Modi is bad news for both, the BJP and India

Vir Sanghvi recently described the political turmoil in the BJP as a colonels’ coup, with the party’s middle echelon ejecting its senior officers. A change of guard does seem to be in the offing: The RSS has intervened to speed up the superannuation of the Jan Sangh gerontocrats, L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, and to manage the transition to a younger generation of bigots. The party’s rout in the recent elections has weakened its ability to resist Nagpur’s meddling or to preserve the fig leaf of functional autonomy, and defeat has made it easier to purge the old men who failed to deliver Hindutva’s holy grail, the state.

Trump card: Will Modi alienate the undecided voter? PTI

The fascinating thing about this process is the speed with which the party’s anglophone intellectuals have abandoned their erstwhile friends and patrons. Sudheendra Kulkarni has jumped ship, Swapan Dasgupta has turned on Advani, his erstwhile hero, out of a principled concern for the greater good of the party and Arun Shourie, who thinks on the grand scale, presciently urged the RSS to nuke the party’s ruling establishment and set its house in order.

Shourie is an interesting figure: an ideologue whose persona fuses intemperate polemic with mincing rectitude. He’s unique: There isn’t a person I can think of in contemporary politics who has been a crusading editor, a civil rights activist, a votary of the “hard” state, a forceful minister, a majoritarian demagogue and an inexhaustible compiler of albums of quotations glazed with rage and published as books.

If the BJP was brighter and Shourie less angular, he would be that party’s Manmohan Singh, its Mr Integrity: the foreign-returned, World Bank alum determined to globalize India, the arch modernizer with the middle class credibility to make majoritarianism India’s common sense. The fact that he doesn’t have an electoral base isn’t important: Manmohan Singh has shown us what a Rajya Sabha MP can do. With Vajpayee retired and Advani in the doghouse, the BJP sometimes seems like a party of provincials and operators: Shourie at the helm would have given it the semblance of a fierce, metropolitan respectability.

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But this is unlikely to happen not least because Shourie carries so much published baggage. His book-length attempt to exhume Ambedkar the better to shred his reputation would be a liability in a political world where Ambedkar counts for more than Gandhi or Nehru. So the role he seems to see himself playing is that of the conscience keeper of the Hindu right and, should it capture the state, the guardian of the republic’s morals.