That the Delhi Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in poor shape, one really did not need to know from the organ of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) – Organiser. In the editorial of its latest edition, it has been said that the state units should not expect Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah to win all elections for them.
What the editorial preferred not to mention was that if the Delhi state unit was in poor shape, it was the making of the central leadership. The state unit has been led for the past four years by Manoj Tiwari, who is for sure not an organisation man. A political traveller, Tiwari started his career with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh, hobnobbed with the Congress for a while, and finally took refuge in the BJP.
Tiwari may claim to be a two-time member of Lok Sabha from Delhi and that is the party’s tragedy in the National Capital. Of the seven BJP MPs from Delhi, at best two – Harsh Vardhan and Ramesh Bidhuri — can claim to have risen from the ranks of the organisation; the rest are all paratroopers. The likes of Hans Raj Hans and Gautam Gambhir may be celebrities in their own right but when comes to providing leadership to a political machinery they proved to be absolute nincompoops.
For that matter, New Delhi MP Meenakshi Lekhi too was nowhere to be heard during the campaign and the MP who was most heard – Pravesh Verma — was asked to keep quiet by the Election Commission (EC). In the good political structures across the parties, the Lok Sabha MPs provide the leadership to all the assembly segments falling under their constituencies. The same cannot be said anymore in the case of the Delhi BJP.
It also must be recalled that the Delhi BJP was not always a weak state unit. As rightly mentioned by the Organiser, it had deep roots in the city even during the Bharatiya Jana Sangh days. Leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani could always fallback on the Delhi unit for passage to parliament as the party then did not have much presence in many of the states.
The Delhi BJP for long boasted of resourceful and grounded leaders like Madanlal Khurana, Kidarnath Sahni, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Sahib Singh Verma and, to an extent, OP Kohli. They had a great connect with the workers and knew the party functionaries on one-to-one basis. On the other hand, Manoj Tiwari while meeting the eight victorious MLAs from the just concluded polls needed a check on the political resume of veterans like Rambir Singh Bidhuri and Mohan Singh Bisht.
Why didn’t the Delhi BJP leadership graduate from the older generation to the newer generation of local leaders? This question is important as the BJP in Delhi always had a crop of young leaders available who had cut their teeth into electoral politics by contesting the vigorously fought Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections. Even during the heydays of Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) was never routed the way it has in the past two assembly polls at the hands of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and before that in the three polls at the hand of the Sheila Dikshit-led Delhi Congress.
First, the ambition of the first-generation leaders, they refused to accept transition. The BJP rule of Delhi from 1993-98 is best remembered for the fratricidal battle for domination between Madanlal Khurana and his successor Sahib Singh Verma. Then there was the ambition of an ageing Vijay Kumar Malhotra and the desire for power of a Jagdish Mukhi, which had to be accommodated.
While they fought each other, they invariably came together to deny entry to DUSU leaders, be it Arun Jaitley in the early 1990s and the later generation of leaders in the future years. Even a scheming and always networking leader like Vijay Goel, though not of the same caliber as Jaitley, faced constant resistance.
Between themselves too, Jaitley, Goel and, to an extent, Harsh Vardhan, resisted one another and often remained focused on arresting the rival’s growth than propping up the fortunes of the party. Harsh Vardhan at the peak of his popularity in 2008 was denied the candidature of chief minister, with Vijay Kumar Malhotra fielded instead. It’s a matter of record that Dikshit had a cakewalk in those polls.
In 2013, Harsh Vardhan was made the chief ministerial face but again it was done at the last moment, making Goel, who was Delhi unit president then, feel like a victim. Despite the discomfort, the two managed to cross the rubicon and emerge as the single largest party. But then the Congress decided to play spoilsport and supported a minority government led by Arvind Kejriwal.
The BJP had another chance at redemption in 2015, but to diffuse the faction fight and put to rest the personal ambitions of leaders, former cop Kiran Bedi was propped up as the chief ministerial face. Bedi had neither any worker connect nor was she an organisation person. The campaign went absolutely haywire, with her own poll agent quitting midway, and a loss in the election thereafter was never in doubt.
Unfortunately, in the past five years too, the BJP central leadership has done little to strengthen the party organisation. Tiwari neither belongs to Delhi nor to the party culture and organisation. A party cadre, which has always known its leaders attending ‘shakha’ early morning, could never get engaged by a late-rising Bhojpuri singer.
If the BJP wants to revive its Delhi unit, it would have to get over the psyche of winning all polls at any cost. It would have to find leaders from its local cadres and give them opportunity to build the organisation once again, brick-by-brick. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen as in two years, a municipal poll will take place and the party will want to win at any cost, as it did the last time when it replaced all the sitting councilors and stunted the natural growth of another generation of leaders.
(The writer is a senior journalist and political analyst.)
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