If there is one political party in India which
knows how to create the impression that it’s
laying down the national agenda when it isn’t,
it’s surely the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
That’s the message its national council meeting
in Lucknow sent out when Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee
declared that "the road to power in New Delhi
passes via Lucknow" and exhorted the party to win
the coming elections to the Uttar Pradesh
Assembly.

Senior BJP leaders themselves manufactured this
upbeat appearance. They highlighted the issue of
who would lead the party in the next Lok Sabha
elections as if it were part of the real agenda.
Mr LK Advani set the ball rolling in a recent
television interview when he said he would be the
natural candidate for the Prime Minister’s job
should the BJP come to power; yet he doesn’t
expect Mr Vajpayee to nominate him. Soon, Mr MM
Joshi, another would-be PM, declared there’s no
dearth of prime ministerial candidates in the BJP.

It was left to Mr Rajnath Singh, anointed BJP
president for three more years, to put in the
next claim. Mr Singh used colourful, semi-rustic
imagery, of baratis (the bridegroom’s party) only
waiting to carry the bride, satta ki sundari
(deity of power) to Delhi, and hinted that he
himself might be the dulah (bridegroom).

Meanwhile, Mr Narendra Modi strutted around as if
he were Mr Vajpayee’s successor, being the only
senior second-generation leader to wield state
power.

However, it’s preposterous to regard the issue of
BJP leadership in 2009 as relevant today. One
must be irrationally exuberant to be convinced
that the BJP will probably return to power in the
next general elections, or that leadership will
be the main determinant of its fate.

The BJP has been in steep decline since its 2004
Lok Sabha defeat. Many of its partners have
deserted its National Democratic Alliance. The
party’s consistently poor performance in
by-elections, its loss of power in Jharkhand, and
the demoralisation of many of its state units all
point to this. The murder of Pramod Mahajan, the
party’s brightest second-generation leader, by
his own brother, and the defection of Ms Uma
Bharati, the fiery leader with the widest OBC
appeal, were major setbacks too.

It’s only in urban UP that the BJP has registered
gains. During recent three-tier municipal
elections, it won eight out of 12 large-city
mayoral positions. (It had won six even in 2001.)
In smaller towns, it was comprehensively defeated
by the Samajwadi Party.

Yet, BJP leaders presented these results as a
triumph heralding the party’s ascent to national
power. In reality, the local elections weren’t
even representative because the Bahujan Samaj
Party, one of UP’s Big Two, didn’t contest them.
In fact, the BSP covertly backed select
candidates, including many from the BJP, to
defeat its principal rival, the SP.

The BJP benefited from two factors:
anti-incumbency against Chief Minister Mulayam
Singh Yadav, and communal polarisation triggered
by the Haji Yakub episode (in which he offered Rs
50 crores to kill the Danish cartoonist who had
ridiculed Prophet Mohammed), and the government’s
refusal to ban the Students’ Islamic Movement of
India.

Ironically, a strange confluence of interests has
developed between the two rivals, BJP and SP. The
harder Mr Yadav tries to woo the Muslim
constituency that’s now suspicious of him, the
more the upper-caste Hindu vote shifts towards
the BJP. It’s not for nothing that Mr Yadav
offered 5-star hospitality in Lucknow to BJP top
brass citing “protocol”, and they accepted it.
Despite these advantages, the BJP only made
modest gains in the local elections. It’s unclear
whether these will reverse its long downslide.

The party’s UP Assembly strength has plummeted
from the 1991 peak of 221 (of 419 seats) to just
88 (of a total of 403), and its Lok Sabha tally
from UP shrunk from 51 to only 10. For a party
long in the Number Three slot in UP, a reversal
looks highly unlikely.

However, BJP leaders have taken heart from what
they regard as the “Muslim appeasement” card
played by the United Progressive Alliance
government through the Sachar Committee, which
recommends affirmative action for Muslims.
In Lucknow, there was full-throated condemnation
of “Muslim appeasement”, warnings about India’s
“second partition”, fanatical appeals to build a
grand Ram temple at Ayodhya, and contrived
bemoaning of the alleged reduction of Hindus to
the status of “second-class citizens”. Leader
after BJP leader spewed venom on Muslims and
hysterically warned against a “sell-out” on
Kashmir and Siachen.

