Under The Bjp's Big Tent

The new and the old in the politics of Hindutva

as the BJP turns 30: Cows and climate change.
Antyodaya and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam
By CHANDRAHAS CHOUDHURY | 1 April 2010

AT THE BHARATIYA JANATA PARTYS national convention in Indore this

February, over 4,000 members of the partys National Council massed inside
an enormous air-cooled tent to discuss what the party considered significant
issues in politics, economics, foreign policy, affirmative action, and also to
witness and ratify a changing of the guard. The tenure of Rajnath Singh, a
Thakur from Uttar Pradesh and the party president from 2006 to 09, was
over. He was giving way to Nitin Gadkari, a Brahmin from Maharashtra.
At 11:00 am on 18 February, the entire top brass of the party leadership had
taken their places before the delegates on a grand flower-bedecked dais with
a backdrop of a sari-clad woman at work in a idealised agrarian idyll: the sun
shining, thatched huts, children at play, a windmill. Everyone in the tent,
including members of the press, had already stood to attention while the
song Vande Mataram resonated through the tent over loudspeakers. Now
the departing president was speaking, in a grave, orotund Hindi, about the
partys history, its recent troubles, and its future.
The very look of the convention was an attempt by the BJP, in a time of
crisis, to reconnect to its history. In its 30th year, and smarting from the
reverses of the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, the party had organised one of
the back to the basics gatherings it seemed to find attractive from time to
time. In Indore, as it had in Bandra in Mumbai at its inaugural convention in
1980, and again in its silver jubilee year in 2005, the party had erected a
massive political squatter camp at Omaxe City, a massive, 36-hectare private
plot just outside Indore city limits, on the Mumbai-Agra highway. Small white
tents, each with five beds, a fan, and an attached bathroom, stretched away
to the left and right of the main thoroughfare as far as the eye could see.
(Women delegates had a more comfortable time in a block of flats.)
When the convention began, journalists took great pleasure calling out all
those of the top brass who apparently decamped to plush hotels for the
night. But nostalgists of the old party dictum of simple living and high
thinking seemed to find the air of austerity and community pleasing. Sirf
kambal lane ka aur so jaane ka, declared Surendra Lakha, a tall, suave MLA
in his 50s from Baroda. Just bring your own blanket and go off to sleep.
Prostrate on their beds behind Lakha, taking a break from the days
exertions, were four grizzled septuagenarians from Punjab, his roomies for
the convention. The characteristic Indian talent for discovering a family
connection in any situation had revealed that the daughter of one of the

Punjabis was working in Baroda, and now four and one had become five.
A convention is for people to meet, get to know one another, to improve
unity in the party, said Neeraj Yagnik, a BJP worker from Indore who had
been closely involved with hospitality. But in recent years, people would
come to sessions and then go back to their halls or hotels all over town. This
time everyone is together, like one big family. Weve made the convention
like a village, with farms and fields alongside where fresh produce is being
grown. Everything is eco-friendly: CNG cars and bullock carts to take
delegates up and down, bicycles if they want to get around by themselves.
The convention organisers riffs on a swadeshi theme were no doubt
ingenious. Security guards at the convention wore yellow kurtas and turbans
and carried lathis; vendors roasted channa and bhutta and served up nimbu
paani with rock salt. There was no trace of a bottled soft drinkthe symbol
of an easy, unthinking, and untraditional consumptionin sight. But inside
the convention hall, the delegates found themselves listening to an intensely
serious disquisition on Coca-Cola.
Rajnath was not willing to concede, as some had argued after the failure of
Advanis campaign in 2009, the prospect of the exhaustion of the politics of
Hindutva or a rethinking of the partys self-definition. The BJP found itself
today in a predicament, declared Rajnath, similar to that faced by Coca-Cola
in the 1980s, when the company found itself steadily losing market share in
the cola wars with its big rivalPepsi.
Convinced that it no longer appealed to mass taste, Coke decided, fatally, to
change its original formula. The company then produced and enthusiastically
advertised a new Coke similar to its competitorwith more lemon oil and
less orange oil explained Rajnath, whose research on this subject appeared
to have been very thorough. But, far from winning back those who had
jumped ship, the new product was a disaster in the market, and Coke fell
away even more. Only when, chastened, it reverted to its original formula
and kept the faith in its original identity did it eventually make up its lost
ground. For Rajnath, the BJP was now in the position that Coke was in the
80s. Learning from history, it had to avoid the temptation to abandon
its original formula.
That original formula was, of course, Hindutva. The conundrum of how to
balance communal mobilisation with a wider, more inclusive appeal based on
socio-economic themes is, of course, the central dynamic of the BJPs history
(although no illustrative example could have been more anachronistic than
Rajnaths). Over the three decades of its political life these two themes have
been mixed up in different proportions at different times, often by the same
personalities, such as Advani himself, responding to expedient concerns. Or
else they have run in parallel, aggregating their rewards, as when personified
by the figures of Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the partys
heyday in the late 90s. Now Rajnath, while acknowledging that development
was the new buzzword of Indian politics, insisted that by hitching its cart too

