(Harish Khare is a senior journalist, commentator and a research scholar)One can only admire the BJP's new president, Amit Shah, for his unsentimental and professional approach in performing a clean surgical operation on Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. The two veterans have been shown the door from the BJP Parliamentary Board, the party's most powerful decision-making forum. Combined with the omission of the ailing Atal Bihari Vajpayee's name, the transition is total and complete.
The change was inevitable and perhaps natural after Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party last May to its most magnificent electoral victory since the party (including its earlier incarnation, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh) began contesting polls in 1952. This time the electorate was invited to elect "a Modi Sarkaar". The BJP just lent its electoral symbol to the Modi campaign. And the voters responded. The nature and magnitude of the victory meant the birth of a Modi Sultanate.
The elevation of Amit Shah, a man with a relatively light-weight political persona, was the first signal that Narendra Modi wanted to re-cast the party as an instrument of his control. And, now, the Modi-Shah regime has done away even with the tokenism of keeping L.K. Advani and M.M. Joshi as consulting colleagues. The two veterans no longer have a political constituency of their own nor, are they in a position to question Amit Shah's obvious vindictiveness. Neither Prime Minister Modi nor his hand-picked party president should be expected to forget that Mr. Advani was not very enthusiastic about declaring the then chief minister of Gujarat as the BJP's mascot. And, in any case, realpolitik demanded that new voices and new faces be brought into the decision-making forums.
The BJP has now proclaimed to itself as well as to others that it is a new party, with a new chehra (face), a new chaal (working style) and new charitra (identity). Historically, the Jan Sangh and later the BJP were fashionably critical of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi that as Prime Ministers, both of them had made the party organization subservient to the government.
This dwarfing of the party, in the BJP perspective, was a breeding ground for authoritarian impulses. Nonetheless, when the BJP came to power at the Centre in 1998, its leadership found itself in a quandary and hurriedly undertook a revision of the party-government relationship, with the organization becoming a mere adjunct to the Vajpayee government.
After the1998 electoral victory, when Advani had to hand over the party baton to Kushabhau Thakre, he found himself having to exhort that "the BJP must become a New BJP. Only a New BJP can shoulder the responsibilities of the new era that is opening up for both India and for our own party. The BJP will be guided not by the issues of yesterday but by the agenda of tomorrow."
What the Modi-Shah team is doing is merely living up to the Advani standards, re-forging a new BJP suitable to the needs of a new India, and, in the process, it has announced it chooses not to be guided by men of yesterday.
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