The Bharatiya Janata Party appears to be hell bent upon committing hara-kiri in the national capital, where it has always had considerable presence ever since its earlier avatar, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded in the early 1950s. The party’s strength has been due to the enormous support it has enjoyed from the Vaish community, as well as the families of the Punjabi refugees. Subsequently, it made inroads in the rural areas largely because of the hard work done in the 1990s by Sahib Singh Verma, who brought with him the significant vote bank of the Jats, Gurjars and Ahirs. In fact, if one charts out the growth of the BJP (including Jana Sangh), Delhi was its nucleus and the expansion in other states was much later.
The first state where the party formed a government was in Delhi way back in 1967, when Vijay Kumar Malhotra, then in his thirties, became the Chief Executive Councillor, with L.K. Advani serving as the Chairman of the Metropolitan Council. The progress made in the five years of the Jana Sangh rule was never replicated and though the Congress was in power for 15 years, it was unable to meet targets, with the corruption shrouded Commonwealth Games helping it somewhat to redeem itself in terms of improving the city’s infrastructure to a fair degree.
Courtesy Madan Lal Khurana, the BJP’s principal architect in the city, who in the 1990s buoyed up Purvanchal leaders like Lal Behari Tewari to contest on the party ticket, the new migrant population commenced drifting towards the saffron brigade. Over the years, the demographics of the capital have undergone a metamorphosis, but so far as the BJP and the Congress are concerned, the Punjabis and Banias have dominated the political discourse. Delhi continues to be referred to as a Punjabi city, even though the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has very few members from the community among its top leaders.
However, those who are running the BJP at present seem to have either no knowledge of its past, or are living in a make-believe world of their own. They are obviously not acquainted with the ground reality, something which became conspicuous when the party declared Kiran Bedi as its Chief Ministerial candidate in the 2015 Assembly polls. Bedi is no doubt a Punjabi, but she had always been in an adversarial role towards the BJP as a police officer and thus could never be accepted by its rank and file to be someone who could steer the party to victory. The poll results proved to be a big setback and only three BJP candidates won, while all others including Bedi were defeated.
The philosophy behind fielding Bedi was that since the party had won all the seven seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, it would be again triumphant no matter whom it projected. The leadership forgot that the Parliamentary outcome was on account of Narendra Modi’s aggressive campaign and not because of the candidates who contested the seven seats. The fact of the matter is that barring Dr Harsh Vardhan, Union Minister and MP from Chandni Chowk, no other winner had a grassroots connect. Manoj Tewari, Maheish Girri and Udit Raj were “outsiders” in the eyes of the workers and Parvesh Verma, Ramesh Bidhuri and Meenakshi Lekhi have since their election failed to consolidate their position.
Therefore, by appointing Manoj Tewari as head of the Delhi BJP, the top leadership is apparently repeating the same mistake it made while announcing Kiran Bedi as the CM face. Tewari may be an accomplished showman and actor, but he probably does not even know the names and faces of the BJP workers in the city. His immediate actions are also bound to impact the party’s image. An SMS sent on Wednesday by the Delhi unit to the media states “Delhi is the city of all and Purvanchalis along with other people…” By singling out Purvanchalis, the signal to the party’s core base has grave political implications. This is precarious business for any political outfit.
It is very clear that Tewari’s appointment was made to send a message ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. It was also aimed at countering the growing influence of AAP in sections hailing from the region who are in Delhi. But what the top leadership has failed to comprehend is that the party is perhaps pushing the Punjabis and the Banias towards the Congress, which under Ajay Maken is in the process of reviving itself.
Delhi has been sacrosanct to the BJP/Jana Sangh as three of its top leaders—Balraj Madhok, Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani have both contested and won elections from here. Moreover, barring Chaudhury Brehm Perkash, the remaining four-time Lok Sabha MPs from the city have only been Punjabis—Malhotra, Khurana (both BJP) and H.K.L. Bhagat and Jagdish Tytler (Congress). The Late Kanwar Lal Gupta, Vijay Goel and Harsh Vardhan have been the torchbearers of the Vaish community.
The short point is that instead of consolidating its position from where it can retain its Parliamentary seats in 2019, the BJP comes across as being determined to alienate itself from the masses as well as its workers. There is no dearth of rooted BJP leaders in the capital and Tewari would only serve to remind people of the Kiran Bedi fiasco. Between us.