closely to such a general idea it would be squandering its unique selling

point: a politics based on an appeal , first and foremost, to a hindutva ka
vichardhaara, sanskritic vichardhaara.
II
I WAS BORN IN THE SAME MONTH as the BJP: April 1980. We were both
approaching 30a life-number that in human consciousness usually
represents a stability of self, a higher self-awareness. Although I could hardly
claim, like Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdies Midnights Children, that my
personal fortunes had oscillated on the same curve as the larger entity born
at the same time as I was, it could certainly be said that my own responses
to the party over the years might be seen as a barometer of my generations
relationship to the BJP. Because of the BJP, the Hinduism of millions of
people of my generation now had a definite political valency.
As I watched Advani, the partys grand paterfamilias, now in the twilight of
his career, reminisce about the partys dramatic leap in political fortunes in
the 80s, I was taken back to the Sunday morning telecasts of Ramanand
Sagars Ramayan on Doordarshan in the Cuttack of my childhood. No one
was to be seen on the streets between 10:00 and 11:00 on those mornings;
one article estimated the audience for the serial at 91 percent of those
owning television sets. These broadcasts, although the work of Rajiv
Gandhis Information & Broadcasting ministry, did much to create a panIndian Hindu consciousness that would work in the BJPs favour and broaden
the appeal of its own agitation on the issue of the disputed Ram Temple in
Ayodhya.
I thought, too, of the day the Babri Masjid was brought down by kar sevaks
and miscreants late in 1992, and the riots and reprisals, some of them the
handiwork of the BJPs ideological ally, the Shiv Sena, that followed in the
Bombay where I then livedan experience from which the city has never
quite recovered. The citys Hinduism, until then was rooted in gestures such
as worship at its hundreds of temples and roadside shrines or even a bunch
of grass fed to a cow at a street corner, becameas right-wing nationalism
wanted it to bemore strident, demonstrative. Maha aartis in the evenings
at the temple opposite my house in Santacruz attracted hundreds of people,
and blocked off all traffic.
As the 90s rolled on, the BJPs power and influence waxed as that of the
Congress, rudderless without a Gandhi in charge, waned. Now it was
associated not so much with the agitation of the temple movement as with
government. I was a teenager when it came to power in Maharashtra for the
first time in 1995 in alliance with the Sena, and then a student in Delhi when
Sushma Swarajs government was somewhat unreasonably ousted in 1998,
mainly over the rising prices of onions. When we were both 18, the party
finally came to power at the centre, as the principal player of the National
Democratic Alliance. Although far from being the kind of Hindu the party

