BJP plans to reinvent itself in Mahableshwar next week

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

Fifty top leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party will assemble in Mahabaleshwar next week and thrash out strategies to face the challenges ahead.

The meeting at the quiet hill resort in Maharashtra will be held from January 9 to 12. It will remain a closed-door affair as the party leadership is seriously concerned with the setbacks faced in Delhi, Gujarat and Lucknow last year. Much time is expected to be devoted to issues connected with the reorientation of the party.

"We need to do a lot of rethinking about which way we are going and what needs to be done to fill the gaps and plug loopholes," says former prime minister and BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

, Every party, he says, needs to reorient itself with the changing needs of time - without, of course, deviating from its fundamental values.

Similarly, Kalyan Singh, the party's leader in UP, stresses the need for making the BJP more vibrant and infusing some discipline in its rank and file. "We cannot deny that in recent times we have witnessed more indiscipline in the party organisation than ever before," he said, "But these are facts of life. Simply because we are cadre-based and a disciplined party, even minor expressions of dissent become more noticeable."

Singh, a former UP chief minister and BJP vice-president, is confident that the meeting will go a long way in giving the party organisation a new direction. "Broadly, the whole idea is to identify the snags and take corrective measures at the earliest. We want to be better prepared for the next parliamentary and assembly elections," he added.

While he is unwilling to reveal the finer details of the agenda, sources close to him say the BJP's failures in Gujarat and Lucknow would figure prominently during the discussions. Since salvaging the party position in Gujarat is not all that simple with Shankarsinh Vaghela firmly entrenched in Gandhinagar as chief minister, greater emphasis will be laid on raising the party's graph in UP, India's most important political state.

"There is only a remote possibility of forming any popular government in UP," says one party insider, "Therefore there is greater need for gearing the party for the next assembly election." Kalyan Singh has drawn up a six-point assessment of the party's failure in forming an absolute majority in the state.

"Due to infighting we lost nearly 30 to 35 seats," he says, "Besides, multiplicity of aspirants for certain seats was also responsible for absence of a united effort to win," he says.

Kalyan Singh admits the party's failure in implementing its plan to deploy 20 youth at every polling booth. Overall, he feels the absence of proper booth management was another reason for the party's inability to live up to popular expectations.

''We failed to take our voter up to the booth," he points out while not underscoring the ''inappropriate choice of nominees'' as another reason for losing a number of seats.

''What we failed to assess was the chances of many candidates, that is borne out by the fact that 92 of our 135 sitting MLAs in the contest lost,'' Singh says, adding, ''and, last but not the least, it was lack of co-ordination between the candidate, the party organisation and the local MP.''

Recent developments in UP and a virtual rift in the party leadership on the question of extending support to a Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party or a BSP-BJP coalition government in the state has further exposed the crisis in the party.

What the party has seen of late was unprecedented -- in UP at least - one senior leader accusing the other of harming the party's interests by opposing the move, while the other flinging the same argument against him.

There is also the element of caste in the party's crisis in UP. Even as political circumstances compelled the once largely upper caste BJP to entrust the most populous state's leadership to a backward caste politician, a section of the party was constantly looking for excuses to run down Kalyan Singh.

There is reason to believe that the campaign against Kalyan Singh led by Brahmdutt Dwivedi with the tacit support of state chief Kalraj Misra -- both men are brahmins -- was prompted by caste factors and the fact that Singh has managed to rise far above his upper caste counterparts in stature and mass appeal.

Dwivedi's actions and utterances in particular highlighted these differences more than ever before -- sending the message loud and clear that BJP was fast losing its reputation for discipline.

With the realisation dawning among the party's moderates that the Hindutva card will no more accrue the usual dividends for the BJP, serious rethinking on a new strategy is in the offing at Mahabaleshwar next week. The accent, ironically, may be on 'secularism'.