Jethmalanis in action: Are they Modi's guided missiles?

The father-son duo of Ram and Mahesh Jethmalani may not be powerful enough inside the BJP to shape the party’s public policy, but they certainly work a lot on the party’s public purposes. Whether it is providing help to party leaders in legal matters or relentlessly pursuing the black money issue against the Congress, they have been part of the party’s missile armoury. But Mahesh Jethmalani’s recent outburst against party President Nitin Gadkari for the latter’s statement, where he compared Swami Vivekananda and Dawood Ibrahim on their IQs, is being seen in a different light. Mahesh quit from the party’s national executive yesterday citing discomfort with Gadkari’s statement, among other things. The unexpected outburst, amplified today by Ram Jethmalani, has raised eyebrows in the party on what their real intentions are. Are father and son - the former called on the party to endorse Narendra Modi as the PM candidate - acting as unguided missiles or are they working to a plan? [caption id=“attachment_516470” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Ram Jethmalani. AFP.[/caption] The Gadkari issue is, of course, not going to go away any time soon, since parliament’s winter sessions starts on 22 November, and his continuance as party President will blunt the party’s attacks on the Congress over the issue of corruption, including Coalgate and Robert Vadra. However, some BJP insiders smell a rat in the new ideological positions being taken up by Ram and Mahesh Jethmalani over the Vivekananda-Dawood controversy, for which Gadkari has since clarified and apologised. The Vivekananda issue is not something on which anyone in the party or the RSS would want to call the Jethmalani bluff - since Vivekananda is a core ideological issue for the Sangh. A senior BJP leader thus wonders if the Jethmalanis have made it a big issue in order to pressure the RSS to do something about Gadkari. Ram Jethmalani sought to give his call for the resignation of Gadkari a broader support base by suggesting he may also be voicing the opinions of Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha, but the fact also remains that none of them are really core RSS members. They are thus more free to speak their minds than the BJP’s older leaders like LK Advani. Jethmalani also smartly dropped the name of another RSS trouble-shooter, S Gurumurthy, saying that he had initially contacted him for damage control but the latter did not subsequently keep any of the six appointments he had fixed with him. Gurumurthy is currently in Delhi and is said to have met all top BJP leaders since morning. With Gurumurthy in the capital, Gadkari has dropped his programme to go to Mumbai in the afternoon to attend a party function. He will now stay in Delhi for further rounds of meetings with other top leaders to sort out the self-inflicted problems. BJP insiders wonder about Ram Jethmalani’s real game - or that of his son Mahesh. Given the senior Jethmalani’s surprise entry into the Rajya Sabha from Rajasthan, and his proximity to Narendra Modi (he is fighting the legal cases of Modi’s right hand man Amit Shah), there is speculation that his moves are part of a larger internal orchestration. Though Jethmalani outright denied a suggestion that his moves had the blessings of Narendra Modi, who has made Swami Vivekananda his campaign theme, he also emphasised that Modi remained his “choice for the Prime Ministerial post." He said it was unlikely that Modi had the time to become party president.” But he reiterated his earlier stand that the party should grant primacy to Modi over others. Put the statements of the Jethmalanis - Senior and Junior - together, and party insiders believe there is more to it than meets the eye. What they are not willing to say right now is whether they think it is Modi’s hand behind them, or someone else’s.