BJP’s dreams of obliterating the Opposition get a reality check

The ‘Dhanteras purchase’ of independent MLAs by the ruling BJP to somehow form the government in Haryana reminds one of BJP president and Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s oft-repeated determination to obliterate the Congress from the face of India.

For a leader so determined and focussed to achieve this objective, the results of the latest elections to the Maharashtra and Haryana assemblies must have been severe jolts.

This clearly demonstrated a resurgence of not just the Congress, which Shah and his patron saint Prime Minister Narendrabhai Modi so badly despise, but the rest of the Opposition as well.

The elections to the 17thLok Sabha held in May this year, when the BJP crossed the 300 mark tally comfortably on its own, saw this big dream of Amit Shah/Modi, nee RSS itself, come true when the entire Opposition crumbled, with the exception of the DMK. Otherwise, the BJP had even made a successful foray in the supposedly impregnable secular fortress of West Bengal.

These results ought to be even more alarming for the BJP because except for Sharad Pawar leading the NCP, there appeared virtually no evidence of any of the Opposition leaders making any serious attempt to challenge Modi and Shah’s triumphal reminder to the voter on how they have trampled the Kashmiris under their heels.

Who’s bothered to quibble over the fact that there are no numbers with the Opposition to challenge the move anyway? In fact, the Congress did not oppose it in Parliament. So where was the question of doing that now?

But obviously, the lure of marrying fair-skinned Kashmiri girls and buying apple orchards did not match Modi’s clarion call of the last general election on Pulwama and Balakot.

They could not impress the farmers of Haryana and Maharashtra. Imagine Lalu Prasad’s RJD, with virtually no party leader campaigning, winning two Assembly seats in the Bihar Assembly bye-elections.

Evidently, this signified some degree of mistrust among voters of this government’s performance on the socio-economic front, when the poor of this country are being forced, on the one hand, to put their hard-earned savings in a bank, while the bank goes bankrupt, gobbling up their savings.

Elections come and go and this downslide for the BJP is not necessarily irreversible.

But what is even more significant is the voter reminding Modi and Shah that they do not relish the idea of ‘Ek chhatra raj’ (an umbrella rule of a single party with its governments at both the Centre and in all the states) of the BJP, or rather of the Sangh Parivar, which the RSS has been aspiring for since the 1920s when it was founded.

Come to think of it, that is the difference between Modi/Shah and the previous set of BJP leaders. Be it former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Pramod Mahajan, or Arun Jaitley or Sushma Swaraj, all of them believed in the Indian constitutional propriety of not completely obliterating the Opposition, though the Sangh had set its eyes on capturing all the institutions and levers way back in 2002.

The then RSS Sarsanghchalak, K.S. Sudarshan, is said to have sent an emissary to Vajpayee a little before the 2002 presidential elections to subtly suggest to occupy the Rashtrapati Bhavan, leaving the Prime Minister’s chair for his Deputy L.K. Advani who was then the Hindu Hriday Samrat and a hot favourite of the Sangh.

But Vajpayee delegated his trusted lieutenant Pramod Mahajan to look for a suitable candidate. APJ Abdul Kalam was chosen whom a good section of the Opposition too readily accepted.

That crop of leaders, including to an extent even Advani, did at no point aspire for obliterating the entire Opposition from the country’s political scenario. This one is determined to remove all vestiges of any past history or heritage to the extent of now planning to bulldoze and pull down the structures that may connect the future generations to the past, be it North and South Block or Rashtrapati Bhavan or Parliament House itself.

In the Vajpayee era, Jaitley once said in his media durbar, “We don’t want the Congress to die. A strong Opposition is necessary for democracy.” Of course, in the Modi era, he dared not swerve from the party line.

The Indian voter has surely disturbed the bloated egos of Shah and Modi. But a bigger jolt is urgently needed to retain not just our political dissidence but also our heritage. Hope the Delhi, Jharkhand and Bihar voters, too, press the right buttons.