‘Groom’ Rajnath spoils the party

BJP president Rajnath Singh’s shocker of an announcement at the party’s National Executive in Lucknow that he—instead of more consensual, more senior candidates—would be gunning for the prime ministerial chair seems to have cost him some respect and support.

By Sandeep Suman

It was billed to be a show of putting together a united house. The strategists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had hoped that on the conclusion of their three-day National Executive in Lucknow, they would be able to impress upon the electorate at large that the main Opposition party was in a state of battle preparedness to wrest power in the coming Assembly elections in four states, including the crucial Uttar Pradesh (UP), and claim to be the right alternative to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) at the Centre. Ironically enough, it was no less than party president Rajnath Singh who let his personal ambitions overshadow the regular proceedings.

After a long spell of all kinds of gloomy predictions, the BJP had some reason to feel buoyant. The unexpected gains in the UP mayoral elections have changed the mood of the cadre. But the BJP president seem to have taken local bodies elections a bit too seriously and, thus, allowed his prime ministerial ambitions get better of his other political senses—that, too, in his home town.

Rajnath Singh’s prime ministerial ambitions become the monkey on his back: he didn’t blink for a moment when he rather defiantly announced that he was the “bridegroom” whose endeavour it would be to take the “bride” (power) from Lucknow to Delhi. The other senior leaders seated at the podium and in the audience did not miss the significance of the message. It added a fresh dimension to the in-house debate over the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the next general elections. Rajnath Singh’s declaration came at a time when the media controversy over L K Advani’s statement on the subject had merely lost its edge and not died down, and the BJP was still smarting over a TV report that suggested that Advani had declared himself the party’s candidate for the prime minister’s post.

Sadly for Rajnath Singh, despite all his tall claims about his respect for Atal Behari Vajpayee and Advani, his gameplan is becoming too transparent: he is today taken more as a schemer than as the visionary that the main Opposition party badly needs at this juncture. There is a feeling among a section of Opposition leaders that Rajnath Singh was hardselling the candidature of President A P J Abdul Kalam for a second term as president because it suited his own overriding ambitions. His close supporters feel that if Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat was made the Opposition candidate for president, and if he won, it would hurt Rajnath Singh’s prime ministerial chances. “How can both the president and the prime minister be Rajputs, that, too, from North India?” a BJP leader asked.

Interestingly, while the party struggled hard to blame the media for an “avoidable” controversy, Advani’s perennial baiter within the BJP, former Union minister Murli Manohar Joshi, tossed back a premeditated byte on the sidelines of the national convention, saying that Vajpayee had been the best prime minister that the country had ever had. As for Advani’s perception that, according to the British, the leader of the Opposition was usually taken as the Opposition’s prime minister-in-waiting, Joshi said, “The party has many (candidates), and we will let you know the name when the time comes.”

If Rajnath Singh and Joshi sought to hog the limelight by adding fresh fuel to the the dying embers of a controversy, Hindutva’s haggard mascot, Kalyan Singh, tried to do some favours to himself by singing the old Ramjanambhoomi-Babri Masjid jingle and the appeasement-of-Muslims-by-the-UPA-government martial march.

Hindutva icon Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has lately been making serious attempts at an image makeover. He no longer wants to be remembered as Hindutva’s prime hatchet but as the poster boy of development politics. At the convention, he sported a new look—an Osho-style cap—and has also grown his hair. Whether that counts as a total image makeover is another matter altogether.

The poverty of new ideas can best be gauged from the fact that three months ago in Dehradun, it was Vajpayee who had protested that he could not be thrown into a dustbin just because he is gathering years. But even as he turned 83 on December 25, a number of BJP leaders began eulogising him as the party’s only hope and prime ministerial candidate.

It seems to have been forgotten that Vajpayee had, in the winter of 2005, already announced his retirement from active politics.