Don't blame Advani for stalling Modi's rise, the BJP needs to change

The BJP has a problem. And it isn’t that LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Murli Manohar Joshi are opposed to Narendra Modi’s candidature as the party’s prime ministerial candidate. The trouble is that the party has no institutional mechanism to settle the dispute over its leadership.

It would be unreasonable to expect, in any (internally) democratic political party, a consensus over leadership. It will be, and indeed should be, contested. That is how it happens in democracies all over the world. In some countries, like the US, candidates are chosen by voters through primaries – remember how the wildly popular Barack Obama had to fight a bitter contest against an almost equally popular Hilary Clinton to be his party’s presidential candidate. In other countries, like the UK, leaders are chosen within parties but there are contests none the less. David Cameron had to fight off several heavyweight rivals to win the leadership of his Conservative Party.

Party leadership contests, whether in the US, UK, France or Australia, are messy, cut-throat, bitter and often appear to tear the party apart from inside. In most cases, the very senior members of the party are divided into rival camps. In that sense, what the BJP is going though is not something exceptional at all. What is exceptional is that the BJP is not hosting an open contest for its leadership. All the rivalry in the BJP takes the form of backdoor machinations where certain leaders sulk their way to exercising a veto or blocking at any cost any effort to forge a broad consensus. The balance of power is tilted in favour of those who do battle from the shadows rather than in the open. That is bad for the party and bad for democracy.

The BJP would be much better served if it had a transparent election for its Prime Ministerial candidate. That would have forced Narendra Modi to reveal his hand. It would also have forced Advani and his followers to put up an alternative candidate or lose their credibility with the public at large. Like elsewhere in the world, the losing side (or sides) would eventually back the chosen one. The leader would of course, do his or her bit to show magnanimity to the defeated. Voters understand this. They would not see an open contest as a sign of disunity in the party.

Instead, what the voting public gets is smoke and mirrors. Nobody in the BJP is apparently in the running for Prime Ministerial candidacy, but plenty of busy bodies are trying to block the perceived ascent of one man. This smacks of disunity. And it is hardly a good advertisement for a party that is trying to position itself as a ‘decisive’ and ‘transparent’ alternative to the bumbling and opaque Congress.

An open contest would help the party thrash out its ideas for governance and its policy plans. At least some of the BJP’s confusion and contradictions over key policy matters stems from the fact that no one is sure who is in charge. Also, in the absence of party-wide deliberations, no one is really sure what the best ideas and policies are. Tough, in-depth, and transparent debates would solve the BJP’s crisis of “what it stands for.”

In the end, the RSS may wield its stick to solve the BJP’s leadership dilemma. That will be bad for the BJP, which remains a rare Indian political party that is not run by a single individual or family. The BJP need not worry at all about the multiplicity of its leaders (whether in Delhi or in state capitals) and the competition between them. That is in fact a source of dynamism which gives it strength. It’s also BJP’s ultimate comparative advantage over the dynastic, status quoist, Congress party.

It just needs an institutional framework to pick a winner.