsi.
Convinced that it no longer appealed to mass taste, Coke decided, fatally, to
change its original formula. The company then produced and enthusiastically
advertised a new Coke similar to its competitorwith more lemon oil and
less orange oil explained Rajnath, whose research on this subject appeared
to have been very thorough. But, far from winning back those who had
jumped ship, the new product was a disaster in the market, and Coke fell
away even more. Only when, chastened, it reverted to its original formula
and kept the faith in its original identity did it eventually make up its lost
ground. For Rajnath, the BJP was now in the position that Coke was in the
80s. Learning from history, it had to avoid the temptation to abandon
its original formula.
That original formula was, of course, Hindutva. The conundrum of how to
balance communal mobilisation with a wider, more inclusive appeal based on
socio-economic themes is, of course, the central dynamic of the BJPs history
(although no illustrative example could have been more anachronistic than
Rajnaths). Over the three decades of its political life these two themes have
been mixed up in different proportions at different times, often by the same
personalities, such as Advani himself, responding to expedient concerns. Or
else they have run in parallel, aggregating their rewards, as when personified
by the figures of Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the partys
heyday in the late 90s. Now Rajnath, while acknowledging that development
was the new buzzword of Indian politics, insisted that by hitching its cart too
Swaraj, Modi, or Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari was almost unheard of in Indian
politics outside his native Maharashtra. He had never before won an election
to a state or national legislative assembly; his one term in high office was as
the widely praised Public Works Department minister of the BJP-Shiv Sena
government in Maharashtra from 1995-99.
A Brahmin from Nagpur, the headquarters of the RSS, and himself an RSS
swayamsevak in his youth, Gadkari enjoys the confidence of the body that
serves as a pressure group and veto power on the BJP. After the electoral
and internal crises of the past year, the party had sought someone who
represented both the traditional values of the partys parent body and the
spirit of a new generation, and with no history in the power struggles of
Delhi. This was Gadkari.
Despite his relative inexperience, the new president exhibits a certain savoir
faire. The day before the convention began, he made a trip to Mhow to pay
his respects at the birthplace of BR Ambedkar. During his inaugural speech,
this prosperous industrialist supplied to the delegates the image of himself as
a humble party worker, whose work, once upon a time, was painting walls
white (because my own handwriting was bad) so campaign messages could
be written on them, and rolling up carpets after meetings. That a person
such as himself could rise to the highest post of the party, he argued, is a
compliment to the party and its cadre, particularly in a political landscape
where powerful families have wrested control of parties.
More persuasively than many leaders invested in ushering in a new era,
Gadkari returns repeatedly to first principles, to notes of warning and selfrestraint. We should think: what kind of political culture do we want to be a
part of? he asks, enjoining delegates not to go around touching the feet of
leaders, especially his own. Past mistakes should encourage reflection about
the thin line between atma-vishwas (self-confidence) and ahankaar
(arrogance). The party is to make a conscious effort to reach out to
scheduled castes and tribes, minorities, the lower middle-classes and the
poor. After all, isnt this the true meaning of Deen Dayal Upadhyays concept
of Antyodaya, or reaching out to the last man? Without actually crossing his
predecessor, Gadkari was taking issue with Rajnaths more static view of the
party.
It is no doubt an oration with some real thought behind it. Its idiom, too, is
consistent with its message; Gadkaris Marathi-accented Hindi, with the
occasional burst of English, much more a language of the street than the
partys more ornate and Brahminical traditional idiom. Intrigued by the new
president, I sit down that night under the flickering tubelight of my cheap
hotel roomdespite the tents, every room in town is takento read Politics
For Development, a curious little book Gadkari published in English last
October, before his elevation to high office.
The book, easily available online as a PDF file, outlines Gadkaris vision for
Maharashtra, which at the time of writing formed the boundary of his political
world, but it is also a kind of autobiography. It is written in a simple,
unpretentious English, with the odd grammatical error commonly made by
the Indian English-speaking tongue confirming that it is an original
composition. It is devoid of rhetoric, with only the odd quote from Deen
Dayal Upadhyay or John F Kennedy to garnish its plainspoken style.
