In a new age when nuisance makes news, no news is good news. News famine caused by opinion shortage and intellectual imbecility, even a routine restructuring of a party setup takes Page One by storm and is food for prime time pandemonium. A debate on 'who is in and who is out and why' is today's benchmark for testing the knowledge and connectivity of twattling tele-pundits. Ever since politics became a single-man act, party forums have been losing relevance. Only Constitutional provisions force parties to constitute these bodies for form's sake.
Many political mahouts with elephantine support were put out of form last week; on August 17, the BJP chief JP Nadda reconstituted its 11-member Parliamentary Board and 19-member Central Election Committee (CEC) — only a few months remain before he takes a bow. His predecessor Amit Shah, too, had reshaped the party hierarchy. For a few years, both the bodies have rarely met or followed the party constitution rules. The inclusion and exclusion of a couple of individuals are being seen as a sinister signal signifying social re-engineering.
Reading the saffron tea leaves indicates the rejig was ostensibly about shaping a new leadership and putting an election-ready team in place for 2024. Amongst the new faces were middle-level Dalit leaders and representatives of minority and backward communities. Some of these worthies had lost either the Lok Sabha or Assembly elections, but the leadership inked them in as sanguine satraps.
The decomposition of BJPs' two governing bodies indicates a deliberate decline into faceless fawning when maximum decisions are endorsed with minimum discussion. Since PM Modi gets credit and discredits for taking popular and unpopular decisions, analysts felt his touch in the new choices. And why not? After all, it is Modi Magic that made the BJP numerically the world's largest party. It is under his aegis that it won over 300 Lok Sabha seats, ringing in a single party majority after three decades. Nearly 1400 of 4000-odd MLAs are his political spawn. His magnetic moxie brought his party 36 per cent of votes last polled. It rules over half the States. Modi's admirers assert that the BJP needs him more than he needs it; therefore, it is his undeniable right to sculpt its contours whichever way he chooses. Its official platforms are now just synchronised stagecraft with a handpicked audience demurring to one-way dialogue.
Dropped by Nadda were veterans Nitin Gadkari and Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Since both PB and the CEC rarely met during the past six years, they or other members hardly made any contribution to the deliberations. So, neither forums nor individuals matter much. For the first time, a politically and administratively active former party chief like Gadkari has been ousted from decisive party forums. Close to the RSS leadership, he is known to call a spade a spade — sometimes even a pickaxe. He is arguably the best-performing minister in Modi Sarkar.
But the changes indicate a shift in Maharashtra's political cartography; though Devendra Fadnavis was appointed just a member of the CEC, he is perceived as the sole Maharashtra leader in the new coalition. There is a mystery to the method. For example, Modi has selectively relaxed the 75 years age limit for party and government nabobs. Nadda picked the 79-year-old B S Yeddyurappa from Karnataka and 77-year-old Satya Narain Jatiya from Madhya Pradesh. Taller leaders like Yogi Adityanath were ignored in favour of Assam's Sarbananda Sonowal.
Sudha Yadav, who lost elections twice in Haryana got preference over other known women netas like Smriti Irani—her husband, Deputy Commandant Sukhbir Singh Yadav of the BSF is a Kargil martyr. Besides the electoral emphasis, the nationalist credentials of the new members make them significant signals in the overall picture. Iqbal Singh Lalpura, a former IPS officer from Punjab, joined the BJP only in 2012. After he arrested Bhindranwale, he became famous for his no-nonsense approach in handling terrorism. Telangana saffronite K Laxman got a seat on the high table for aggressively promoting Hindutva in Telangana; he was instrumental in getting the BJP four Lok Sabha seats. In 2014, he earned the deplorable distinction of calling Sania Mirza, then the State's brand ambassador, "Pakistan's daughter-in-law" for the crime of marrying Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik. It is obvious that in the new BJP constellation, the Gadkaris, Chouhans, Scindias, etcetera, have become meteors of past plurality.
Now, getting a membership in a notional highest decision-making body of any political party just entitles the glorified viziers to a visiting card and some social respectability. Most of them are rubber stamps of the supreme leader or his or her authorised signatories. Hardly any outfit holds regular meetings of party forums. It was Indira Gandhi who authored the trend of turning important organisational bodies into symbiotic symposiums signifying servitude; by ignoring constitutional precedents of holding regular elections for AICC President and constituting the Congress Parliamentary Board when one of her nominees lost.
In contrast, the BJP does hold state-level party polls, although the process has been diluted, with the party president replacing state chiefs as decided at the very top. The latest modifications in the structural collective indicate that the party boss has usurped the powers of elected bodies. Articles XXV and XXVI of the BJP Constitution define the appointment and powers of BJP's 11-member PB and 19-member CEC. They say that "The National Executive shall set up a Parliament Board comprising party President and ten other members, one of whom will be the leader of the party in the Parliament with the Party President as its chairman. One of the general secretaries would be nominated as its secretary", and the "National Executive shall set up a Central Election Committee (CEC) consisting of all the members of the PB and eight other members elected by the National Executive as per rules".
This time, the turn in the road is a sharp curve. It's not the National Executive that reshaped the PB and the CEC last week. The president did, perhaps using an invisible resolution authorising him to do so. However, there remain four vacancies in the CEC, the forum where the names of candidates for the next general elections are finalised. Obviously, the BJP, like other parties, is moving from collective leadership to directed democracy. Earlier, parties made a leader. Now leaders make or maul the party. The Duopolistic Democratic structure has replaced collective confabulation as the chapter and verse of the iambic meter of Indian politics. Perhaps it's only poetic justice that the emphasis has shifted from the Oneness of Many to Many Under One.