The surprise elimination of Nitin
Gadkari from BJP’s presidential sweepstake, and the unanimous choice of Rajnath
Singh, former party chief and a has-been, have the touch of a television serial
hurrying to end because the producer is broke. To add a touch of Inspector
Clouseaeu into the plot’s climax, a field investigation by the Income Tax
Department on the alleged financial misconduct of the Purti Group founded by
Gadkari commenced on the same day. If it were a shoddy screenplay, equally
incongruous were the characters in it. Rajnath could be nobody’s choice—neither
Arun Jaitley nor the veteran L. K. Advani. At best, he was the second choice of
RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat. In fact Bhagwat was Gadkari’s savior and benefactor
whenever he got into trouble, and that was all too often. But he had to go as
the taxmen, who report to Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, knocked at his door
in the nick of time to put a red flag on his choice as president for another
term, as Bhagwat had wanted.
However, for the RSS-BJP combine,
the incident is fraught with a more serious significance than either Gadkari’s
fall or Rajnath’s rise, both being non-entities in the national context. What
their last-minute swap exposes is an intense intrigue going on behind the high
walls of RSS, between Mohan Bhagwat, its chief, and general secretary Suresh
Soni. Much like the Soviet communist party, the goings-on within the RSS remain
under wraps until the explosion inside sends its shockwaves, as it did this
time.
Traditionally, the RSS left an
arms-length distance with the BJP, helping it if it could but avoiding driving
the party from the back seat. This tacit understanding got compromised from the
time of K. S. Sudarshan, who was appointed sarsanghchalak in 2000, in the high
noon of Atal Behari Vajpayee’s prime ministership, and perhaps envied him. BJP
fell from power in 2004, but the RSS got irrecoverably infected with the bug of
bossism. And with that arose jealousy and internal feud. But Bhagwat enjoyed
the authority that comes with the chair. Gadkari is his ‘magic wand’ with which
he has controlled the BJP ever since he became RSS’s second-in-command, in
2005.
In this situation, it was unlikely
that an intense rivalry for power wouldn’t breed within the Sangh. Suresh Soni,
a pracharak with all the guiles of a politician, became Bhagwat’s
biggest challenger. Over the years, Soni had gathered a fairly large army of
his followers in the BJP, particularly from among those who thought—rightly
perhaps—that they’d have led the party better than Gadkari. Apart from Yashwant
Sinha and Sanjay Joshi, this group included Rajnath Singh. And Soni targeted on
Gadkari for his links with Bhagwat. And Gadkari accidentally trod on
Bhagwat’s toe, that too at a most unpropitious time. Last year, on the eve of
BJP party election in Madhya Pradesh, as Shivraj Singh Chauhan, the chief
minister, probably complained to Gadkari against state party president Prabhat
Jha, Gadkari readily agreed to the idea of making Jha step down from the
election. Even Bhagwat reportedly refused to intercede in the inner-party
dispute. But Jha is Soni’s long-time acolyte, and Soni began plotting revenge.
The opportunity arose within days, when news broke of Gadkari’s l’affaire Purti,
and so much was public consternation due to it both within and outside the
party that it seemed to have had lost the 2014 race in advance. Gadkari would
have had to quit office within moments if only Bhagwat hadn’t saved him.
The party’s rank and file understood
that Gadkari, with his low morals, poor imagination and hoity-toity manners,
couldn’t be candidate for a mayor’s election, not to speak of one for leading
the national government. There was also a consensus on Narendra Modi as the
party’s top candidate. But party leaders’ hands were tied as naming Modi at
this stage would instantly polarize the national politics, with Nitish Kumar,
Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu, Mamata Bannerjee—none, not even Nitish,
being personally opposed to Modi but afraid of losing minority votes in their
states—likely to immediately join the rival ranks.
Also to force their hands was
Bhagwat, whose threat of mobilizing the “Canterbury” against dissenters kept
them silent. Nor could they be mobilized when Ram Jethmalani and his son Mahesh
approached them with a pending criminal charge involving the body of a murdered
girl being found in Gadkari’s Honda car. The victim’s father was reportedly the
very same driver to Gadkari who became director of one of the Purti companies. But the scenario changed with the
Income Tax brigade appearing on the scene, which made Bhagwat retreat from his
unseemly urge to defend a person who could be too far on the wrong side of the
law. Rajnath Singh is a weak leader, and his thakur identity is obscured
as he is, in terms of strength of personality, a pale ghost of his other
notable clansmen like the impassionate V. P. Singh, charismatic Chandra Shekhar
and even wily Amar Singh. But he is a beneficiary of not a democratic power
tussle in the BJP but a tug-of-war within the closed precincts of a remote
controller.
The episode has lessons for all. BSP
lost Uttar Pradesh because its supremo Mayawati never shared with others her next
steps. Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav does not let a word go out how
he’d run his family, which sums up his party, and his popularity is going down,
not up. CPM lost West Bengal, its fief, as it got a close cabal to run the
party and the government. As far as BJP is concerned, in the past decade, from
a national party, it has become one of marginal states because it was being run
from a distance by those who’d enjoy all the power without responsibility. But
now the fight within the RSS has exposed the harsh truth that it is not
possible to direct public affairs from the safety of a guarded palace.
