The BJP lawmakers in the State keep storming into controversial rows at regular intervals. While one beats up a horse for daring to show its horse sense to toe the line of the Congress -charged police in quelling a party movement, another roughs up a woman for daring to defile the deified precincts of his residence by raising her shrill voice for justice during a panchayat-convened mediation meeting.
It seems that Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya whose name the saffron leaders invoke on every occasion is ‘rolling over in the grave’ or where he is now while viewing from afar the evolution of the party he built, brick by brick, while investing it with a definite ideology to make it one with a difference at a time when the realm of politics was fast degenerating into a refuge of the lumpen.
The manner in which the BJP leaders treat such muscle-powered MlAs reminds me of how the CPI-M leaders used to treat the party’s public representatives in Bengal when they waded into controversies through obscene attacks mounted through their venomous tongues on the ascendant Mamata Banerjee- a rap on the knuckle in public and pat on the back in private. Serving a show- cause notice and flaunting the party’s lofty ideology which strongly disapproves of such outrageous acts are not enough to rein in such elements which hardly are moved by what they consider ‘ideological hanky-panky’.
let us now see what Upadhyaya stood for when he was steering the course of the fledgling Jana Sangh left orphaned by the untimely death of its founder Dr Syama Prasad Mukherjee.
It was the time when trading of MlAs was the reigning practice. Discipline was crumbling in almost all the political parties when the MlAs were being lured to switch sides ‘for a handful of silver’, for money and position.
The term ‘aya Ram gaya Ram’ was coined around the time when Upadhyaya as the president of the party was seriously engaged in helping it carve a niche for itself in those days dominated by the turncoat culture.
Significantly, there were only two parties which succeeded in keeping their flock together and maintaining a semblance of discipline during that uncertain time-Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the Communist parties.
Upadhyaya from the beginning stressed on the public representatives of his party projecting and maintaining an impeccable image before the people-integrity, empathy and sobriety.
He was convinced that this was the only way aside from the well-defined ideology to endear the party, which was kept out of the political mainstream, stigmatised as untouchable for its ‘sectarian’/ ‘majoritarian’ views, to the people at large.
Wedded to high standards in politics, he pioneered a comprehensively defined code of conduct for the lawmakers of his party and conducted workshops for them.
Besides, during the annual session of the party in Nagpur, he moved a resolution which stated that the base of the Jana Sangh being principled, the party urgently needed training camps and workshops.
He was for the MPs and the MlAs to be thoroughly trained on how they should behave while embodying the ideology of the party they were representing which would make the people to understand that theirs was a party not tethered to self-aggrandisement of the individuals but one committed to a robust ideology.
He was of the view that every lawmaker representing the party must emanate qualities of head and heart while exemplifying the distinct ideology the party has set for itself, risking all odds that were to come inevitably in its way.
He said while addressing a party session, “Walking out of the house and a tendency to create chaos through shouting or sloganeering which is aimed at capturing newspaper spaces are not considered right by Jana Sangh. We have advised our members to keep away from such conducts. They should not protest in this unbecoming manner.”
However, time has changed now. It is time for the lawmakers to bare fangs and to flaunt the power of the lungs and the sinews to assert their differences, their superiority in the art of surviving in the realm of the muscle-powered politics. Taking recourse to the ideological ‘mumbo jumbo’ while invoking Upadhyaya and parroting ‘a party with a difference’ jargon is a good ploy during electioneering to woo the gullible. But when it comes to getting down to the brass tracks of what is called realpolitik things turn different.
Ideology can be used at best as the fig leaf to conceal the things which the people at the receiving end of the tantrums of such power-drunk leaders can best understand.