Our February 9, 1998 cover on the BJP

The BJP has always claimed to be a party with a difference. Well, yes except that this time it's the wrong difference. The party looks just plain tired, adrift, confused and demoralised. It has a geriatric leadership at almost every level which refuses to yield to a younger and talented generation. In the process, it has wrecked the party's renowned organisational prowess. Its agenda is being overwhelmed by Hindutva monsters like the VHP and the Bajrang Dal that it has encouraged. The Union budget has alienated its prime constituency-the urban middle class. And the continuing communal violence in Gujarat has destroyed its credibility. The confidence that marked the party's politics in the mid-1990s has been replaced by a sense of overwhelming despondency.

When the party came to power in 1998, there was the hope that regardless of its Hindutva baggage it would be able to evolve into a conventional right-wing party on the lines of the Conservative Party in Britain or the Christian Democrats of Germany. Right-wing politics is, in theory at least, meant to merge national and cultural traditions with free market economies. The fabric of all political parties has many conflicting social, economic and cultural strands. On coming to power, their success depends on which strand is allowed to dominate the warp and weft of government. The BJP has stumbled badly in the economic reform process and has lurched from one crisis to another.

There is a serious mismatch between the party and the Government that cannot be explained by the compulsions of coalition politics alone. The BJP Government has allowed the party to go to seed. Naturally there is a contradiction between what the party thinks and what the Government does.

Our cover this week tracks the slow deterioration of the BJP and the reasons why the response to this crisis has lacked decisiveness. The BJP has swept its problems under the carpet and allowed them to fester. As happens in other spheres of life, the unaddressed problems now threaten to overwhelm the party. It is as if all that remains is the formal death sentence from the electorate.

(Aroon Purie)