On a suicide mission

The BJP in Kerala wants desperately to break the stranglehold of the two coalitions but finds that even its own supporters would not vote for its candidates until the party proves that it indeed has the strength and the credibility to win elections in the State.

R. KRISHNAKUMAR in Thiruvananthapuram

THE Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been a curious phenomenon in Kerala, masquerading as a ferocious lion with its eyes set on the jugulars of the ruling and Opposition coalitions in the State but proving to be a lamb when election results are announced.

The question what ails the BJP in Kerala where it has had all the trappings of saffron popularity but failed to transform these to votes, has stuck to the party like a birthmark. Its leaders have often tried to wish it away by claiming that the party is a victim of bi-polar coalition politics and caste-based political divisions and that it is gaining ground steadily, increasing its share of votes in every election.

Such statements seemed justified when, in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, its candidate, former Union Minister O. Rajagopal, got a never-before 2,28,052 votes (29.86 per cent of the votes) in the prestigious fight in Thiruvananthapuram and P.C. Thomas, the leader of the nascent IFDP, then a partner in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), won the Muvattupuzha seat in a keen three-cornered fight.

In the local body elections of September 2005, the BJP was the deciding factor in about 60 local bodies that gave hung results, though it did not win many seats. It won five panchayats and became the party with the highest number of seats in nearly 10 others. It also won double the number of seats it did in the 2000 local body elections. Its most impressive victories were in Palakkad, Kasargod, Thrissur and Pattanamthitta districts.

But now the cat is out of the bag.

In the November 18 Lok Sabha byelection in Thiruvananthapuram, necessitated by the death of P.K. Vasudevan Nair (CPI), Rajagopal's victorious rival in the 2004 election, the BJP fielded one of its most prominent leaders, former State unit president C.K. Padmanabhan, giving the impression that the party wanted to consolidate the gains made in Thiruvananthapuram in 2004.

But what followed was a lacklustre campaign. The BJP failed even to provide its candidate with agents in many polling booths and Padmanabhan could manage only 36,690 votes, a mere 4.83 per cent of the total votes polled. He lost his deposit in the only Lok Sabha constituency where the BJP proved its strength in 2004.

The majority of the party's supporters, especially cadre of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), were absent from the campaign scene during this round.

The question what ails the BJP in Kerala was finally answered by Rajagopal in an anguished response to Padmanabhan's humiliating defeat. In an interview to a magazine, Rajagopal admitted what the BJP's critics had been hinting at all along: despite the occasional gains, and although it was nowhere near the seat of power, the party's State unit was a deeply divided one, with one group, which claimed the support of the RSS, opposing the leadership of Rajagopal, State president P.S. Sreedharan Pillai, and former presidents K. Raman Pillai and Padmanabhan.

Rajagopal said the division in the party was not over ideology or individuals but the result of an attack mounted on the others by a minority who were eager to protect and nourish the huge wealth they have amassed using the party's name. This group did not have the support of a large section within the party, nor did it have the support of the RSS (as was being claimed). He argued that the problem was not rampant, and was confined to Thiruvananthapuram.

He alleged that Padmanabhan was so thoroughly defeated in Thiruvananthapuram because this section indulged in large-scale trading of votes and that, though he was yet to obtain concrete and complete evidence about it, "circumstantial evidence indicated that the needle of suspicion pointed towards P.P. Mukundan" (a prominent State leader known for his close links with the RSS).

Rajagopal, who perhaps represents the most credible face of the BJP in Kerala, pointed out that the party had earlier found Mukundan guilty of trading its votes to the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), and had removed him as organising secretary and asked him to shift his headquarters to Chennai. When he refused, the then party president, M. Venkaiah Naidu, had personally intervened to shift him to Chennai. But in the run-up to the Thiruvananthapuram byelection, Mukundan pitched tent at the party headquarters in Thiruvananthapuram, ignoring the directive of the leadership, he said.

Rajagopal also alleged that Mukundan had struck vote-switching deals with former Congress leader K. Karunakaran, especially in constituencies where the latter had a personal interest, and said that it was significant that both the leaders were in Thiruvananthapuram during the byelection. (Karunakaran's Democratic Indira Congress-Karunakaran supported Left Democratic Front (LDF) candidate Panniyan Raveendran of the CPI in the byelection.)