The BJP should know better. Sachar is no Shah
Bano. In 1984, the Congress government amended
secular laws to please those clamouring against
modest compensation for a poor, deserted old
woman. The Sachar report is a serious,
well-considered, solidly documented analysis of
exclusion of and discrimination against Muslims.
It pleads for diversity and pluralism-not for
sectarian solutions. It should occasion sober
reflection on Indian society’s failure to prevent
the creation of a new underclass of disadvantaged
people and promote full representation of all
social groups-without prejudice.

It’s extremely unlikely that the “appeasement”
card will work given the present national mood,
which favours integration and respect for
inclusion and equity. The mood also frowns upon
paranoid notions of national identity. There is
widespread support for a durable and just peace
with Pakistan and a border settlement and broad
cooperation with China.

It’s even more unlikely that the Ayodhya plank
will sell. As the Sangh Parivar’s own countless
futile attempts to organise yatras on the issue
show, the public is simply not interested in this
agenda of hatred and revenge. The agenda doesn’t
earn votes anywhere.

The BJP’s return to hardline Hindutva represents
a terrible retrogression. It’s not in the
interest of democracy and pluralism that India’s
largest opposition party should embrace such a
narrow, divisive, communal agenda. This
demolishes the hope that leaders like Mr Vajpayee
would somehow neutralise the RSS’s malign
influence and push the BJP towards moderation. If
he couldn’t do this while in power, it’s
ludicrous to expect him to do so after he’s lost
it.

In line with this Rightward ideological-political
shift, the BJP has also executed an
organisational shift. It has amended its
constitution so that all its secretaries at the
national and state levels are pracharaks or
full-time Sangh propagandists. The RSS influence
has been starkly visible in all recent BJP
campaigns.

Mr Rajnath Singh has further strengthened this
influence-not least because he lacks an
independent base and needs the Sangh’s crutches.
The RSS in turn is only too happy at the revival
of the three contentious issues-Ram temple,
Uniform Civil Code, and Article 370-which were
put on hold in 1998 for dishonourable
reasons-expediency and greed for power.

The Lucknow conclave leaves the BJP’s structural
crisis unresolved. Ideologically, the party is
trapped between orthodox, Islamophobic, Hindutva
typical of small-town traders and upper-caste
groups, on the one hand, and pro-globalisation
Big Business, on the other. Politically, it’s
divided between its identity as an
ethno-religious movement, and electoral
compulsions which propel it into opportunistic
alliances. Organisationally, it cannot sever its
umbilical chord with the Sangh Parivar.

As this Column has often argued, the BJP’s
ascendancy from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s
was founded on three mutually reinforcing
factors. First, the Congress’s long-term decline
owing to its compromises with communalism and
market fundamentalism. This, coupled with the
Left’s stagnation after the Soviet Union’s
collapse, shifted India’s political spectrum
Rightwards.

Second, the BJP-VHP’s mobilisation around Ayodhya
in the late 1980s allowed Hindutva to percolate
widely. For the first time, the BJP broke out of
its narrow savarna Hindu-Hindi confines. And
third, its “social engineering” strategy, of
combining “Mandal” with “Kamandal”, helped it
attract OBC support in the Hindi belt.

None of these factors operates today. The
Congress has revived itself. The Left has
expanded. Regional parties with subaltern agendas
have grown. And the centre of gravity of Indian
politics has shifted Leftwards. Social justice
has displaced Ayodhya.

The BJP is disoriented by all this. Until
recently, it was in outright denial of its 2004
defeat It still has no political strategy to
revitalise itself. Its leadership crisis remain
serious. Its president is a narrow-minded
provincial Thakur politician. He isn’t even
remotely acquainted with the India that’s outside
the Hindi belt.

Lurking behind him is Mr Narendra Modi, who,
sadly, enjoys a high level of acceptance within
the BJP and behaves as its de facto Number Two,
next only to Mr Vajpayee.

The BJP is caught between aspiring leaders of
such appalling quality, and geriatric veterans
who are increasingly out-of-sync with reality,
but refuse to fade out. It’s likely to remain
suspended in this unenviable state for some time.