BJP plans to reinvent itself in Mahableshwar next week
Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow
Fifty top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party will
assemble in Mahabaleshwar next week and thrash out
strategies to face the challenges ahead.
The meeting at the quiet hill resort in Maharashtra will be held from
January 9 to 12. It will remain a closed-door affair as the party
leadership is seriously concerned with the setbacks faced in
Delhi, Gujarat and Lucknow last year.
Much time is expected to be devoted to issues connected
with the reorientation of the party.
"We need to do a lot of rethinking about which way
we are going and what needs to be done to fill the gaps and
plug loopholes," says former prime minister
and BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
,
Every party, he says, needs to reorient itself with the changing needs
of time - without, of course, deviating from its fundamental values.
Similarly, Kalyan Singh, the party's leader in UP, stresses the
need for making the BJP
more vibrant and infusing some discipline
in its rank and file. "We cannot deny that in recent times
we have witnessed more indiscipline in the party organisation than
ever before," he said, "But these are facts of life. Simply because we are
cadre-based and a disciplined party, even minor expressions of
dissent become more noticeable."
Singh, a former UP chief minister and BJP vice-president, is
confident that the meeting
will go a long way in giving the party organisation a new direction.
"Broadly, the whole idea is to identify the snags and take corrective
measures at the earliest. We want to be better prepared for the
next parliamentary and assembly elections," he added.
While he is unwilling to reveal the finer details of the agenda,
sources close to him say the BJP's failures in Gujarat and Lucknow
would figure prominently during the discussions.
Since salvaging the party position in Gujarat is not all that
simple with Shankarsinh Vaghela firmly entrenched in
Gandhinagar as chief minister,
greater emphasis will be laid on raising the party's graph in
UP, India's most important political state.
"There is only a remote possibility of forming any popular
government in UP," says one party insider, "Therefore there is greater need for gearing the
party for the next assembly election." Kalyan Singh has drawn up
a six-point assessment of the party's failure in forming an
absolute majority in the state.
"Due to infighting we lost nearly 30 to 35 seats," he says, "Besides, multiplicity
of aspirants for certain seats was also responsible for absence
of a united effort to win," he says.
Kalyan Singh admits the party's
failure in implementing its plan to deploy 20 youth at every
polling booth. Overall, he feels the absence of proper booth
management was another
reason for the party's inability to live up to popular expectations.
''We failed to take our voter up to the booth," he points out while
not underscoring the ''inappropriate choice of nominees'' as another
reason for losing a number of seats.
''What we failed to
assess was the chances of many candidates, that is borne out
by the fact that 92 of our 135 sitting MLAs in the contest lost,''
Singh says, adding, ''and, last but not the least, it was lack
of co-ordination between the candidate, the party organisation
and the local MP.''
Recent developments in UP and a virtual rift in the
party leadership on the question of extending
support to a Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party or a
BSP-BJP coalition government in the state
has further exposed the crisis in the party.
What the party has seen of late was unprecedented -- in UP
at least - one senior leader accusing the other of harming
the party's interests by opposing the move, while the other flinging
the same argument against him.
There is also the element of caste in the party's crisis in UP.
Even as political circumstances
compelled the once largely upper caste BJP to entrust
the most populous state's leadership to a backward caste
politician, a section of the party was constantly looking for excuses
to run down Kalyan Singh.
There is reason to believe
that the campaign against Kalyan Singh led by Brahmdutt Dwivedi with the tacit
support of state chief Kalraj Misra -- both men are brahmins -- was prompted
by caste factors and the fact that Singh has managed
to rise far above his upper caste counterparts in stature and
mass appeal.
Dwivedi's actions and utterances in particular highlighted these
differences more than ever before -- sending the message
loud and clear that BJP was fast losing its reputation for discipline.
With the realisation dawning among the party's moderates
that the Hindutva card will no more accrue the usual dividends
for the BJP, serious rethinking on a new strategy is in the offing at
Mahabaleshwar next week. The accent, ironically, may be on 'secularism'.
|