When, unlike his son now, Madhavrao Scindia refused to join hands with the BJP

It was in the late 1990s that the late Madhavrao Scindia gave me an enduring lesson in ideology and power politics.

The government of Atal Behari Vajpayee at the Centre had collapsed after 13 days in power because not one MP would touch the BJP with even a barge pole for its recent involvement in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

I know as a matter of fact that Pramod Mahajan and Kirit Somaiya, the then moneybags of the party, had overreached themselves to persuade members of Parliament from other parties to support their government but not one would be convinced.

Then there were a series of governments of the secular United Front which were supported by Madhavrao as the president of the Madhya Pradesh Vikas Congress. He had formed his own party after falling out with former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao who he had blamed for implicating him in the Jain Havala diaries. The BJP

had not been an option despite the fact that his mother and sisters were leading members of the party. Madhavrao too had followed in their footsteps by initially starting political life in the Jan Sangh but soon changed his mind because he could not adjust to that ideology, he told me.

In 1998 he dissolved his party to return to a Congress where Rao was now marginalised. He was soon made general secretary in charge of Maharashtra and during one of my many conversations with him during this turbulent phase in Indian politics where governments were being toppled with great frequency and elections being held again and again, I expressed the view, after Vajpayee’s government fell by one vote, that Vajpayee might find it as difficult, as in 1996, to find enough numbers of MPs to support his government if the BJP fell short of a majority again.

“Oh, don't be under any illusions,” he shot back. “There is nothing like ideology for these power-hungry people. Very few are committed to their values. They will go to whoever forms the government, Vajpayee or Deve Gowda.”

When I reminded him of 1996, he said that was the shock and surprise of the BJP winning such a large number of seats in the Lok Sabha. No one could wrap their heads around what had happened, so they dug in their heels and stuck to their tried and tested ideological positions. But now that they have got used to the idea of the BJP winning, they have also worked out how to worm their way into a coalition led by the BJP, he said.

“Power is what they really care about. If the BJP can give them ministerial berths and Rajya Sabha nominations, the BJP is no untouchable at all. The moment it goes out of power, they will switch back to whoever is in a position to form the government,” he said, adding ‘unless they are among the very few committed ideologues like him who know what their values are and will have nothing to do with parties practising bigotry and religious discrimination’, he told me.

Sadly, Madhavrao died in a plane crash shortly after that conversation and did not live to see the return of the Congress to power. Notably, the Congress-led UPA government was then supported by parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which were also part of the Vajpayee coalition government. There have been others like Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress or even Omar Abdullah of the National Conference who would do the same flipflop over the years.

But what I did not expect was that Madhavrao's son Jyotiraditya Scindia would do the same and prove his father so right all these years later at a time when all the other political parties and leaders who did not find it hard to flirt with the BJP today give it a wide berth for the manner in which they are poisoning and destroying the country.

For all that Jyotiraditya has chosen to get into bed with the BJP, I wonder why he could not have formed his

own political party if he was really upset with the Congress which over the past 18 years gave him everything he deserved or, according to many Congress workers, over-rewarded him beyond his capacity to serve the party. If he was really upset with the Congress, his own party on the secular side of the divide, as his father’s was, would have been a far more acceptable option, particularly as at this moment in time when the Congress is at its nadir, it could have helped to consolidate Congress ideologues across the country behind him and perhaps also lead the Congress at some point in the future.

Scindia is young enough to have been able to pull it off as Sharad Pawar could not two decades ago when Sonia Gandhi outsmarted him and rallied the party behind herself. But at least Pawar did not compromise his secularism and today is among the tallest leaders in the country, not just at the head of his party but also possibly of a future coalition, given his role in the Maharashtra government formation.

However, not everyone is a mass leader like Sharad Pawar as perhaps Madhavrao was too – that is why even the latter never lost his family seat of Guna, even without the backing of the Congress. If his son could be defeated by a former party worker by over one lakh votes, it does raise questions about his connect with the masses and that is why perhaps he could not have formed his own political party.

Whatever he might now say about the Congress, it is clear the trappings of power were more important to him

– he has now got the Rajya Sabha seat that he wanted. But it will be interesting to see how he resolves the ideological contradictions between his former party and the present one.

In his father’s time, courting the BJP was a mere power-game. Under the current dispensation, the toxicity of its ideology is irreconcilable with every norm of civilised and democratic discourse. Anyone of Scindia’s intellectual stature who consciously embraces a party that is destroying the Constitution and shaking up the foundations of the modern nation deserves no sympathy.

Perhaps Jyotiraditya had other compelling reasons to join the BJP which we are not aware of. But the damage he has done to himself is likely to be longer-lasting than his Rajya Sabha term or that of the Modi government.

Views expressed in the article are the author’s own