valorised, I found myself persuaded by the poise and intelligence of Atal

Bihari Vajpayee, who seemed to promise a government more vigorous than
that offered by the moribund Congress. When his government embarked on
a set of nuclear tests at Pokhran that year and declared India a nuclear
power, I was not to be numbered among the skeptics. At discussions on
university lawns in Delhi and later in England, against those who argued that
the party was at its very heart illiberal and communal, I argued that the BJP
deserved a chance to prove its worth.
But in 2002, watching news of the genocide in Gujarat from the security of
my room in Cambridge, the bubble of my youthful confidence in the party
burst, and the dark underbelly of its politics, particularly its links with
bloodthirsty right-wing groups, was laid bare. I was disillusioned, too, by the
party high commands equivocation over the Gujarat affair. In December
1992, in the wake of the demolition in Ayodhya, Advani had argued that the
BJP was actually firmly committed to secularism, and that the partys track
record of preserving communal peace in the states where it had formed a
government spoke for itself. Now that claim lay comprehensively dismantled.
Further into my 20s, as my own understanding of Indian politics and society
expanded, the partys view of Indian history and culture came to seem ever
less satisfactory. Yet, through my interactions with people and on my travels,
I had come to be intrigued, both as an observer of politics and as a novelist,
by the narrative power exerted by the partys founding fiction on the minds
of many middle-class Indians like myself. This was the idea that Indian
culture is rooted in a Hindu ethos and worldview, and that Indian Hindus,
because a double-standard secularism that ignored the sentiments of the
majority community, were disorganised, defensive about their faith, and
therefore accomplices in the desertion of the central principle of their
civilisational history. In centuries gone by, Muslim rule and British colonialism
had been responsible for Hindu debilitation. But in an independent India in
which their primacy has been re-established, Hindus had no one else to
blame but themselves for their marginalisation. Or, as an article called Angry
Hindu published in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sanghs Organiser in the 80s
put it, Really speaking, I am more angry about myself than about others.
In this view, now widely shared and propagated by middle-class, upper-caste
Hindus, India was really our country, and the BJP was brave to speak the
truth about the historical primacy and present inadequacy of Hindus in India,
while the Congress merely flip-flopped and tried to be all things to all people.
The other side of this belief, based on a longstanding and widespread animus
now given the confidence to speak out, was a contempt for and pained
sufferance of communities outside the Hindu fold, particularly Muslims, who
were mainly imagined in the abstract and not in the particular. On many
long-distance train journeys, I saw older people brought together only by the
accident of adjacent seat numbers forging a bond over casual conversation,
as one might discuss cricket or cinema, about the rapidly growing size of the
Muslim community because of polygamy and high birth rates, or the wily

conversion tactics and plots of Christian missionaries.

In one particularly sickening instance, when my train from Mumbai to Delhi
stopped one evening in Godhra, a middle-aged man waiting, like me, to get
out onto the platform for a stroll looked at me and said with a laugh, Modi
Nagar! As much as our fabled tolerance or peacability, this schadenfreude,
too, was part of the deep structure of our society, particularly now that travel
and mass media had allowed people to think and imagine not through
the lens of local categories and traditions but the global, unqualified
constructs and the hollowed-out narrative and overwhelming power of words
like Hindu, Muslim, and Indian.
These were tendencies not created by the BJP, but rather exploited by it. So
there was something inevitable about its rise in a democracy only a few
decades old. A charitable view of the BJP was to see it as a kind of safety
valve, allowing voters to express their resentment democratically and
peacefully. In this view, nationalism of the classic blood, soil and culture
variety, as propagated by the BJP, inevitably contained within it the seeds of
xenophobia, but could be moderated by democracy and the rule of law. A
less sympathetic interpretation would note that the BJP not only channeled
the agitation of a pervasive default setting in society but also stoked it,
seeking to reinforce and multiply this suspicion and hostility, and,
paradoxically, to boil down Hindu identity itself to a mirror image of the
stereotypes of the other it generated.
At 30, then, I was more curious than ever to see and hear from up close the
representatives of Hindutva, and to listen to the party in conversation with
itself as an insider might. I was also curious to see first-hand how the party
envisioned its own future direction after the chastening defeat at the
hustings last year, and in a new time where the appeal of the colour saffron
had begun to run dry. For three days I found myself wandering through the
personalities, lexicon and imagery of an alternative, fully-formed universe
very distant from my own: pracharaks and swayamsevaks, Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, nationalism and pseudosecularism,
Atalji and Advaniji, Hindutva and Bharat Mata, the cow and the Ganga,
polysyllabic Hindi and Vedic advice for the 21st century, and green and
saffron without the white in between.
III
THE CYNOSURE OF ALL EYES at the convention is not Advani or Narendra
Modi, the partys two most charismatic faces, nor Sushma Swaraj, the new
leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, but an innocuous, shambling,
slow-moving figure in his early 50s, dressed like a middle-level manager in a
plus-size shirt and very baggy pants.
Until December 2009, when he was appointed the new party president in
preference to more prominent members of the partys second generation like

