First, although it is being suggested by many media commentators that the BJP is fallen prey to factional squabbles, there is no clear evidence for this. The "secular" media in India, on account of its right-liberal tendencies nowadays, imagines a deep-seated ideological and factional divide separating moderates and hardliners in the BJP. For the past decade, Vajpayee and Advani have been the representative faces of these two imagined factions. Post-election dissidents such as Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, and Arun Shourie have been labeled "Vajpayee's men" whereas Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, and Arun Jaitley have been implicitly assumed to be Advani's chelas. These remarks actually have deep roots that go back nearly two decades to a theoretical statement by the political scientist Amrita Basu that the BJP is a Janus-faced creature that attempts simultaneously to woo hardcore right-wingers as well as more moderate right-liberals. The main problem with this view is that the two imagined factions have never acted as factions or undercut each other's power within the party. Advani and Vajpayee, apart from being personal friends for decades, share much in common, including their early political training and formative experiences. If any substantial ideological or personality differences existed, how could they have coexisted so happily for so long? Vajpayee may not have led the Ramjanmabhoomi movement alongside Advani, but, contrary to opinion in certain quarters, he most certainly backed it fully. The movement even won him the prime ministership in 1996 and 1999. As such, while there may be different shades of right-wing opinion (softer and harder Hindutva, if you please), we cannot conclude that the BJP is divided along factional or ideological lines that mirror differences between Advani and Vajpayee.
Second, the crisis within the BJP today derives, above all, from its top-heavy, highly centralized party structure. This problem is peculiar to the BJP and does not apply to the decentralized units of the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and other constituents of the Hindu Right. However, the problem is actually rather commonplace, historically speaking, in Indian politics. It afflicts every Indian party with the exception of the Congress, which remains, relatively speaking, the only properly national party in the country, whose local and provincial units conduct their everyday activities relatively independently of the CWC (party discipline is, therefore, a permanent problem in the Congress compared to its rivals). In the typical Indian political party, either a single leader or a bunch of charismatic characters dominates the show, and the rank and file at the provincial and local levels must simply accept this "monarchical" or "oligarchic" state of affairs. But when the winds of change blow at the top, party workers suffer from a certain inertia that lingers from the past, for which reason conflict between the "high" and the "low" is virtually built into these centralized party structures. In the BJP today, the old Jan Sangh order is yielding place to a new regime dominated by technocrats and petty bourgeois types. Neither party workers nor traditionally right-wing voters appreciate this change of guard. They signed up mainly because they sympathized with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement or Narenda Modi's pogroms. The party is presently in the throes of a life-threatening crisis because its primary social bases, as revealed by a close reading of its 2009 election manifesto, the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie that dominate the metropolitan cities, are electorally insignificant and impotent. In other words, the BJP cannot win elections in its current avatar, as the past couple of years have shown. The RSS has stepped in to resolve the current crisis because it believes, rightly, that party workers must be appeased if the BJP is to have any meaningful political future. The likes of Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh are the Sangh's best bets, of course, since they represent old-fashioned Hindutva in the minds of party workers. In contrast, the likes of Arun Shourie and Arun Jaitley, urban professionals with no mass base, must be made to operate in the background. While this patchwork solution calms nerves within the party for the moment, it cannot, however, wish away the fundamental structural opposition between the party's top leadership and its base.
