With Gadkari, BJP sees reason

With Gadkari, BJP sees reason

Shitanshu Shekhar Shukla
New Delhi, February 19

New Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari appears to be different from his predecessors in more ways than one. Concluding today, the three-day National Executive meet of the party at Indore in Madhya Pradesh heard him sing a different tune, literally. As if on the cue, many followed with Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan showing an ear for music.
Hand picked by RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat for the top party post, he was expected to hymn the chants of Ram and couplets from religious books to bring back into focus the ‘ideology’. More so, when many party stalwarts had diagnosed the dilution of ideology as main cause for electoral reverses.
In stead, he talked more about performance, governance. The man from Maharashtra, who was written off because of being new to Delhi, appeared keen to carve out his own groove.
2009 Lok Sabha election results taught the party a lesson on politics of inclusion. The 2009 Lok Sabha election, much re¬moved from the tumultuous con¬troversies, drew people’s at¬tention to issues of performance of the government and the delivery end of politics.
In 2009, the Congress may just have forged – very tentatively – a coalition of the middle classes and the poor. A slight shift away from the middle classes brought the party to the middle road once again. The results are there to see – a recovery of the Congress.
But more than the recovery of the Congress, the tentative coalition of the middle classes and the poor could arrest the onward march of various politics of exclusion and bring the poor back into the policy consciousness of our polity – to the extent this is possible within a liberal democratic framework






So, the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat managed to gain not by the Modi of 2002-03, but by the overall record of the state government; the Y S Rajasekhara Reddy government returned to power in Andhra Pradesh on claims of having cared for the poor; Nitish Kumar in Bihar surpassed all expectations on grounds of stalling the downfall of governance that took place during the Lalu-Rabri Devi regime; the Left Front fared badly in both Kerala and West Ben¬gal because it lost the script of being a government that cared.
He admitted it as much saying, “We lost the Lok Sabha polls. Congress got more votes than us. If we have to win, we have work more, just as when we fail in exams, we have to study more to pass the next time. We need to have SCs, STs, minorities, hawkers and unorganised labourers on our side,".

The buzzwords in his 24-page inaugural address were “antyodaya” (welfare of the poorest), “samajik samrasta” (social equality) and “vikas” (development) with social justice.
In Indore, Gadkari treaded a new path, in a sharp departure from the hard Hindutva line propounded by L.K. Advani through the party’s Palampur resolution on a Ram temple in 1989 and taken forward successively by several party presidents. He addressed the concerns of the poorest sections of society.
Politically, it indicated his readiness to fight the Congress on what it may consider its home turf — struggle for the poor and the downtrodden and take the country’s development forward.
Instead of harping on conspiracy theories floated by LK Adavni blaming the faulty EVMs, Gadkari said the fact was that the party was outpolled by Congress and it needed to embrace more sections to catch up with the rival.

Besides, although he mentioned the pet project of the party, Ram temple issue, at the end of his hour-long address, the way he did it spoke volumes about changing priorities. He said that he was mentioning Ayodhya Ram Temple issue “otherwise the media will write that he has skipped the issue.”
Even here he adopted an inclusive agenda, contrary to the BJP’s routine confrontationist approach that come what may, a Ram temple will be built at the disputed spot. He appealed to the Muslim community to be generous towards the sentiments and feelings of Hindus and facilitate the construction of a grand Ram temple since it was "hamari aatma". He went to the extent of saying that the party had no problem if a mosque came up nearby
Besides, his long talk on terrorism, Pakistan and Kashmir missed even a passing reference to abrogation of Article 370 conferring a special status on Kashmir. The issue has continued to be central to the party cultural nationalism. However, Gadkari moved on and elaborated later in the resolution on security issues that talks with Pakistan and terror attacks from its soil can’t co-exist.
He called upon his party men to go to the villages, highlighted plans to end farmers’ suicides, and finally indicated that the BJP could grow if it could attract 10 per cent of the poorest and most downtrodden sections of society, including Dalits.
Gadkari didn’t appear to spare any one, speaking like a man possessed. He hit every sparring colleague, irrespective of position. Gadkari warned them against encouraging workers to touch their feet or do anything that lowers their dignity, while asking workers not to waste their time waiting on “leaders.”
He gave his own example to drive home the point. He never had the habit of coming to Delhi and meeting party leaders unless he was doing so with some specific work in mind and yet “I became the president of the party”, he said.
None of this is even remotely a routine political noise. He went even further, calling upon the party to work for the poorest, without looking at this as a vote-bank issue. The BJP should always be on the side of development and would not oppose good government policies simply for the sake of opposing.
He ended his address with reference to a story of a sparrow trying to fight a fire with a few drops of water in its beak.
“The sparrow may not be able to put out the fire, but at least it will be counted among those that tried to douse it,” he said.
The message, it seems, was for all party men to try and douse the fire of internal bickering that was hurting the party.
For example, he lent support to Shah Rukh Khan and opposed Shiv Sena on its campaign against north Indians. (With Agency Inputs)