Swaraj, Modi, or Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari was almost unheard of in Indian
politics outside his native Maharashtra. He had never before won an election
to a state or national legislative assembly; his one term in high office was as
the widely praised Public Works Department minister of the BJP-Shiv Sena
government in Maharashtra from 1995-99.
A Brahmin from Nagpur, the headquarters of the RSS, and himself an RSS
swayamsevak in his youth, Gadkari enjoys the confidence of the body that
serves as a pressure group and veto power on the BJP. After the electoral
and internal crises of the past year, the party had sought someone who
represented both the traditional values of the partys parent body and the
spirit of a new generation, and with no history in the power struggles of
Delhi. This was Gadkari.
Despite his relative inexperience, the new president exhibits a certain savoir
faire. The day before the convention began, he made a trip to Mhow to pay
his respects at the birthplace of BR Ambedkar. During his inaugural speech,
this prosperous industrialist supplied to the delegates the image of himself as
a humble party worker, whose work, once upon a time, was painting walls
white (because my own handwriting was bad) so campaign messages could
be written on them, and rolling up carpets after meetings. That a person
such as himself could rise to the highest post of the party, he argued, is a
compliment to the party and its cadre, particularly in a political landscape
where powerful families have wrested control of parties.
More persuasively than many leaders invested in ushering in a new era,
Gadkari returns repeatedly to first principles, to notes of warning and selfrestraint. We should think: what kind of political culture do we want to be a
part of? he asks, enjoining delegates not to go around touching the feet of
leaders, especially his own. Past mistakes should encourage reflection about
the thin line between atma-vishwas (self-confidence) and ahankaar
(arrogance). The party is to make a conscious effort to reach out to
scheduled castes and tribes, minorities, the lower middle-classes and the
poor. After all, isnt this the true meaning of Deen Dayal Upadhyays concept
of Antyodaya, or reaching out to the last man? Without actually crossing his
predecessor, Gadkari was taking issue with Rajnaths more static view of the
party.
It is no doubt an oration with some real thought behind it. Its idiom, too, is
consistent with its message; Gadkaris Marathi-accented Hindi, with the
occasional burst of English, much more a language of the street than the
partys more ornate and Brahminical traditional idiom. Intrigued by the new
president, I sit down that night under the flickering tubelight of my cheap
hotel roomdespite the tents, every room in town is takento read Politics
For Development, a curious little book Gadkari published in English last
October, before his elevation to high office.
The book, easily available online as a PDF file, outlines Gadkaris vision for

Maharashtra, which at the time of writing formed the boundary of his political
world, but it is also a kind of autobiography. It is written in a simple,
unpretentious English, with the odd grammatical error commonly made by
the Indian English-speaking tongue confirming that it is an original
composition. It is devoid of rhetoric, with only the odd quote from Deen
Dayal Upadhyay or John F Kennedy to garnish its plainspoken style.
Remarkably, for a BJP voice, it never excoriates the Congress, preferring
instead to lay out a purely constructive agenda. The only contemporary
political figure it references is American president Barack Obama, who has
harnessed the concept of Politics of Development for all-round development
of the country.
The word development appears 112 times in this work of 86 pages, and
Hindu only once. Development, the book holds, is the primary good that
must be delivered to society by politics. Politics itself must never come in
the way of development. The book positions the writer, and by extension his
party, as holding the imperative of good governance above ideology. You
have every right to decide your own political inclination, the author writes to
an imagined reader, as if to stir him or her out of a lets play it safe and vote
for Congress reflex. If however you observe that the party which you favour
has pitched a candidate who is not seen chasing the development agenda,
whats the harm in electing a candidate who is not from the party of your
choice but has the potential to drive development?
Gadkari also demonstrates an impressive command of local conditions,
jumping nimbly, almost proprietorially, from one site in Maharashtra to
another (The sewage water of Nagpur is collected at Bhandewadi. It is then
recycled and supplied to the Koradi thermal power project,which is close
by....Can we consider treating Mumbais wastewater and carrying it to Nashik
via Thane in a pipeline? This water is enough to generate 2000 MW
electricity.) Appropriately enough for a book written by a self-professed
moderniser and reformer, it ends with three pages of answers given by the
writer to questions asked to him on a live Internet chat at Rediff.comhard
to imagine someone like Rajnath doing that.
There was enough seen of Gadkari at the convention to take seriously the
claim made by Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, Gadkaris contemporary in student
politics and now the director of a training institute for BJP workers in
Mumbai, that the new president was a non-conventional politician in a
conventional politics. It remains to be seen how Gadkari handles incidents
like Varun Gandhis indefensible speech in Pilibhit during last years election
campaign, one that generated a further set of disingenuous equivocations
among the party high command. The BJPs own young Gandhi, while present
at the convention, did not appear on stage, though posters all over town
proclaimed him the Bhavishya ka agaaz, or the voice of the future. In March,
Gandhi was made a secretary on Gadkaris team of office-bearersmany of
them new faces and a third of them womenas was the founder of the
Bajrang Dal, Vinay Katiyar. Even so, to many kinds of watchers not

