Caught in a cleft

At a function held in the Capital last Tuesday to mark the 103rd birth anniversary of Shyma Prasad Mukherjee, Atal Behari Vajpayee swore undying fealty to the RSS and in the process sounded the bugle for an all-out campaign against the ''poisonous ideology'' of the Congress.
In one stroke, the former prime minister discarded his mask of moderation, ended his ''isolation'' within the BJP and made sure that he would continue to be the helmsman of the party.
The latest development is in line with the two-pronged strategy that the BJP has followed for close to four decades. Time and again it has put its ideological concerns on the back burner with alacrity whenever it spotted a chance to share power.
And it has reverted to those concerns just as swiftly once it was sent packing into the opposition.
In the first instance the party unceremoniously dumped its parent organisation, the RSS, while in the latter instance it reverted to the stern and unsmiling men in Nagpur in sackcloth and ashes.
After the 1967 election, the party, then known as the Jana Sangh, participated in coalition governments in several states including MP, UP, Bihar and Harayana.
Throwing ideology to the winds, it wooed the Swatantra Party as assiduously as it broke bread with dissident Congressmen, Akalis, Lohiate Socialists and even Communists.
It is a different matter that today the BJP thinks it fit to chastise the UPA government for kowtowing to the Left parties on every issue of substance.
A decade later, the Jana Sangh again gave the go-by to its ideology when it merged with the Janata Party on the eve of the election that followed the lifting of the Emergency.
Such was its zeal to protect the government from falling apart that it did not hesitate to be flexible on the contentious issue of ''dual membership''.
In May 1979 Vajpayee told this newspaper: "We have left the politics of the Jana Sangh forever. We should forget these things now and participate in the nationalist mainstream of the Janata Party, based on the principles of nationalism, democracy, religious equality and social equality."
In an interview published in the 1980 Diwali issue of Panchjanya, the weekly RSS mouth-piece, L K Advani was even more forthright: "In India a party based on ideology can at the most come to power in a small area. It cannot win the confidence of the entire country -neither the Communist Party nor the Jana Sangh in its original form."
And he asserted, quite correctly, that the Jana Sangh''s appeal increased to the extent that its ideology got diluted. And where the ideology was strong, its appeal diminished.
So far this two-pronged strategy has served the BJP well. But its efficacy is now open to question. For one thing, anti-Congressism is no longer as pervasive as it has been until now.
This was demonstrated dramatically when the CPM chose to lend support to the UPA government from the outside.
For another, the RSS continues to be perceived as a votary of a Hindu Rashtra, unable or unwilling to treat the minorities other than as second class citizens and indeed to regard modern, progressive Hindus other than as apostates.
So long as the constitutional legitimacy of the RSS remains under a cloud, the BJP is condemned to be caught in a cleft.
The party may yet win an election in this or the other state. However, its claims to be a national alternative to the Congress will ring hollow unless it jettisons its Hindutva baggage.
This is admittedly a tall order. But then Hindutva, unlike the BJP''s economic, defence and foreign policies, cannot ever acquire the cachet of nationalism.