Aditi Phadnis: Sushma's swaraj

Whether it's Jaswant Singh or Narendra Modi, she speaks her mind

The BJP is to have a new president by the end of the year. The RSS has already said that it proposes to take the BJP in hand by seconding more lieutenants to the organisation and by ensuring that the BJP has a president whose overall handlers are the RSS. Accordingly, any one of the three Marathi speakers in the BJP leadership could become the party’s next president — Maharshtra BJP President Nitin Gadkari, Goa leader Manohar Parrikar and BJP Vice-President Bal Apte. As the BJP’s constitution prohibits a second consecutive term, it is clear that Rajnath Singh cannot continue.

 

So, for the next three years, the reins of the party are to be entrusted to someone who will keep a low profile and will not — because he won’t be able to — throw his weight about.

Sushma Swaraj is therefore out of the party equation: No doubt she will succeed LK Advani as leader of the opposition and lead the party and the NDA in Lok Sabha. But she will not be handling the party’s election propaganda in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, nor will she have any role in preparing the party for the next general election. Not that it matters much. Swaraj’s advice was not taken either in the Lok Sabha election of 2009 or the Haryana assembly election. On both occasions, she suggested the BJP swallow its pride and go with the Indian National Lok Dal whatever its views may be on Om Prakash Chautala — because at the end of the day it is the seats you win that matter, and in Haryana there was no point going with the non-Jats. No, said the party bosses, we need to build our own party, not give Chautala a vehicle to travel on. Now the party is paying the price. In 2005, when Haryana had the last assembly election, 75 BJP candidates out of 90 lost their deposit — this means they got less than a sixth of the votes polled. In 2009, this number was down marginally at 72. The BJP got the number two place in just eight seats.

There are some misconceptions about Sushma Swaraj that need to be cleared.

One, it is rubbish that she is an outsider in the Sangh. This belief has gained ground because of her connections with the socialist movement via her husband Swaraj Kaushal, who was a whole-timer in the Socialist Party. Swaraj was part of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) while studying in Panjab University and actually came to Delhi to campaign for Arun Jaitley when the latter contested the election for the Delhi University Students’ Union in 1974. In 1985, she joined the BJP and stayed there.

This might explain her catholicity about Hinduism. For the modern urban woman, it is toe-curlingly embarrassing to see a woman as competent and articulate as Swaraj observing the karva chauth rituals in all their garishness. But when the Sri Ram Sene began beating up young women to stop them from visiting pubs, she criticised them trenchantly: My daughter goes to pubs with her friends, she said, she doesn’t drink because that’s the way she has been brought up. And if she does decide to have a glass of wine, well, that’s up to her. Her lawyer-daughter has had the best possible education — London School of Economics, Oxford and now the Inner Temple.

Swaraj is a professional politician as distinct from a social climber posturing as a politician. She doesn’t waste time entertaining reporters, fellow partymen, MLAs, etc. But when she’s given a job, she is decisive to the point of ruthlessness. When she was asked to contest the Bellary seat against Sonia Gandhi in 1999 (Gandhi polled 51.7 per cent of the vote, Swaraj 44.7 per cent), she created a party there that had never really existed before. In the last Karnataka assembly election, the largest contribution to the BJP Legislature Party in the Vidhana Soudha came from the Bellary region.

At the same time, she was highly critical of party colleague Jaswant Singh and the bearer of the tidings that he should resign from the chairmanship of the public accounts committee. She agreed with Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the wake of the Godhra riots that Narendra Modi had neglected ‘raj dharma’ but when Chandrababu Naidu threatened to withdraw support to the NDA on that issue, she dug in, like other partymen, and said Modi could not be replaced under pressure.

Swaraj is a good teacher and doesn’t see fresh talent as a threat: Of the 58 first-time MPs of the BJP in the Lok Sabha, 46 have had the chance to speak. She was one of the few in the party who spoke in favour of retaining Vasundhara Raje as the Rajasthan leader of the opposition: Her argument was, it takes minutes to destroy a leader but years to create one. She has delivered many memorable speeches but her best one has to be the one in Oriya, when she visited Orissa four days after the BJP and the Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal government parted ways. In his nine years as chief minister, Naveen Patnaik is yet to give a public speech in Oriya.

Swaraj has a lot going for her. Parliament is going to be a livelier place because of her.

A clarification

The article mentions that Sushma Swaraj's advice to align with the Indian National Lok Dal went unheeded by the BJP in both in the Lok Sabha election of 2009 and the Haryana assembly election. The BJP did, in fact, take that advice in the Lok Sabha election of 2009.