One cannot help but agree with what Vellapally Natesan said about the BJP soon after the news broke of the party's biggest bribery scandal in Kerala.
The SNDP general secretary might be a novice when it comes to hardcore politics. He is a loud mouth too. But when he says that the BJP in Kerala "has insulted Prime Minister Modi by getting itself embroiled in a major scam", his words mirror the state of affairs the state unit of the party finds itself in.
Undoubtedly all the corrective steps taken in Kerala at the behest of party president Amit Shah has come to a nought with the turn of events in the last few weeks.
From caught red handed while making counterfeit currency to taking 'commission money' for enabling the safe passage of crucial permissions to set up medical colleges in Kerala, the BJP's state unit is exactly the opposite of what the saffron party projects itself across the country.
If 22 June will go down in history as a truly embarrassing day for the party's Kerala unit after one of its youth leaders was arrested for making counterfeit currency notes at his home in Thrissur, 19 July is a much bigger indictment.
A party functionary and a senior leader's name have cropped in the internal commission inquiry report saying that both were involved in taking an alleged kick back to the tune of seven crores.
Nothing seems to be right with the BJP state unit and that the party is only trying its best to get more and more alienated from the common man.
With the party's spokesperson himself admitting to malice that is killing it from inside, there is hardly any doubt that the BJP in Kerala has hit a new low.
"If there is a perception that the infighting in the party is perhaps a reason for this sorry state of affairs one can only say there is an element of truth in it. Whatever has been taking place in the last few weeks is something which is taking this party back to square one. This is terrible and some tough decisions will have to be taken soon," BJP state spokesperson MS Kumar told Asianet Newsable.
Indeed a tough action was put in place on Thursday when just 24 hours after the scam hit the headlines, RS Vinod, the key man behind the scandal and one of BJP's oldest functionaries, was thrown out.
Vinod, who was the convener to the 'corporative cell' of the party, is alleged to be the lynchpin behind this entire scam episode. In the scam, a Medical college based in Varkala was coaxed to pay crores of rupees as a kickback to fixers inside the Medical Council of India (MCI) through a prominent BJP leader in the state.
Though MT Ramesh, the party general secretary, had featured in the media as the prominent leader, Ramesh has denied it vehemently, and nothing substantial has emerged to prove his role too.
So at the moment, the BJP can perhaps get away by just sacking Vinod. Also that Vinod has hardly held any post of high importance in the state, to a large extent, allows the BJP to stick to its argument that its top leadership in the state has clean hands.
But the big question is, does sacking of Vinod set the records straight for the BJP? Will it be able to bring back the momentum developed post the 2014 Modi wave and the big breakthrough it made by getting the old warhorse O Rajagopal into the state legislative assembly?
"It's true that the BJP has had some feel-good factor for some time. But that is because the Modi factor had played its part in Kerala too. But to sustain that you need to have a responsible organisational set up here. You need leadership that is seen as powerful enough to lead the party. But the BJP still doesn't have that. It is like a free-for all situation," added Advocate A Jayashanker, a political analyst.
That the present fiasco is a result of an intense power struggle between the factions led by two former state presidents is perhaps very much evident by the people involved.
K Surendran, another general secretary, had openly hinted at the scandal in a Facebook post a few days ago.
That it became a tip off to an ever vigilant Kerala media is perhaps proof enough that leaking the inquiry report indicting RS Vinod and MT Ramesh was an insider's job.
While Vinod, the accused in this episode is close to Ramesh who allys with the Krishnadas group, there is a murmur going around that the entire issue is an attempt not only to fix the Krishnadas but also to unsettle the state President Kummanam Rajasekharan.
Not the party with difference
For years the belief was that the internal squabbles of the BJP were the primary reason the party failed to reach anywhere in Kerala in spite of a having a tremendous organisational machinery backed by a highly professional outfit like the RSS.
Kerala has the highest number of Shakas in the country. A staggering 5000 are held per day compared to just 1000 in a state like Gujarat.
Yet election after election the BJP could hardly muster the numbers to even throw a challenge to the CPI(M) or the Congress forget about winning anywhere.
But in the last local body elections in 2015 and then the assembly polls in 2016, the BJP managed to make its presence felt. Though their claims and targets were later proved to be fantasies, the party was able to win some local bodies, come second in a few and even managed to bloom the lotus inside the assembly.
But in a state like Kerala where one needs to have a sustained political strategy to break in and create electoral space among voters who swing from the Congress led UDF to the CPI(M) led LDF every five years, the BJP apart from the occasional sparkle had been found wanting at crucial junctures.
Take the present scenario - The LDF is certainly on a popularity deficit due to the perceptions of a misrule by the Pinarayi Vijayan government and the UDF has been in tatters with inept leadership and unable to perform the job of a constructive opposition.
Any other political party would have seized the opportunity, but certainly not the BJP. If there was one tag the party could still hold on to was honesty, especially with someone like Rajasekharan at the helm of affairs. But the two incidents have almost shown that it had just been a myth.
"Whether any senior BJP leader gets indicted in this whole episode or not, what this issue has done is to irreparably damage the party's image as one with a difference. Modi might show he is uncompromising with his stand on corruption, but his state unit here is exactly the opposite. Even people who would vote in the name of Modi now would think twice about associating themselves with these people here," says CR Neelakandan, a noted social activist.
Old wine in new bottle
K Raman Pillai is the former chief of the BJP in Kerala. But in 2007 the same Pillai had left the BJP to form the 'Janapaksham Party' after having had his differences with the then state leadership which he said: "had no concern for the future and had no idea what the party stood for."
Although Pillai later went to do political compromise and return to his parent party in February 2016, he had in the interim period written a biographical sketch of what the BJP with an insider's eye.
Pillai goes on to say that the party during the late nineties to mid-2000s had been corrupt to the core. From taking kick backs by allotting petrol pumps to those who were close to the state leadership during the regime of Atal Bihari Vajpayee at the Centre to selling votes openly in a number of constituencies to gross indiscipline and rampant misappropriation of funds, the BJP in the state according to Pillai was more of an organized syndicate than even a disorganized political outfit.
At one place he writes "...In Thiruvananthapuram party funds were collected without receipts. It was found that even in Mavelikara this is happening. I had asked the party treasurer to conduct an audit in all the 20 assembly constituencies. But when you do not receive records from any of the 20 constituencies how will you conduct and audit? No one knows where the money went..."
Perhaps his words sum up the way the BJP had functioned in Kerala over the years, completely opposite to the highly disciplined and professional outfit it is in the rest of the country especially north of the Vindhya.
Though many BJP leaders claim that most of it has changed and that the party in the state has travelled a lot from what it was a decade ago, the present turn of events shows that it is more or less the same old wine in the new bottle.
"See from what we see at the moment; it is the same old problems that are plaguing the party even now. There is rampant corruption and zero accountability inside the organisation, and the sad part is that the state leadership is not able to do anything to prevent it from going that way," added Roy Mathew, a veteran journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram.
The state government has meanwhile ordered a vigilance inquiry into what is now being called 'The Medical Colleges Bribery' case.
The way more colleges in the state got approval from the MCI is also likely to come up for investigation.
For the BJP, till now it's a small fish that has landed in the net. It might claim that it was its own internal enquiry commission that caught the small fish, but once the State Vigilance and Anti Corruption Bureau gets in, the picture could change drastically.
The party can only hope that none of its top brass in the state will find themselves on the wrong side of the law. That could be suicidal for the BJP in Kerala.
