Bharatiya Janata Party: Neither united nor untainted

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s problems seem to be increasing with the approach of the state assembly elections later this year and the 2014 general elections.

Not only has the party lost a crucial election in Karnataka as a result of corruption allegations against its former chief minister, B.S. Yeddyurappa, but similar charges are now being levelled against an incumbent chief minister. Madhya Pradesh’s Shivraj Singh Chauhan, who was being projected as an alternative to Narendra Modi on the national stage because of his low-key, non-polarising style, is facing accusations that he palmed off prime land at throwaway prices to relatives. Predictably, the charge has brought Uma Bharti, his main adversary in the party, to the forefront. She lost no time in asserting her “zero tolerance” to corruption.

Last year, Bharti was readmitted to the BJP after six years in the cold. She was tasked with campaigning in Uttar Pradesh, but was specifically advised to keep out of Madhya Pradesh, where she was once the chief minister. But now that she has been made a BJP vice-president, there is no question of reining her in.

This latest internal tussle on graft is a reminder of what happened in Karnataka, where Yeddyurappa’s ‘lapses’, described by then BJP president Nitin Gadkari as moral rather than legal, encouraged his detractors in the party — Ananth Kumar in the state and L.K. Advani at the centre — to target him. Since then, Advani has been vocal in his criticism of the party’s handling of the Karnataka situation, even calling it “absolutely opportunistic”.

If Advani appears to have become more assertive of late, the reason perhaps is that his prime ministerial hopes have been rekindled by the support he is getting from diverse sections of the BJP — Sushma Swaraj, Bharti, Varun Gandhi, the Shiv Sena, et al.

These expressions of support coupled with the problems faced by the other major claimant, Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, must be music to Advani’s ears. The time is clearly past when he felt that the next prime minister may not be either from the Congress or the BJP, or when he petulantly stayed away from the party’s rally in Mumbai in 2012.

It isn’t only Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, of the Janata Dal-United, who is dead against Modi being projected as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, conspiracy theorists in the BJP see the latest Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation into the alleged involvement of former Rajasthan home minister Gulab Chand Kataria in the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case as a move to implicate Modi.

As it is, Modi’s factotum, former Gujarat home minister Amit Shah, is facing charges in the case. With the needle of suspicion now pointing to Kataria, life will become difficult for Modi.

The realisation that the tide is turning may have persuaded Modi to backtrack on the death penalty for Maya Kodnani following her conviction in a 2002 Gujarat riots case where 95 people were killed. The Gujarat government had initially sought the death penalty, but outfits such as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad in Gujarat and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra described the decision as an attack on Hindus, Modi must have realised that he would be alienating his core group of supporters, communal-minded Hindus, if the state government did not make a U-turn on the issue.

How Modi will explain his volte-face is not known, for he hasn’t held a question-and-answer session with his usually admiring audiences for some time, preferring instead to address them through video presentations as he did with the Gujarati diaspora in the US recently.

But Modi knows he cannot keep brushing aside links with the 2002 Gujarat riots every time the issue crops up.

Just as the spectre of the riots is pursuing Modi, a 2009 hate speech has returned to haunt Varun Gandhi following allegations that his judicial exoneration was flawed because the prosecution did not pursue the case seriously. A large number of witnesses against Gandhi turned hostile, suggesting that they had been influenced by money or muscle power.

The reopening of the case is not good news for the 32-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, who was appointed the BJP’s youngest general secretary since the party wants to project him as its answer to Rahul Gandhi.

What these cross-currents show is that the BJP will find it difficult to approach the forthcoming elections either as a united party or an untainted one in terms of sleaze and secularism.

— IANS

Amulya Ganguli is a political analyst.