Rajagopal said a large section in the RSS had turned against Padmanabhan during his tenure as BJP State president after he criticised its role in the widespread violence unleashed in Thiruvananthapuram during an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) student agitation three years earlier.

Over 50 RSS cadre were among the accused in the case filed in connection with the incidents and Rajagopal said the "financial and physical hardship" that the RSS and its cadre were going through to fight the case was enormous. He alleged that Chief Minister Oommen Chandy had "taken the lead in giving an assurance that the government would be willing to offer concessions to the RSS cadres involved" in this case as well as some other such serious cases in Kannur district. He said it would not be surprising if ordinary RSS cadre facing personal hardships because of the cases against them took the bait and voted for the UDF candidate, former MP V.S. Sivakumar.

In reply to another question, Rajagopal alleged that a sort of "double trading" had taken place in Thiruvananthapuram this time, "with a section in the Sangh that had some empathy with the Left" voting in the latter's favour when it found that votes were otherwise being shifted en masse to the UDF. He also alleged that the party State committee member M.S. Kumar was responsible for it.

He said he had information that during the campaign, a car belonging to the CPI had made regular night trips to the residence of a BJP State vice-president and that "there were doubts that money had changed hands".

Rajagopal asserted that he was saying this openly because it had become imperative to conduct a surgery to remove the cancer that was afflicting the party for a long time. Asked whether the guilty would be removed from the BJP, Rajagopal made the most startling of all his allegations. He said: "The troubles within the party are being engineered by those who amassed wealth using the party's address. It is said the individual wealth today of the most prominent among them would be over Rs.10 crores. You must be aware of the petrol pump deals. One of them has very close links with a construction company that is associated with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. This individual has even acquired a residential flat from them for free."

So, would the State BJP's troubles be over if such leaders are removed from the party? Ever since it came into being in Kerala in the early 1980s, the BJP, and even its predecessor the Jana Sangh, caught as it was between the two prominent political coalitions in Kerala, had utilised vote trading as a political art that gave it at best a wishful influence in Kerala politics.

At times, it seemed that the party prided itself on the fact that at least in some constituencies it could tip the balance by making its cadre vote against its main rival in the State, the CPI(M) and the LDF it leads, and in favour of the Congress, the BJP's main rival in the rest of India.

For example, when the party began to ride the saffron wave unleashed by the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the BJP garnered over 10.5 lakh votes in the local body elections held in January 1991. But in the Assembly elections that followed five months later, the party won a mere six lakh votes, an obvious result, as a party inquiry revealed, of the vote-trading engineered by most of the prominent leaders who now find themselves in opposite camps in the State party.

Even its most popular leader, K.G. Marar, was defeated in Manjewaram, where the party then had its most prominent presence. According to one of the members of the party inquiry committee, trading votes with the Congress-led coalition also led to the Muslim League, a UDF constituent, getting the maximum number of seats in the State Assembly then.

From all indications, what started as a strategic trade-off with the UDF, perhaps under the genuine impression that the UDF would then help the BJP to win a seat or two in the Assembly or in the local bodies, soon deteriorated into regular vote-for-money deals that were used by a section of leaders to amass wealth - an allegation raised against the BJP by its political rivals for long and now corroborated by the statements of O. Rajagopal.

But what the State BJP leadership perhaps fails to realise is that when over a period of time as it encouraged sympathisers to vote for non-BJP candidates, initially as a matter of party strategy for long-term rewards and then, as Rajagopal now alleges, as part of an individual strategy for personal gains, it was pushing the party into a political trap.

The BJP's would-have-been voters, a large majority of them without any firm ideological commitment, soon needed no goading to look for alternatives independently whenever they found that the BJP candidate had no chance of winning in an election (as is the case in almost all constituencies in the State).

It may be true that, rightly or wrongly, some BJP leaders can now claim credit for making supporters vote against party candidates. But what has become a real challenge for the party is that none of its leaders may now be able to do the opposite - make them all vote for the BJP itself.

The party wants desperately to break the stranglehold of the two coalitions, led by the CPI(M) and the Congress, but finds that even its supporters would not vote for its candidates until the party proves that it indeed has the strength (and now the credibility) to win elections in the State. It is the BJP's own undoing in Kerala, a sort of vicious cycle engineered by its own leaders.