enamoured of the BJP in its current avatarwhether it is the neutral

observer hopeful of seeing the BJP fill the space potentially available for a
broadly free-market, right-of-centre politics, or the sceptical one resigned to
the BJPs long-term presence as a revanchist force in Indian politics and
wanting only its worst tendencies to be kept in checkGadkaris resume
seems to promise a more moderate and liberal politics.
IV
A PARTY AS FIXED ON THE PAST as the BJPand not just a recent,
historical past, but a more distant, mythical pastmust continuously be
idealising that past on the one hand, as if seeking a return to it, and of
funneling it into the present on the other. Although it is only 30, the BJP
would have us believe that in spirit it is about 2000 years old. Two such
examples at the convention demonstrate the enormous archive of narrative
material available to the BJP.
Prominently on display at Indore, adjacent to the main convention centre, is
a small cowshed with five cows. The cowshed is part of an elaborate little
gau--complex: a number of small pits and storage tanks, a thatched house
with a solar heater, a small field with the earth turned over, white boards
with diagrams and notations about the gai ka arthashastra, or cow science,
and a stand with bottles, jars, and vials of products made with cow urine.
Nanaji Deshmukh [a Jana Sangh leader who passed away later in February]
has said, Do acre zameen, ek parivar, paanch govanshtwo acres of land,
one family, and five cows, declared Rishi Tiwari, a local party man whose
dealership in tractors and interest in energy-efficient technology had found
expression in this display. The centre of the rural household in India is the
cow. It gives milk, pulls the plough, provides pollution-free transport. Even
the cows waste products are useful. What you are seeing here is a cowbased village.
Tiwari led me past a bail motor, a device that, when turned round and
round by a cow at an even speed, would recharge a truck battery in eight
hours. Right now, though, the cows were resting, and instead, a group of five
women from the local BJP unit were amusing themselves going around in
circles dragging the lever. Next up was an animal-powered thresher to cut up
the hay that the cows themselves eat; and a water sprayer that used power
generated by the very cow pulling it through the fields.
Of course, none of these devices were commercially available yet to their
potential market of 100 million buyers, but that would all happen in good
time. Nor was there a wider vision yet for the urban cow, contributing
nothing but cow pats to the streets where it roamed unchecked, or chewing
the cud and flicking its tail at flies all day long in a tabela.
The point of this display, said Tiwari, is to show how we can become a

superpower through ox power. A little over 200 years after the Industrial
Revolution, it was not easy to imagine such an eventuality coming to life. But
then again, every grand scheme in this world was an idea before it was
reality.
That evening, I attend a two-hour session on, surprisingly enough, global
warming and climate change. Anil Dave, a Rajya Sabha MP from Bhopal and
a member of the Indian delegation at the recent world conference on climate
change in Copenhagen, delivers a precise, clipped presentation on the
subject to a rapt audience, hitherto never particularly moved by the subject
of global warming. My science is a little backward, and like many others in
the hall I find myself taking notes and feeling bad that I consume energy and
fuel so unthoughtfully.
Dave offers pragmatic suggestions about what can be done by individuals
and communities to reduce global warming, and points out how we are guilty
of a selfish, short-term perspective by not factoring in environmental costs
when thinking about the price of consumption. Because of the global
warming crisis, the world is slowly coming around, in his view, to the Indian
or Vedic way of looking at the environment holistically, through a concept
such as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, or the world as one interlinked and
interdependent family. Let us resolve, he urges his audience, to be the
most environmentally conscious society in the world.
It is an ambitious speech, one that gives the assembly the sense that they
were at the centre of the movement against global warming, and not a group
of spectators watching from the margins. Later I catch up with Dave, an RSS
swayamsevak who joined the BJP six years ago, as he spoke into a
delegates mobile phone to record a message to the children of a school
about caring for the environment. I ask him how he came to specialise in an
area rarely given any importance in Indian politics or civic life. I think that
properly to be a Hindu, or an Indian, he replies, is to always think of ones
relationship to the environment.
V
ALTHOUGH THE BJP is emphatically a nationalist party, it is not, and
probably cannot in its current form be, a national party. This seemed clear
even at a conference of its own delegates. The default language of the
convention was Hindi, which immediately divided the assembly into insiders
and outsiders, those from the centre and the north much more at ease than
those from the east, the northeast and the south. Of course, language is a
minefield for every pan-Indian event, and there can be only so much
accommodation for diverse tongues. But not the slightest concession seemed
to be granted to non-Hindi speakers. Just as every Indian is assumed by the
BJP to be a part of a monolith called Indian culture, so too it seemed an
assumption of the convention that every delegate possessed a working
knowledge of Hindi, both oral and written. All the delegates were urged to

