Nitish, Advani & Avarice

Consequent to the JDU pull out from NDA and parting ways with BJP on June 16, CNN-IBN anchor, Bhupendra Chaube, carved out an interesting graphic on TV. It showed that post-JDU pull out there are 163 members opposed to BJP. To put it more specifically he suggested that these non-Congress 163 members are not with Narendra Modi. There’s only one problem; these are numbers from the current parliament which is precisely what the BJP hopes to change with Modi as campaign Chairman. But Chaubeji won’t tell you that. He would like viewers to believe that with Modi the BJP was already losing the battle. He’s not alone. His co-propagandists at IBN, the Political Numero Unee, as also other pundits and punditayans at NDTV, Timesnow etc were doing a similar analysis.

In the hunting season almost every pundit seems to know Modi far better than he does. Prabhu Chawla writes a school-boy type open letter to Modi. While most of the stuff he writes would have been done better by a Class-8 student there is one line which shows up the foolishness and deception of Chawla. He writes: “But they find the new Modi’s politics a threat to democratic institutions”. Really? Prabhu Chawala isn’t the only liar. This is a lie that the hunters will spread with even greater force in the coming months. Chawla is not exactly a bimbo but he doesn’t pause to think who has been systematically destroying democratic institutions in this country. It started with Indira Gandhi and has now continued with Sonia Gandhi’s Congress. Any institution worth naming has been destroyed. Well, okay maybe not all. I think Congress has left the ‘folk-dances’ of India left untouched yet. Chawla is not the only one. The Numero Unee uses a JDU statement to call BJP a one-man show, authoritarian and imperious. For her and the media slaves the Gandhis are the ultimate symbol of democracy everywhere. They usually overlook the fact that Modi has neither sought to be CM of Gujarat nor has he ever been BJP president. His rise has been purely on performance and popularity and approval by the party. The BJP has proved that even LKA can’t dictate terms like a Gandhi let alone Modi.  

The question now returns to who propelled the JDU pull out. The answer is not complicated except for our blind media. Nitish Kumar is one of those ‘self-preservation’ politicians who doesn’t mind dumping relationships. He has dumped Lalu Prasad in the past, he has dumped George Fernandes and after enjoying the luxury of power with the NDA he has now dumped them too. And what’s his great excuse? Narendra Modi! It’s the same Modi that Nitish once supported, campaigned for and shared platforms with who is now “communal” for him. The motives don’t need further explanation nor does the hypocrisy of Nitish. But he was supported in his endeavour by none other than LK Advani as everyone now knows. Like Nitish, LKAdvani too has been driven all these years by nothing but his personal ambition of being a PM one day. To borrow from my favourite politician RahulG: “Not happening”!

The fact that the Congress and the media now find LKA a great darling tells a story by itself. It’s their fear of Narendra Modi. While Congress kept denying Modi is a threat as their own minister Jairam Ramesh inadvertently admitted “Modi is a challenge”. Both LKA and NitishK are guilty of avarice. Exceptional greed! Avarice usually backfires. In 2010 NitishK’s avarice and ego had reached such limits that he wanted the BJP to ban Narendra Modi from campaigning in Bihar for the state elections. A junior partner’s head telling a national party that their member can’t campaign in his state wouldn’t be tolerated by any party; not even a local party. But LKA and the Delhi-4 or D4 as they are known in the social media obliged Nitish. That’s when LKA killed his own party. His philosophy resembled Churchill’s old saying: “An appeaser is a person who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last”. Three years later the crocodile has eaten Advani and broken the alliance. Advani blames the elevation of Modi as the cause of the break-up. He is wrong! He is the one to blame for mollycoddling forces trying to marginalise his party.

There are those who scream “Advani built the BJP, Advani built the BJP” and they don’t tire of it, especially those in the Congress and the media. This is the stupid sentiment of most emotional Indians. LKA may have founded the party but no one can claim having built a political party all alone. It takes lakhs of workers and foot-soldiers. It is these very workers who have now decided LKA’s time has passed and he has proved himself a disgrace in not accepting such verdicts. The awful truth is that LKA has never been as popular as ABVajpayee or Narendra Modi. I also doubt anyone would miss having LKA as Prime Minister. The political life of LKA in the last 15 years has been one of flip-flops. Suddenly Jinnah is secular, he writes regret letters to SoniaG for her name being included in a list of Black-Money hoarders and has become a bigger appeaser of motley elements. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that under his leadership BJP has lost 2004 and 2009 and set the party back by as many decades as he took to nurture it. If the BJP’s stocks have seen a rise then there is only one answer. And the party confirmed that answer in Goa.