Remarkably, for a BJP voice, it never excoriates the Congress, preferring
instead to lay out a purely constructive agenda. The only contemporary
political figure it references is American president Barack Obama, who has
harnessed the concept of Politics of Development for all-round development
of the country.
The word development appears 112 times in this work of 86 pages, and
Hindu only once. Development, the book holds, is the primary good that
must be delivered to society by politics. Politics itself must never come in
the way of development. The book positions the writer, and by extension his
party, as holding the imperative of good governance above ideology. You
have every right to decide your own political inclination, the author writes to
an imagined reader, as if to stir him or her out of a lets play it safe and vote
for Congress reflex. If however you observe that the party which you favour
has pitched a candidate who is not seen chasing the development agenda,
whats the harm in electing a candidate who is not from the party of your
choice but has the potential to drive development?
Gadkari also demonstrates an impressive command of local conditions,
jumping nimbly, almost proprietorially, from one site in Maharashtra to
another (The sewage water of Nagpur is collected at Bhandewadi. It is then
recycled and supplied to the Koradi thermal power project,which is close
by....Can we consider treating Mumbais wastewater and carrying it to Nashik
via Thane in a pipeline? This water is enough to generate 2000 MW
electricity.) Appropriately enough for a book written by a self-professed
moderniser and reformer, it ends with three pages of answers given by the
writer to questions asked to him on a live Internet chat at Rediff.comhard
to imagine someone like Rajnath doing that.
There was enough seen of Gadkari at the convention to take seriously the
claim made by Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, Gadkaris contemporary in student
politics and now the director of a training institute for BJP workers in
Mumbai, that the new president was a non-conventional politician in a
conventional politics. It remains to be seen how Gadkari handles incidents
like Varun Gandhis indefensible speech in Pilibhit during last years election
campaign, one that generated a further set of disingenuous equivocations
among the party high command. The BJPs own young Gandhi, while present
at the convention, did not appear on stage, though posters all over town
proclaimed him the Bhavishya ka agaaz, or the voice of the future. In March,
Gandhi was made a secretary on Gadkaris team of office-bearersmany of
them new faces and a third of them womenas was the founder of the
Bajrang Dal, Vinay Katiyar. Even so, to many kinds of watchers not
superpower through ox power. A little over 200 years after the Industrial
Revolution, it was not easy to imagine such an eventuality coming to life. But
then again, every grand scheme in this world was an idea before it was
reality.
That evening, I attend a two-hour session on, surprisingly enough, global
warming and climate change. Anil Dave, a Rajya Sabha MP from Bhopal and
a member of the Indian delegation at the recent world conference on climate
change in Copenhagen, delivers a precise, clipped presentation on the
subject to a rapt audience, hitherto never particularly moved by the subject
of global warming. My science is a little backward, and like many others in
the hall I find myself taking notes and feeling bad that I consume energy and
fuel so unthoughtfully.
Dave offers pragmatic suggestions about what can be done by individuals
and communities to reduce global warming, and points out how we are guilty
of a selfish, short-term perspective by not factoring in environmental costs
when thinking about the price of consumption. Because of the global
warming crisis, the world is slowly coming around, in his view, to the Indian
or Vedic way of looking at the environment holistically, through a concept
such as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, or the world as one interlinked and
interdependent family. Let us resolve, he urges his audience, to be the
most environmentally conscious society in the world.
It is an ambitious speech, one that gives the assembly the sense that they
were at the centre of the movement against global warming, and not a group
of spectators watching from the margins. Later I catch up with Dave, an RSS
swayamsevak who joined the BJP six years ago, as he spoke into a
delegates mobile phone to record a message to the children of a school
about caring for the environment. I ask him how he came to specialise in an
area rarely given any importance in Indian politics or civic life. I think that
properly to be a Hindu, or an Indian, he replies, is to always think of ones
relationship to the environment.
