Amazing are the ways of the Indian Right in repudiating its own soul. More than a decade into the 21st century and the BJP still thinks that its natural habitat is an arcadia of shopkeepers. The regressive rigour with which it rages against foreign investment in retailing shows how far the so-called party with a difference has retreated from the constituency that historically belonged to it. Now, at this dire moment in an India threatened by Walmart and Waitrose, the nationalists find themselves in the unlikely company of provincial scaremongers and Marxist fossils. I can understand why Indian communists oppose the shrines of capitalism: imagine those counter-revolutionary viruses from shop shelves migrating to the body politic of the proletariat. Also remember the sickening irony: our comrades' entire solar system is a tribute to Foreign Direct Investment in ideology. And the provincialists' idea of India is invariably smaller than their provinces. But why is the BJP there?
The answer is in the strange biology of the Indian Right itself. When the BJP came to power, the moment marked a historic cultural shift in Indian politics: the dead certainties of official secularism were swept aside by the renewed velocity of the nation. The BJP government vindicated an old truism: managing power is a greater task than the struggle against power. In those six years of slow disintegration, it was the personality of the prime minister that somehow made the politics of BJP bearable. Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister, in his unifying humanism and moderation, was larger than the sum total of the NDA. Two decisions that bore his personal stamp, in retrospect, took India to the right side of history. The second nuclear test at Pokhran was a bold statement of national assertion-and political will. Equally transformative was India breaking out of the Cold War mindset. It took India a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall to reach out to the brand new world. BJP government's engagement with Washington brought to an end the anti-Americanism of the Cold War vintage-an ism embedded in the mind of the left-of-centre ruling establishment. In the end, it was the "shining" fallacy of an economic slogan that undid the Right.