Third, since the crisis within the BJP is primarily structural rather than ideological or factional, the publication of Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah or Yashwant Sinha's dissenting views are quite simply besides the point. Jaswant and Yashwant were always fringe figures in the party whose restricted support bases in Darjeeling and Hazaribagh rendered them insignificant to the ebb and flow of party politics at the all-India level. In short, they are dispensable. Furthermore, although much is being made of pro-Jinnah statements by Advani and Jaswant in the recent past, there is not much new here actually. Staunch RSS ideologues have noted in the past that Jinnah was a secular man, and was compelled, by the pseudo-secularism of Gandhi and Nehru, to abandon the mainstream anti-colonial movement during the Khilafat Movement. According to the RSS, when Jinnah emerged after his self-imposed exile, he had no option but to take up the two-nation theory in order to oppose the pseudo-secularists in the Congress. In this manner, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha made common cause against the Muslim-appeasing, Hindu-baiting Congress, most spectacularly in the 1946 elections in undivided Bengal. Jinnah's speech on 11 August 1947 has come in for much praise recently in the saffron camp, but most commentators fail to mention that, by this time, the two-nation theory had already become a reality. The Sangh Parivar is effectively suggesting that Jinnah was a truly secular Pakistani just as they are truly secular Indians (unlike the Congress and the Left). They are NOT suggesting that the Congress should have accepted the 1946 Atlee Cabinet Mission's proposal of a three-tiered confederation to replace the Raj, and therefore, the Hindu Right is NOT offering a revisionist history of independence and partition but simply maintaining their old line that Hindus and Muslims in South Asia ought to "live together separately." It is not surprising that Vallabhai Patel has been the Right's traditional hero because his historical views on the subject most closely mirror their own. Had Jaswant thought through this logic clearly, he would not have been unceremoniously kicked out by his party. As it turns out, he's neither a secularist nor a pseuo-secularist, just a confused man.
What are we to conclude from all of this? Is the crisis in the BJP a happy sign that communalism is a thing of the past? Sadly, I think not. The current crisis will blow over eventually. Either the party will reform its structures and develop a mass base, as it had hoped over two decades ago, or what is more likely, it will split into two saffron parties, one committed to old-style Hindutva with chariots and tridents and the other devoted to right-wing economic policies and technocracy moderated by a calm belief that appeased minorities ought to be put in their place. The latter appeals greatly to the India Shining public in India and abroad. But it cannot hope to win power at the all-India level unless it allies with similar-sized regional parties such as the Akali Dal, the Ahom Gana Parishad, and the AIADMK. The most likely situation is that it will become the millennium edition of the old Swatantra party, albeit with a communal flavor. It would be erroneous, however, to believe that the BJP's decline in electoral politics means the end of communalism in India. A useful analogy is the decline of the parliamentary Left for similar reasons, and its supercession by more extreme-left groups. There's every reason to infer that right-wing extremism and intolerance in contemporary India is on the rise in much the same fashion. The formation of senas to impinge on the rights of minorities, women, and homosexuals suggests that communal sentiments are growing in Indian society today. Economic liberalization since 1991 has, in fact, given a new lease of life to communal elements in Hindu society, who not only have the support of the urban petty bourgeoisie but are also increasingly winning the favor of Sanskritizing, upwardly-mobile lower-caste and tribal groups. Gone are the days when "votes and violence" won the day. As the state has withered away in a neoliberal age and previously subordinated castes have come into their own, civil society in India, dominated as it is by brahmins and banias, has moved steadily towards the Right. Communalism has thus redefined itself amidst the shifting class and caste dynamics of neoliberal India. The Hindu Right remains stronger today in India than ever before, and the right-wing challenge cannot be written off as trivial simply due to the BJP's failure to win elections. The saffron wave that once focused its energies on winning state power is now happy to simply spread its tentacles over every inch of Indian society, especially as it seeks to "Hinduize" tribals, lower-caste groups, and religious minorities. This new strategy is entirely consistent with the logic of fascism, which appealed so much to men such as Savarkar and Golwalkar, which seeks to create an internally-homogenous organic community underwritten by an expanding urban bourgeoisie and a secular creed. For the Hindu liberal as for the Indian Muslim or Christian, who are most threatened by these social tendencies, it is, to paraphrase the political scientist Paul Brass, not that India is steadily approximating a chaotic, intolerant mess, but it is already such a mess. Of course, one must swim against the tide of hate and intolerance around us, but it's best to be clear-eyed about the choppy waters in which we swim today.
