FOR over three decades after the end of the Second World War, it was common to read about Japanese soldiers who had been discovered hiding in caves all over Asia. Even though the war had long been over, these soldiers either missed Japan’s surrender or simply decided to ignore it. As far as they were concerned, their country was still at war and they were at the frontline of this conflict.

Year after year, they would plot assaults on hapless South-East Asian villagers, sing the glories of the Emperor Hirohito and his Imperial Dream and plan how to defeat the Allied armies. Eventually, of course, they would be discovered and urged to give themselves up peacefully. More often than not they would refuse, preferring death to surrender. Far better, they would argue, to die in the pursuit of the Imperial Dream than to surrender to the enemy.

I was reminded of the last Kamikazes as I watched the shenanigans that marked the first full year that the BJP spent as an opposition party after its long stint in government. Many of its leading lights remained in denial, preferring to treat themselves as a government in exile. Others tried hard to remain true to some Hindutva Dream. And the party’s leader chose to go down in flames, becoming in effect the First Hindutva Suicide Bomber or even the Last Kamikaze.

Some of the BJP’s problems were understandable and not entirely unexpected. The BJP is essentially a party of deception. Most of its leaders joined the RSS at an early age and at a time when the Sangh made no attempt to conceal its anti-Muslim agenda and revelled in the quasi-fascist symbols that characterized its ideology. Swayamsevaks wore khaki knickers, brandished staffs, exercised every morning and were taught to believe that Independence was a cruel joke played on India’s Hindus by such secularists as Jawaharlal Nehru and even, Mahatma Gandhi.

 

By the time these men became part of the BJP, they recognized that even if all the things that the Sangh had taught them were true, they were, nevertheless, unacceptable to the public at large. So, the larger RSS agenda was buried. Instead, a moderate platform that emphasized Hindu pride (usually defined in anti-Muslim terms) was manufactured and the BJP (like the Jan Sangh before it) argued that there was nothing fascist or militaristic about its agenda.

The problem with all this was, that while it worked well enough when it came to winning elections, it was nevertheless something of a lie. The RSS had never stopped believing in the teachings of Golwalkar and Hegdewar. It still believed that Jawaharlal Nehru was a traitor to the Hindu nation. And the only role that Muslims had in India was as second-class citizens who were happy to accept the supremacy of the Hindu majority.

The challenge before the BJP leadership was to sell a moderate political platform to the electorate while simultaneously genuflecting before the old men of Nagpur and assuring them that their medieval prejudices still determined the BJP’s core ideology.

 

It was a challenge that various BJP leaders met with varying degrees of success. The champion of the double bluff was Atal Behari Vajpayee. He packaged himself as a secular politician for the general public but recognized that he could not really lead the BJP unless he had the support of the RSS. Thus, he walked an awkward tightrope. He would declare one day that secularism was in his blood. The next day, at a gathering of RSS sympathizers, he would announce, with equal conviction, ‘I may not be prime minister tomorrow, but I will be a swayamsevak till I die.’ When a secular constituency objected to this declaration of RSS loyalty, his media managers would rush around explaining, ‘Atalji only meant that he would be a swayamsevak for India’ – whatever that meant.

For the most part, Vajpayee was able to pull off the tightrope walk largely because – one always suspected – he had genuinely tired of the medieval mind-set that dominated Nagpur’s thinking. As prime minister, he patterned himself on Jawaharlal Nehru – the RSS’s old enemy. And he never seemed to have much time for such RSS issues as the Ram temple at Ayodhya or the withdrawal of Kashmir’s special status.

But even Vajpayee had to toe the line when it came to the crunch. During the Gujarat riots, he arrived at a meeting of the BJP national executive in Goa, determined to sack Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat. Within hours it became clear that he lacked the support to dismiss Modi. Not only was the RSS opposed to the idea, but the second generation of BJP leaders – the so-called Young Jerks – also believed that mass murder was the key to electoral success.

