Nitin Gadkari is BJP president, and the party has turned a corner; it’s about time, what with the Congress displaying hubris with its somersaults on Telangana. Despite what has appeared in sections of the media, the only aspect of this appointment that did not suit the party’s former prime ministerial candidate, L K Advani, is the fact that it came a year too late. Otherwise, Gadkari is a candidate that Advani, now the party’s mentor and guide, himself had suggested despite some murmurs that Gadkari had never contested direct elections (he won an MLC election). Advani silenced those murmurs by saying that next time around Gadkari would contest — and win — a parliamentary election.
Of course, a year back Advani did not know that the mantle would eventually pass to Gadkari; indeed at that time most of us, including many in the Congress party, thought that the UPA would not be returning to power. Yet it did, and in analysing the reasons for the BJP’s defeat, it has dawned on the Sangh Parivar’s collective leadership that perhaps it should have listened to Advani in November 2008 when he suggested replacing Rajnath Singh as party president. Rajnath is by no means a bad fellow; it’s just that he is unable to see beyond UP. It is a commonplace that in life there are many promising professionals who plateau after a certain point and unfortunately Rajnath was one of them. However, when Advani suggested he be replaced, some pointed out that a major change so close to the elections would send a wrong signal to the cadre as well as to the electorate. In hindsight it is clear that the party went into the Lok Sabha polls with the wrong president.
The party’s next mistake — and this is clearly the main reason for the electoral debacle — was the strategy to attack Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as weak. This was the brainchild of Arun Jaitley, now Rajya Sabha Leader of Opposition, to whom Advani had entrusted the job of managing the campaign. Not everybody was on board with this strategy; there were suggestions to instead focus on the BJP’s “elected PM” versus the Congress’s “selected PM”, which would have been less personalised. To the BJP’s chagrin, calling Manmohan Singh weak was not acceptable to the electorate. Unfortunately, Jaitley has never been held accountable; he did not want a post-mortem (Advani, faced with political retirement, not surprisingly did not press for one).
The party’s other mistake was the poor selection of candidates. Some insiders think this led to electoral defeat in as many as 30 seats. The math is simple: the BJP won 116 seats to the Congress’s 206, so that would have made the results a bit more exciting (and the Congress a bit less uppity). For this culpability must rest with both Rajnath and Jaitley, among others.
This probably worked against Jaitley when he was denied the chance to be party president. Though he is a media darling (especially in New Delhi) he is far from being a darling of the BJP cadre. It is simple: he does not enjoy an easy rapport with the rank-and-file. Someone seen to be elitist cannot lead a party unless of course his surname is Gandhi and his party is the Congress. When RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat declared that none of the four leaders — Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Ananth Kumar and Venkaiah Naidu — would be the next party chief, he was not imposing his own decision; he was conveying to the world what the collective parivar leadership had decided.
This collective leadership, as has been mentioned in earlier columns, is a group of about 60-70 members of the Sangh Parivar which includes seniors from the BJP and the RSS. It is a leadership that does not decide in a hurry, but through comprehensive inner debate and deliberation. In deciding the next BJP president it considered not just the recent electoral loss but also generational change and the future state of the party. Thus it rejected Jaitley for reasons mentioned above; it rejected Sushma because her strength is seen more in parliamentary politics than on the organisational front; it rejected Ananth Kumar for plotting against Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa (it would be odd for a party to appoint a national chief who is opposed to a state unit); and it rejected Naidu because he had been president twice earlier.
So Advani came up with Gadkari’s name. Though some in the media tag Gadkari as the Mumbai-Pune Expressway man (or the flyover minister of the Shiv Sena-BJP Maharashtra government a decade back), the fact is that he has long been a result-oriented politician. He is a man who is comfortable interacting with corporate India, but he is also a man who does not shy of getting earthy in his language when the situation so merits. Most of all, he is a man who wants to get things done — and does not mind taking risks to do so. Needless to say, the RSS is delighted to have someone courageous take over at a time when the party needs to shake things up and set its house in order.
There are three tasks before Gadkari. The first is sorting out the BJP, and for that he probably needs to tour the country and visit the cadre, state-by-state. He may find that such an exercise will itself stamp his authority and infuse fresh enthusiasm in the cadre. The second is to build relationships between the central party and the state governments, for after all the BJP runs six states and there needs to be coordination if it is to derive maximum electoral synergy and benefit from its ideas, ideology and achievements. Lastly, Gadkari has to build relationships between the BJP and the other members of the Sangh Parivar. It is not as if they don’t have relationships, but as organic as they may be, it is again a commonplace that in life relationships need to be continually nurtured or else they grow inert.
It sounds simple but then it wasn’t something that Rajnath was able to do or that Jaitley could pull off. What probably helps Gadkari is the knowledge that in 2013, when the party prepares for the next Lok Sabha election, it will look for a prime ministerial candidate like Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who galvanizes the cadre. Gadkari’s okay with that. He’ll have the satisfaction of having prepared the party to capitalise on the moment that the Congress stumbles over its own hubris. And then the party can look back at this week and say that truly, it was when Gadkari became president that the BJP turned the corner.
editorchief@expressbuzz.com
About The Author;
Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai