Power & Politics / Mail Today, June 28, 2010

IT WAS once touted as a cadre- based party, bred on iron discipline whose leaders do not compromise on principles. Today, it is at best an uneasy union of various factions, some more powerful than others, but each doing what it thinks is best to serve its own interests while running down the rest. The last fortnight has seen the fissures in the party crop up like never before as the BJP tried to grapple with the twin issues of Rajya Sabha elections and reinduction of two of its talismanic expelled leaders. Neither party president Nitin Gadkari nor senior leaders seemed capable of loosening the stranglehold the powerful clique, the D- 4 as they are called, have had on the party ever since it was voted out of power six years ago.

For more than a month now, there has been talk about the party welcoming back into its fold two of its most charismatic leaders. There are valid reasons why Gadkari and senior leaders like L. K. Advani and Rajnath Singh wanted Jaswant Singh and Uma Bharti back. Jaswant’s homecoming wasn’t a smooth affair, but with Advani determined to bring back the seventerm parliamentarian and former finance and external affairs minister, on whom Advani often falls back on for intellectual inputs and sagacious advice, the D- 4 could do nothing but fall in line.

Uma hasn’t been so lucky. Her proposed reinduction has much to do with the party needing her grassroots connections as the BJP prepares to fight assembly elections later this year in Bihar and in the next couple of years in many cowbelt states. But the opposition to her re- entry from the resident Gang of Four at 11, Ashoka Road, was bolstered by the stiff resistance from Shivraj Chouhan, who succeeded Uma as Madhya Pradesh chief minister. There are reports that Chouhan told the party’s central leaders to take his resignation before reinducting Uma.

What all this makes abundantly clear is that in Uma’s homecoming, the D- 4 sees a threat to the status quo — the power- sharing arrangement allows them to control the party setup both at the Centre and in the states. It is actually a self preservation society at work. From 1998, they have controlled the levers of power, either as ministers in the NDA government and, after being booted out of power, as party officebearers. That their power is not commensurate with their acceptability is evident from the fact that while most of them sweat at the mere Jaswant Singh prospect of fighting a popular election, they have the power to decide who will get tickets to contest polls or even who will be the chief minister.

The opposition to Narendra Modi addressing a JD( U)- BJP joint rally in Patna was not so much from Nitish Kumar as from Friends of Nitish Kumar ( FONK) in the BJP’s central office who are visibly disconcerted at the pan- Indian appeal of the Gujarat chief minister and are unnerved by the prospect of him moving to Delhi.

Greed and self interest rule over everything else but in the process, the party and the NDA coalition that it led are paying a heavy price. In the last six years, the alliance has shrunk beyond recognition. It once had 21 parties glued by the unmatched charisma of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Today, there are barely half a dozen. Among those forced out are the National Conference, the DMK, the INLD, the Telugu Desam Party, the MDMK, PMK, the Trinamool Congress, the Lok Janshakti, Ajit Singh’s RLD, to name a few.

Worse, its relations with existing partners are at best tenuous, as exemplified by the recent game of brinksmanship with the JD( U). In the hands of the ruling clique, its future appears bleak. But there may still be some hope left. In the recent Rajya Sabha elections, the old guard was as assertive as could be.

Vasundhara Raje Scindia, whose disdain for Jaswant is no secret, was asked to assemble and keep in isolation the party’s Rajasthan MLAs in the run- up to the elections to the Upper House.
And Venkaiah Naidu, an important cog in the gang that was initially opposed to fielding Ram Jethmalani from Rajasthan, was tasked with being the election manager.

The old guard is finally showing that there is still some fight left in them. And that’s good news for the party and all those who wish it well.

Seedhi Baat/ Aajtak, August 23, 2009

In Seedhi Baat, expelled BJP leader Jaswant Singh talks about the actual reasons leading to to his expulsion from the party, the role of Nehru, Patel and Jinnah in the Partition of India, his relations with Vajpayee, Advani and the RSS, his biggest political regret and his future plans.

विचारों पर पाबंदी दुर्भाग्‍यपूर्ण: जसवंत सिंह

बीजेपी से निकाले गए वरिष्‍ठ नेता जसवंत सिंह ने कहा है कि विचारों पर पाबंदी लगाया जाना देश और राजनीति के लिए दुर्भाग्‍यपूर्ण है. आज तक के कार्यक्रम 'सीधी बात' के दौरान उन्‍होंने ये बातें कहीं.