Not only did Vajpayee quickly abandon all plans of sacking Modi but at public meeting held during the national executive he made one of the most shameful speeches ever made by any Indian prime minister. At a time when Muslims were being massacred on the streets of Gujarat, he took it upon himself to lecture his audience on two kinds of Islam. The first kind, he graciously conceded, was okay. But it was the second kind – fanatical, bloodthirsty and supportive of terrorism – that all of us had to oppose.

 

During Vajpayee’s tenure, L.K. Advani remained the RSS’s favourite leader. Even though Murli Manohar Joshi implemented the RSS agenda and rewrote history books to claim that the Indus Valley Civilization (which he renamed the Saraswati Civilization on the grounds that it developed on the banks of the Saraswati before the river dried up) had an Aryan origin, he never quite hit it off with the old men of Nagpur. They far preferred Advani, who they believed, would be an ideologically sound successor to Vajpayee.

The drawback with this assessment was that Advani owed his popularity to his espousal of Hindutva ideas, most notably his notorious rath yatra to Ayodhya. While secularists were willing to give Vajpayee the benefit of the doubt, nobody seriously believed that L.K. Advani was at all secular. And yet, for all the claims that the RSS made about its credentials when it came to representing India’s Hindus, the truth remained that the country’s Hindu majority would not support a prime minister who was openly communal.

Advani recognized this even if the old men of Nagpur did not. And so, from the time that Vajpayee made him deputy prime minister, he tried hard to recast his image. He had been a moderate all along, he told us. The media had misrepresented his position. He had wept when his followers brought down the Babri Masjid. He was brimming with love for India’s Muslims. And so on.

 

At that stage, Advani’s calculation was simple enough. Within the BJP, it was taken for granted that Sonia Gandhi had led the Congress party into oblivion. The BJP was so certain that it would win the next election that first, it advanced the date, and second, Vajpayee, who had previously declared that he would not stand for election again, quickly agreed to lead the party and the BJP built its campaign around his charisma. The plan – or so Advani believed; it was always harder to tell what Vajpayee was thinking – was for Vajpayee to spend a year or so as prime minister before handing over to his deputy, the newly-moderate L.K. Advani.

Then, against the odds, the Congress came to power. The BJP lost the election and found itself where it least expected to be: on the opposition benches. Vajpayee, whose health was failing anyway, decided that he had seen enough of the hurly-burly of politics and chose to gradually withdraw. It was left to Advani to plot the party’s strategy and to plan how the BJP would recapture power.

Advani’s solution seems to have been to continue with the initiative he began as deputy prime minister. Despite enormous pressure from the RSS and BJP cadres, he refused to return to a hardline Hindutva agenda and continued to portray himself as a moderate in the Vajpayee mould.

It was in pursuit of this agenda that he decided to visit Pakistan. This decision, in itself, was not unusual. Vajpayee had so impressed his hosts during his state visit to Pakistan that they had chosen to embark on a peace initiative convinced that the prime minister was committed to better relations between the two subcontinental neighbours. Presumably, Advani was hoping to repeat the same sort of experience.

But while Vajpayee remained relatively guarded in his statements while in Pakistan, Advani proved to be much more expansive. Two explanations were offered for his sudden enthusiasm for Pakistan – a country that the RSS hates with a pathological intensity. The first was that he was genuinely overwhelmed by the warmth of the welcome he received and therefore got carried away. The second was more complex. Advani was aware that Indian Muslims both feared and loathed him. He recognized that he needed to win some measure of Muslim acceptance before he could be taken seriously as a prime ministerial candidate.

 

Within the BJP, there is no real understanding of Indian Muslims or their concerns. For instance, before the last election, the party proudly announced that Muslims would now become BJP voters because they were all Vajpayee supporters. It never occurred to anybody within the BJP leadership that Muslims might be reluctant to vote for a party whose chief minister authorized and sponsored a pogrom against them in Gujarat.

Advani’s own understanding of Muslims seems particularly feeble. Before the last election, he declared that the BJP was hopeful of winning Muslim votes because it had improved relations with Pakistan. Angry Muslims issued statements declaring that they had nothing in common with Pakistan and condemning the BJP for identifying Indian Muslims with Pakistan yet again. Advani seemed bemused by this response.

