Oh My Gadkari!

The BJP president may have finally arrived, but his arrival has left many of his party members aghast.

If the newly elected president of the country’s principal opposition party faints at his biggest ever political rally, you can’t really blame him, can you? Delhi’s scorching heat—not just political—can be hard to bear even for a well-fed man keen to represent youth and dynamism. At most, you would say it’s just bad luck. If you are in the ruling coalition, you would crack a joke or two about it, and move on. If you belong to his party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), you’d pretend nothing ever happened. Just as Tarun Vijay, BJP national spokesperson from the RSS quota, did in a written column in which he claimed that Nitin Gadkari ‘has finally arrived’ thanks to the party’s 21 April rally against rising food prices and the proclaimed culprit, the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre. ‘Nitin Gadkari has finally arrived,’ wrote Tarun Vijay, who also happens to be director of the party’s think-tank, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, ‘The success of the BJP rally against rising prices in New Delhi on April 21 has stamped a nod of approval on his acumen and leadership.’

As final arrivals go, the event was the stuff of high drama. Attended by thousands of people, the rally managed to jam almost all roads in Delhi, throwing the city into chaos for that day, but the lasting impression has been that of Gadkari’s loss of consciousness on a platform set high to better take aim from.

On 27 April, less than a week later, Gadkari had still more succour to offer India’s starving—or at least political cartoonists starved of inspiration. Gadkari was busy dining with Jharkhand Chief Minister Shibu Soren and other parliamentarians of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), a BJP ally, at his own house in New Delhi.

This, just hours after the BJP’s cut motion against the ruling UPA’s Finance Bill was defeated in Parliament. But there was no sign of tension over dinner. It had been a long while since the two allies had caught up on things, and Mayawati’s announcement of support for the UPA that morning had already made it clear that the Government would easily win the vote.

What spoilt the jolliness was a call from Sushma Swaraj, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha; she informed Gadkari that the JMM had voted against the BJP’s cut motion in the House—and he was thus dining with the enemy, not an ally.

A livid Gadkari threatened Soren with withdrawal of his party’s support in Jharkhand.

Exactly such a decision was taken when the BJP’s parliamentary board met the next morning, but later put on hold with the JMM pleading that it would vacate the CM’s seat for the BJP. Then came a lull of sorts in the acrimony between the two parties, even as political observers went about working out the Jharkhand Assembly’s arithmetic of legislators. The BJP itself held a number of meetings, supervised by Nitin Gadkari himself, with the JMM—and to many’s surprise, even smaller alliance partners like the All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) that boasts of just five MLAs in the 81 member Assembly.

The series of meetings, however, remained inconclusive. “We did the right thing by deciding to withdraw support then. But, by dragging our feet on it, we lost the moral high ground we could have taken a day after the cut motion,” admits a senior BJP leader. At the time of going to press, the party was still pondering a pullout in Jharkhand.

To be fair to the man, the party president’s leadership style is still a work-in-progress. At the BJP’s national executive in Indore this February, Gadkari had taken charge of stage management on the last day to keep the gathering in control. Microphone in hand, he played the master of ceremonies. Party cadres went into raptures; leaders spoke appreciatively of how nicely Gadkari was ‘leading from the front’. But, back in New Delhi, Gadkari’s direct negotiations with alliance partners in Jharkhand after the dinner fiasco has not gone down well with everyone. In politics, after all, public rallies and closed-door negotiations are not the same thing. “There is no need for the BJP president to negotiate with a party with five MLAs, especially if the talks yield no result,” says the senior BJP leader, “Maybe it’s too soon to judge him, because Gadkari’s term is three years and it has been just four months, but the sheen is beginning to wear off.”

Beginning? Between the 21 April rally and the JMM botch up, there was worse that Gadkari did by way of self-injury. And this time, what Gadkari said about communal riots in an interview to BBC Radio had little to do with Delhi’s heat. The party president used the opportunity to display an ignorance of his own party’s politics as much as contemporary political history. This happened in the course of defending the Narendra Modi government on the anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in Gujarat, when the interviewer mentioned the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 in Delhi. “These kind of incidents cannot be manipulated or organised,” said Gadkari, “These are the unfortunate reactions of the people at large.” The interviewer asked if Gadkari believed that the 1984 riots too were an outcome of this ‘people’s reaction’, with no role played by Congress leaders. “There might have been a few people involved in it, but if I say the riots were started by the Government, that wouldn’t be correct,” Gadkari said, negating in a stroke what the BJP and its ally in Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), have held for 25 years: that the Congress was responsible for the 1984 carnage. The chief’s interview sent the entire party reeling in dismay. “It was an embarrassment that we could have avoided,” rues a party vice president.

The party, of course, went into fire-fighting mode instantly, issuing a detailed clarification. ‘The comparison (between 1984 and 2002 Gujarat riots) is totally unwarranted because of the nature of the action taken by those in power in these two cases,’ the BJP’s statement said. The BJP spoke of how the BBC had tried to create confusion, and how the party’s actual position is that it was the ‘complicity of law enforcement agencies that allowed the riots to happen, killing nearly 3,000 men, women and children’.

The clarification apart, BBC India confirms to Open that the party never asked for the interview clip to be taken off the network’s website, where it ran for days. “Gadkari is intelligent and sharp, but that cannot be a substitute for political experience,” says a BJP national executive member, adding, “After all, his experience has only been limited to Vidarbha. He was Maharashtra BJP chief alright, but in that state, the party has always been the junior alliance partner.” What’s more, “Even Rajnath Singh before him represented a state, but that state was Uttar Pradesh, and he had been Chief Minister there and Union minister before he became party president.”

Though among the few designated by the party to speak to the press after Gadkari’s diktat that no other leaders do so, Tarun Vijay refuses to be drawn into a discussion on the Jharkhand fiasco. He insists that “the president’s performance in small daily affairs of the political party” wouldn’t change his thesis that Gadkari has indeed arrived. “Give him a chance,” he pleads.

As for the party president’s final arrival, the next stop after Jharkhand is Bihar, where an Assembly election will be held later this year. The list of office bearers that he announced in March has left many a Bihar leader sore. But that’s just another pang of arrival, we assume.

About The Author

Jatin Gandhi

Jatin Gandhi has covered politics and policy for over a decade now for print, TV and the web. He is Deputy Political Editor at Open.