On June 15 in a discussion with Shiv Aroor on Headlines Today, the India Today Associate Editor Uday Mahurkar made an observation. He stated that he had travelled and covered Kashmir to Kerala and West to East and had seen a clear ground-swell of popularity of Modi. Let’s see that as a personal observation. But every opinion poll also places Modi far ahead of anyone else as the most popular PM candidate. The important question, therefore, is: if not Modi who in the BJP or any other party can really challenge the ruling Congress party? While it is politically sensible to say parliamentary elections in a democracy shouldn’t be driven by individuals it is also foolish to suggest that political parties win without the face of a strong and inspiring leader. For the Congress regardless of the leader the Gandhi name is the mantra. Regional parties are family-run parties or individual-run parties who stand no national chance of combatting Congress on their own. So the nonsense of Sagarika and others claiming Modi to be a “personality cult” is reflective of their own fears and nothing else.

Let me put out another blunt truth that the MSM will not: No regional leader is really too deeply entrenched with concerns about the nation or its economy or its national issues. This is not to suggest they are not patriots. But the truth is they are merely interested in protecting their fiefdoms and if a chance presents itself then get a share in the Central luxury as well. Whether you take a Bhojpuri Laloo, Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik or MamataB you will see what I mean. None of them can really contest a national election as a PM candidate. They may accidentally become PM like Deve Gowda only in a broken verdict. Nitish Kumar too wants to protect his fiefdom where he senses a threat and this is also driven by his ego and nothing more. It’s only Modi who has often made noises about national interest and spoken across the length and breadth of the country and even abroad. Most other CMs or even Cabinet Ministers go abroad only for holidays or medical treatments.

The other spurious argument that media crooks put out is that NDA once had 24 partners and now just has 2 or 3. Well, fact is any alliance at the Centre is valid only when the major party is in power. Parties like DMK, TMC are/were in the UPA and they were also in the NDA. So most regional parties are mere power-chasers and they aren’t in any alliance out of ideology. Even MamataB wouldn’t have quit the UPA had she not won absolute power in Bengal. She can afford to part with the UPA because she too now has her own little kingdom. Of the BJP allies only Shiv Sena and the Akalis can be said to be sharing political ideologies with them. The JDU was never a partner of ideology it was a partner of mere power-share. Another bogus argument is that LKA stood by Modi in 2002. So what? If you are parents would you want your children to be your slaves forever? What kind of parent wouldn’t want his kids to soar to bigger heights than s/he did? This is a telling cartoon that is now floating on the net and I believe describes LKA’s backroom politics quite well:

A long time ago I wrote a post on “The Incremental Fallacy”. The political equivalent of non-incremental change is “reforms”. Major changes don’t happen incrementally, they happen dramatically. When Bengal threw out the CPM they didn’t throw it out by a small margin, they delivered TMC with a huge majority. The same happened to Laloo in Bihar. The same happened to Digvijay in MP. You cannot cross a ten-foot trench in ten equal steps. You have to cross it one leap. Advani has travelled from Ramjanmabhoomi to secular Jinnah to appeasement of forces that run down his own popular CMs. Although it only claims “sources” an article in Mid-day makes damaging remarks about his conditions on acceptance of Modi as campaign head or PM candidate. All these are incremental shifts that have brought LKA down in the eyes of BJP supporters. It is a truth that he will have to understand or he will be given that understanding like a bitter pill. The Congress and UPA are also unpopular not just because of huge corruption but also because of the same old practices of doles, appeasement and division of people through caste and religion. The parties that claim to be “secular” are usually the most anti-secular.

The one mistake that separates Modi from LKA is that LKA wanted to be a darling of the fake “secular” forces and the media. In the process his politics now stinks of avarice. Modi presents that dramatic change and not an incremental one that LKA was trundling all along. While LKA was quick to blame the JDU pull out on Modi’s elevation he has also openly objected to it. It requires him and the BJP to realise that the country doesn’t want any more of the LKA type of politics. Avarice won’t pay for LKA and it won’t pay for Nitish. People want dramatic change and they want it fast.