 

Those who believe that Indian Muslims were the real target of Advani’s rhetoric while he was in Pakistan think that he decided to praise M.A. Jinnah because he genuinely believed that Indian Muslims thought highly of Jinnah. As the scriptwriter and poet Javed Akhtar was later to sneer, ‘He thinks that all of us have little pictures of Jinnah up on our walls.’ In fact, the vast majority of Indian Muslims is either indifferent to Jinnah or blames him for the Partition that left them suspect in their own country. Certainly, there were no Muslim votes to be had by praising Jinnah.

On the other hand, the RSS, which regards Jinnah as Christians regard Satan (or Judas, at the very least) was appalled by Advani’s praise of the enemy. When the party president sent copies of his speeches back to Delhi for release to the media, the BJP office defied him and refused point-blank to send them to the press. Advani decided that the party was being obtuse and dashed off a resignation letter in protest. Far from withdrawing his Jinnah remarks, he declared that he would repeat them all over again should he have to.

All of this was realpolitik in the Vajpayee mould. Many times in the past, when the RSS had criticized Vajpayee, the old man had sent in his resignation and waited for shocked RSS leaders to back down. But Advani is no Vajpayee. And when he sensed that the RSS was inclined to accept the resignation, he quickly withdrew it.

Then began the most extraordinary months in the history of the BJP. Each day, somebody or the other in the party would make some anti-Jinnah remark as a way of baiting Advani. The RSS urged him to step down. The VHP publicly abused him. The second generation made it clear that he could not lead the party into the next election. Newspaper leader writers urged him to do the decent thing and to go honourably.

But once he had withdrawn his resignation, Advani stubbornly refused to offer it up again. His few supporters within the party portrayed his defiance as a battle for the BJP’s soul. Who would determine the party’s agenda? Would it be a small group of unelected old men in Nagpur? Or would it be the moderates who went out and actually won elections as the BJP?

 

It was the old dilemma recast as an ideological battle. But the point was that the BJP had resolved that dilemma over a decade ago. The RSS would set the basic agenda and then the BJP leadership would try and water it down for public consumption. Advani, who had been the architect of a policy of duplicity, now had little credibility when he cast himself as a fighter against the same duplicity.

Eventually, of course, the RSS had its way. Advani agreed to go but insisted that he be allowed several months to do so. He also asked for some say in the choice of his successor though basically this boiled down to saying that he would accept anybody except for Murli Manohar Joshi against whom he has a personal animus (which is heartily reciprocated).

In the process, the BJP has damaged itself from within. It is no longer a party that stands for anything. On the one hand, you have the RSS pushing a Muslim-hating agenda that simply will not work with the electorate in the 21st century. On the other, you have Advani, the last Kamikaze who, even as he knows that the battle is over and the white flag has been waved, refuses to resile from his position, determined to go down, all guns blazing, sacrificing his political career – and how bizarre is this? – in the name of M.A. Jinnah.

 

Within the BJP, there is widespread agreement that the contradictions within the UPA will come to the fore in the next year. It is at that stage, that the opposition must make its move. But what move will that be? What kind of party will the BJP become? Can it still pull off the traditional ideological double-bluff without Vajpayee’s dissembling skills given that Advani has failed so miserably to walk the tightrope? If it does become the liberal party that many of the Young Jerks want it to become, then can it count on the crucial support of the RSS cadres? And if it returns to Nagpur’s medieval agenda, then will it be at all electable?

No answers to those questions have emerged. Some senior BJP leaders believe that the moment of reckoning can be put off. All that the BJP has to do, they say, is to pick on such issues as the Natwar Singh fiasco to damage the UPA. It is not necessary, in the short to medium run, to actually stand for anything. It is merely enough to be an aggressive alternative to the government of the day.

Perhaps they are right. But even if the BJP can harm the UPA, it must still – at some stage – become a party with an agenda. And as of now, that seems like an impossible task.