V
ALTHOUGH THE BJP is emphatically a nationalist party, it is not, and
probably cannot in its current form be, a national party. This seemed clear
even at a conference of its own delegates. The default language of the
convention was Hindi, which immediately divided the assembly into insiders
and outsiders, those from the centre and the north much more at ease than
those from the east, the northeast and the south. Of course, language is a
minefield for every pan-Indian event, and there can be only so much
accommodation for diverse tongues. But not the slightest concession seemed
to be granted to non-Hindi speakers. Just as every Indian is assumed by the
BJP to be a part of a monolith called Indian culture, so too it seemed an
assumption of the convention that every delegate possessed a working
knowledge of Hindi, both oral and written. All the delegates were urged to
make a tour of an exhibition hall documenting the BJPs history, but the text
of this exhibition was entirely in Hindi. A couple of speakers from the south,
including the former party president Venkaiah Naidu, apologised for their
poor Hindi and chose to speak in English. Some others, like Ananth Kumar of
Karnataka, soldiered on bravely in a faltering, platitudinous Hindi without
grace or personality.
Indeed, even on a map of the BJPs position across Indian states, it appears
that the farther the state from Hindi, the farther it is too from the attractions
of Hindutva. The BJPs vision of Indian history and culture is linked to the
language in which it is most commonly expressed and transmitted. It is
something that sounds plausible only in Hindi, particularly the Sanskritised
Hindi favoured by its leaders. Politically, the party is a marginal presence in a
long Indian corridor from Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south all the way up
to the northeastover two days and 2,800 kilometres worth of Indian
territory on the 5629 Guwahati Express, with only a brief stop in Bihar for a
breath of BJP air.
Although many of the speakers at the convention claimed that the party was
far more open-minded than its opponents had made it out to be, in practise,
the categories adopted for the sake of argument themselves gave the lie to
this claim. It was claimed that the party was not hostile to Muslims per se, as
was often believedit was only opposed to those Muslims who, while they
lived in India, bore allegiance to some other territory or idea or grouping.
The very structure of this formulation was paranoid. It was hard to believe
that the party seriously felt that any Muslim would buy such a contorted
argument. A Muslim, even if not the first thing was known about him, was
already in a special category in the eyes of the party.
Then again, the party seemed to project a similarly blinkered and reactionary
view with respect to its own imagined core constituency of Hindus. A genuine
commitment to the rejuvenation of Hinduismif we assume for a moment
that this Hinduism is actually in crisiswould require an organisation that
celebrated the great diversity of thought and practice within Hinduism. This
seemed well beyond the BJPs Hindi-belt bias and militant tenor. Despite the
odd instance of creative interpretation, the partys nationalism still seems
basically uncurious and inflexible, desirous of bending every Hindu to the
adoption of a saffron kit consisting of the Ram temple, the Gita, the Ganga,
Vande Mataram, and Bharat Mata ki Jai rather than accommodating the
divergent adherences of caste, culture and geography. A session on the
purification of the Ganga was reduced to a set of eulogies about the place of
the Ganga in national life and the miraculous properties of its water, while a
resolution on terrorism became the occasion for a characteristically bellicose
oration by Narendra Modi. When the chief minister of Gujarat alleged that the
Centre had offered his government no logistical or financial support on the
matter of state security and bellowed, Mujhe barood chahiye! (I want
weapons!), a roar of applause went up entirely out of proportion to the issue
at hand, as if enjoying the sinister undertones of the message.
What the BJP appears to need at 30and what Gadkari seemed to be trying
to dois the articulation of a more flexible, inclusive expression of its core
ideology, which is now the task of its second generation after the departure
of the old guard. But even if the new president came as a moderate and
modernising voice, the tribalism and inhospitability of the original formula,
now deeply embedded in the partys psyche, were plainly on view in Indore,
and seem sure to come seeping through even in its fourth decade.