New Delhi, Aug 19 (Inditop.com) Was Jaswant Singh the victim of high-level intrigue in his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that used him to deflect attention from its own shortcomings to avoid debate on the party’s dismal performance in the general election?
Many in the BJP as well as those who have demonstrated some intellectual affinity with the party’s ideology and way of thinking on national issues would like to think so.
They say Jaswant Singh, the former Indian Army major who was expelled from the party Wednesday, had “committed no crime” with his personal observations on Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah in the book he authored.
The thinking in this circle is that the senior party leadership ran so scared of an internal debate in the party over the poll debacle that they were desperate to distract media attention from the so-called ‘chintan baithak’, or introspection session, that began in Shimla Wednesday.
“First, they blew up the issue of Vasundhara Raje, the former Rajasthan chief minister (whom the party leadership wants to quit as leader of opposition in the state assembly); and now they whipped up the issue of Jaswant Singh within an hour of the start of the chintan baithak,” said a party supporter who has written newspaper columns in praise of the BJP’s views and policies.
“Why couldn’t they have waited for the chintan baithak to be over before taking up these issues?
“It just goes to say how intellectually challenged these people are and how they feared facing those who could have questioned them at the session,” said the supporter, who wished to remain anonymous.
A primary member of the party who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal said that Jaswant Singh, like the senior leadership, had denounced Jinnah’s two-nation theory and like them thought the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was a mistake.
The fact that L.K. Advani went along with the decision surprised many. But others more familiar with entrenched thinking felt that Advani, party president Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and others who were part of the BJP parliamentary board meeting that took the expulsion decision were only ensuring that their own positions (their ‘kursis’) were not threatened by the new dissidents that Jaswant Singh and people like Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie had come to represent.
That the expulsion came just a day after former president M. Venkaiah Naidu stated that “no action” was being contemplated against Jaswant Singh showed that the top leadership was in a hurry to smother the rising dissent at the party conclave that was to be attended by about 25 top leaders, said the BJP leader.
Yet another pro-BJP analyst rued the role of Advani in the episode saying he himself had allowed the party to deviate from its stated position on Gorkhaland when it came out in support of a separate state before the elections to ensure a victory for Jaswant Singh who was contesting from Darjeeling for the first time.
“This (separatist) stand cost the BJP several seats in West Bengal, but Advani then found it more opportune to assure himself of at least one MP (Jaswant) in support of his leadership, rather than look at the larger party interests in a state where the Communists were in retreat,” said the commentator.
This episode may have long-term repercussions for the party in terms of its support among sections of the middle class, the armed forces and academic circles for whom Jaswant Singh represented the voice of the moderate, English-speaking, progressive view in the party that had helped it to reach a wider constituency beyond its conservative, Hindu chauvinist, trader base.