make a tour of an exhibition hall documenting the BJPs history, but the text
of this exhibition was entirely in Hindi. A couple of speakers from the south,
including the former party president Venkaiah Naidu, apologised for their
poor Hindi and chose to speak in English. Some others, like Ananth Kumar of
Karnataka, soldiered on bravely in a faltering, platitudinous Hindi without
grace or personality.
Indeed, even on a map of the BJPs position across Indian states, it appears
that the farther the state from Hindi, the farther it is too from the attractions
of Hindutva. The BJPs vision of Indian history and culture is linked to the
language in which it is most commonly expressed and transmitted. It is
something that sounds plausible only in Hindi, particularly the Sanskritised
Hindi favoured by its leaders. Politically, the party is a marginal presence in a
long Indian corridor from Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south all the way up
to the northeastover two days and 2,800 kilometres worth of Indian
territory on the 5629 Guwahati Express, with only a brief stop in Bihar for a
breath of BJP air.
Although many of the speakers at the convention claimed that the party was
far more open-minded than its opponents had made it out to be, in practise,
the categories adopted for the sake of argument themselves gave the lie to
this claim. It was claimed that the party was not hostile to Muslims per se, as
was often believedit was only opposed to those Muslims who, while they
lived in India, bore allegiance to some other territory or idea or grouping.
The very structure of this formulation was paranoid. It was hard to believe
that the party seriously felt that any Muslim would buy such a contorted
argument. A Muslim, even if not the first thing was known about him, was
already in a special category in the eyes of the party.
Then again, the party seemed to project a similarly blinkered and reactionary
view with respect to its own imagined core constituency of Hindus. A genuine
commitment to the rejuvenation of Hinduismif we assume for a moment
that this Hinduism is actually in crisiswould require an organisation that
celebrated the great diversity of thought and practice within Hinduism. This
seemed well beyond the BJPs Hindi-belt bias and militant tenor. Despite the
odd instance of creative interpretation, the partys nationalism still seems
basically uncurious and inflexible, desirous of bending every Hindu to the
adoption of a saffron kit consisting of the Ram temple, the Gita, the Ganga,
Vande Mataram, and Bharat Mata ki Jai rather than accommodating the
divergent adherences of caste, culture and geography. A session on the
purification of the Ganga was reduced to a set of eulogies about the place of
the Ganga in national life and the miraculous properties of its water, while a
resolution on terrorism became the occasion for a characteristically bellicose
oration by Narendra Modi. When the chief minister of Gujarat alleged that the
Centre had offered his government no logistical or financial support on the
matter of state security and bellowed, Mujhe barood chahiye! (I want
weapons!), a roar of applause went up entirely out of proportion to the issue
at hand, as if enjoying the sinister undertones of the message.

What the BJP appears to need at 30and what Gadkari seemed to be trying
to dois the articulation of a more flexible, inclusive expression of its core
ideology, which is now the task of its second generation after the departure
of the old guard. But even if the new president came as a moderate and
modernising voice, the tribalism and inhospitability of the original formula,
now deeply embedded in the partys psyche, were plainly on view in Indore,
and seem sure to come seeping through even in its fourth decade.