Gadkari makes a mess in BJP
By Amulya Ganguli
It is the season of the “provincial” – a word which Jaswant Singh used to describe Rajnath Singh after the latter expelled him for writing an adulatory biography of Jinnah. But, if Jaswant Singh thought after his return to the BJP that Rajnath Singh’s successor would be less of a provincial, he was badly mistaken. For, there is little doubt that Nitin Gadkari answers to the same unflattering charge.
As if to prove the truth of this insinuation, Gadkari has apparently made the biggest mistake of his career. This was to invite Babu Singh Kushwaha to join the BJP after the former U.P. minister was expelled by Mayawati from her party for his alleged involvement in the multi-crore health scam. She had expelled other “tainted” individuals, too, but Kushwaha’s record was the worst because the health scam saw the murder of two chief medical officers and the death of a third in jail.
Why Gadkari thought that Kushwaha and others will boost the BJP’s prospects is difficult to explain, but it is not improbable that as a “provincial” with a restricted outlook confined mainly to a state, he was unable to anticipate the furore which would greet his move within the BJP itself. Following the uproar, Kushwaha himself has distanced himself from his new party, saying that he will wait for his name to be cleared before becoming a member. But, no one has been hurt more by the episode than Gadkari himself.
When the RSS chose him to replace Rajnath Singh as the BJP president in 2009, it had made it clear that it was selecting this relatively unknown apparatchik from Maharashtra because it did not want any of the Delhi-centred leaders – L.K. Advani, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and others – to become the chief, presumably because the RSS felt that it would not quite be able to control them because of their worldly-wise ways.
After the long years of dealing with Atal Behari Vajpayee and Advani, who, for all the lip-service that they paid to the RSS, made it clear that they thought that the mindset of the Nagpur patriarchs was too provincial, the RSS felt that Gadkari was the right man. Up to now, he hadn’t many any great bloomers apart from describing Lalu Yadav as Sonia Gandhi’s canine follower and Afzal Guru as the Congress’s son-in-law. But, these diatribes could be brushed off as part of a political skirmish, even if somewhat crude.
But, the Kushwaha episode has shown how little Gadkari is aware of the present atmosphere where Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign has made it more necessary than ever for politicians to tread the straight and narrow path. Any deviation for the sake of votes – in this case, the votes of the OBCs to which Kushwaha belongs – can seriously hurt a party. Gadkari, of course, had earlier tried to defend B.S. Yeddyurappa by saying that his dubious deals might have been immoral but not illegal. But, the BJP had no alternative but to compel Yeddyurappa to resign as the Karnataka chief minister just as it had also to persuade Ramesh Pokhriyal to step down from the chief minister’s post in Uttarakhand in the wake of the allegations of corruption against him.
In the season of Anna’s campaign, which is believed to enjoy the whole-hearted support of the RSS, the pretence to be clean is the prime requirement of all political parties. If Gadkari was unable to comprehend this basic fact, the reason perhaps was that he was feeling left out from all the excitement of the Lokpal debate inside and outside parliament in which Sushma Swaraj and Jaitley were playing a leading role. Since the latent desires of these two, and also of Advani, to be the front-runners in the prime ministerial race are not unknown, Gadkari may have decided to make his presence felt via a major act of “social engineering” in UP which, he thought, would bring the non-Yadav voters rushing to the BJP camp.
In the process, he has shot himself in the foot. Given the high stakes which the RSS has in Anna’s movement, especially after Baba Ramdev let it down, the paterfamilias of the Sangh parivar is unlikely to give Gadkari any more of a free hand. The need to rein him in will be all the greater because Anna’s campaign appears to be fizzling out, giving the Congress a chance to breathe freely after a long time. If, on top of this latest and somewhat unexpected reprieve, the Congress manages to align with the Samajwadi Party and pip the BSP at the post in UP, the RSS’s cup of woes will be full.
In the BJP, the bête noires of the RSS, the Delhi-based leaders would come to the fore and use Gadkari’s blunders to marginalize him. In the cruel, competitive world of politics, provincials have no chance. (IPA Service)