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Narendra Modi may have performed
with aplomb at his first appearance in Delhi after his election
victory in Gujarat, but it is too early to say whether the pitch
which the chief minister made for moving to the national stage
will be successful.
The reason for the doubts lies in the events that unfolded several
hundred miles away in Allahabad. After taking a holy dip in the
Ganga, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Rajnath Singh
fervently called for the building of the Ram temple in Ayodhya,
thereby reviving an issue put in cold storage by the party in
1996. In that year, after failing to secure a majority in the Lok
Sabha, then outgoing prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced
that the BJP was shelving the three main points on its Hindutva
agenda - constructing the temple, an emotional issue for millions
of fervent Hindus, introducing a uniform civil code for all
religions in India and scrapping Article 370 of the Indian
constitution that gives special status to Jammu and Kashmir.
It was on the basis of this promise that Vajpayee was able to put
together a coalition of 24 parties to form a government in 1998.
Since then, the coalition has dwindled to only four members
because many of the "secular" parties walked out after the 2002
Gujarat riots. The point is whether the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP will suffer another jolt because of
Rajnath Singh's announcement, which has subsequently been endorsed
by the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).
Considering that the RSS and the VHP are also seen to be in favour
of Modi's candidature as prime minister, the next point of
interest will be to see how the BJP manages to reconcile Modi's
development plank, which pledges to encompass all the communities,
with the polarising temple agenda. Or, whether it will try to ride
both the horses at the same time even at the risk of the Janata
Dal-United (JD-U) walking out of the NDA. The JD-U has already
said that the Ram temple is not on the NDA agenda.
One calculation of the Hindutva camp can be that Modi's
candidature and a renewed emphasis on the temple will together be
such a morale-booster for the BJP in northern and western India
that it will be able to ignore the JD-U's protests. In any event,
since the latter has clarified more than once that Modi is
unacceptable to it as a prime ministerial candidate, it may
already have one foot outside the NDA's door. The readiness
expressed by the Congress to expand the United Progressive
Alliance (UPA) led by it might be aimed at the JD-U.
It is too early to say whether the Congress will be able to take
advantage of a rupture in the NDA. But, as the sudden execution of
Afzal Guru, a decade after he was sentenced to death by the
Supreme Court, shows, the Congress is gearing up for the
forthcoming state assembly elections this year and the general
election in 2014. If it can breathe new life into the economy, it
can look forward to the contests with greater confidence than
before.
Much depends on whether it will be able to woo back the "neo
middle class", as Modi calls it, which has been drifting towards
the BJP. If their diatribes on the internet are an indication,
they are anti-Mahatma Gandhi, anti-"Italian" dynasty,
anti-Congress and anti-Muslim. No one knows, however, how big this
group is as a vote bank.
Besides, there is a basic contradiction between the tension-prone
temple issue and a development programme with its concomitants of
consumerism and social peace. A middle class, or any other group,
which favours development can hardly be expected to go along with
the whipping up of communal tension that is bound to accompany the
revival of the temple agenda.
It is possible, therefore, that the BJP's efforts to repeat in
2013-14 what it tried in the 1990s will come a cropper. Had the
choice of tactics been left to itself, the party may have to tread
more carefully by being more accommodating towards the JD-U and
the Shiv Sena. The latter prefers Sushma Swaraj as the prime
ministerial candidate instead of Modi. It appears, however, that
the RSS has persuaded Rajnath Singh, chosen by it to replace the
scam-tainted Nitin Gadkari, to focus on the temple again. The BJP
will be preoccupied, therefore, in the coming weeks with the twin
issues of Modi and the mandir, an insistence on either or both of
which can lead to the NDA's demise. It is a Hobson's choice for
the BJP.
Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst. He can be
reached at amulyaganguli@gmail.com
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