Power & Politics/ Mail Today, August 10, 2009

EXTERNAL Affairs Minister SM Krishna and Shivraj Patil, the former home minister who had to resign in disgrace after fiddling through 26/ 11 have in common an obsession for sartorial elegance, but that’s about all the common ground that they share.

Yet, ribald SMS jokes are doing the rounds about their many commonalities and I suspect the government’s spin doctors are behind these crude attempts. Some of the text messages border on the vulgar, so I will not share them here, but their underlying theme is this: Krishna is as clueless in South Block as Patil was across the road in North Block.
Such comparisons are less than fair to Krishna and the reasons are many.

For one, he has been in office for less than eighty days which is a very short time to judge a man who I assume is there for a five year tenure. In comparison, Patil blundered along for four and a half years and it wasn’t until the blasts in Hyderabad and Jaipur well into his third year in office that questions began to be raised whether he was the right man for the hot job. On that count alone, Krishna deserves the benefit of doubt but there are more crucial differences. In UPA I, Patil was Sonia Gandhi’s handpicked nominee with a mandate to run the ministry as he deemed fit. As foreign minister, Krishna does not enjoy that privilege. In fact, few foreign ministers in recent times have had that. Barring perhaps Pranab Mukherjee in the last government and Jaswant Singh in Vajpayee’s, foreign ministers have played second fiddle as foreign policy has always been directed from the PMO.

A Fulbright scholar, chief minister and governor, Krishna has the finesse and the articulation for the job. His fault is that he is less than ambitious and quite new to Delhi’s cloak and dagger world of plots and conspiracies. How shameless then that over enthusiastic babus in the foreign office should try to deflect the blame for the recent shames in their backyard from the PMO to this affable Kannadiga. It is no secret that at Sharm El Sheikh and during all the acrimony witnessed in Parliament over the alleged sellout, foreign office mandarins were seen closeted not with their minister but in the PMO.

The work that ministers do is judged in comparison with the accomplishments/failures of their predecessors. Krishna is disadvantaged here since his predecessor was the UPA’s all purpose man and super minister Pranab Mukherjee. He seldom took directions and always took decisions.

And don’t forget he has also been Manmohan Singh’s boss and it comes as no surprise that despite being the prime minister and first among equals, Manmohan frequently consults Pranabda for inputs on vital policy matters, be they on the economic, domestic or external front. At the moment, Krishna is merely allowed to take directions. There cannot be accountability without responsibility. The PMO cannot run the foreign office and dodge responsibility when things go wrong. Krishna should be judged when he is given the powers to perform.

A DOUBLE WHAMMY by Jaswant Singh/Mail Today-June 16,2008

THE MOVING finger writes and having written moves on. Well, not quite. Politician’s pens are traditionally less mightier than their swords and their tongues but when the politician’s moving finger writes, the results can be embarrassing, if not self defeating. Jaswant Singh, the former finance and external affairs minister and friend to Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice has just completed atome. It’s all wrapped up, the editing, proofing and everything after the contents were discussed with both Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani, his senior party leaders. Yet the book may not hit the stores until we have a new government in place in New Delhi. Lest you think that the delay is due to fears that the book will trigger another fratricidal war in the BJP because of revelations of Kandahar, Kargil etc, perish the thought. The hefty volume (it is 1000 pages plus) is in fact about Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the man who created Pakistan 60 years ago and almost destroyed Advani three years back. From what Igather, alot of research has gone into it and Jaswant had exclusive access to alot of original material thanks to the company that he is known to keep. The former Army officer meets up with the Qaid- e- Azam’s relatives in India. But for the BJP, Jinnah is ahot potato. Jaswant’s book is not said to show Jinnah as the monster that the RSS and much of the BJP paints him to be. In 2005, Advani nearly singed his career by singing Jinnah’s praise. Earlier this year, Advani again courted controversy with his biography, My Country My Life .Clearly, both books and Jinnah don’t go down well in the BJP. For Jaswant, it’s adouble whammy.