The BJP leadership has decided to bite the bullet

Goodbye, Mr Akbar. The exit of the Union minister of state for External Affairs is testimony to the liberal sensibility of middle-class urban India, which cuts across ideological lines. The growing chorus of opinion against him among rightwing intellectuals, affronted at Akbar’s un-sanskari behaviour and mystified by the tacit support he appeared to command, exerted strong pressure on the BJP leadership.

Even among the national office-bearers of the BJP, the sentiment was firmly against M J Akbar. BJP president Amit Shah was told that Akbar ought to go on ethical grounds, regardless of the consequences. In any case, the collateral damage to the BJP from the ‘MeToo’ movement was likely to be far worse if he was allowed to continue. Fingers were being pointed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and to some extent, at the RSS. Colourful conspiracy theories, with immense potential for embarrassing the BJP, were doing the rounds. For each day the PM and the RSS maintained their deafening silence on Akbar, votes were being lost.

The BJP leadership decided to bite the bullet. Once the decision was taken, on the morning of October 17, it did not waste any time. Akbar was told to put in his papers at the earliest.

Sighs of relief went up across sangh and party circles. Granted, the RSS is a patriarchy, headed and managed by celibate males. But Mohan Rao Bhagwat’s three-day lecture series last month indicated a conscious inclination towards a progressive outlook. While its superstructure is male-dominated, the householders within the sangh hierarchy are in touch with changing social norms. Many have daughters who are successful professionals, which explains the angst against Akbar. One RSS think-tank removed Akbar from its board even before he put in his papers!

In retrospect, the BJP leadership’s silence may have stemmed from a belief that the movement would die in a fortnight as public interest shifted to the next big scandal, or that Akbar’s defamation suit against the first complainant, Priya Ramani, was the end of the matter. If so, it miscalculated. Such errors of judgment are rare as far as Modi and Shah are concerned. They are risk-takers, but their gambles tend to be carefully calculated. Their legendary political acumen is based on a deep understanding of the electoral psyche, with the result that apparently counterintuitive moves have proved phenomenally successful. The pain of demonetisation translating into a landslide electoral victory in Uttar Pradesh is one example.

But this time, they were dealing with a constituency of which they appear to have little or no understanding: the urban middle-class woman and her network of family and friends. An indispensible part of the workforce, she is buoyed by the support of a vast and varied sisterhood as well as the men within her social frame. She is articulate, voices her opinions and takes her own decisions.

Akbar and his votaries erred in seeing Ramani as a hapless individual, who would not be able to withstand the might of the establishment for long. In so doing, they turned her into a cause celebre. ‘She’ is now a movement, with a hundred thousand heads. And not even the combined efforts of 97 lawyers can shut her up.

L’Affaire Akbar has not yet ended. The very fact that he took it to court will keep it alive. If he unleashes a legal blitzkrieg, so much the better for the 20 women who have declared they will bear witness and so much the worse for him. The hope that public interest would steadily diminish to the point of invisibility, has been belied. MeToo will not die and the chorus against Akbar will not be silenced. He will encounter it in court, in Parliament and in the press.

The fear across the political establishment is that Akbar’s exit will open the floodgates and a number of politicans may be outed. This is unlikely, because no matter how libidinous a politician might be, he is morbidly conscious of his public image. In the age of informationalism and ‘sting’ operations, he is aware of his vulnerability (as a Congress MP discovered a few years ago, when he was covertly filmed in flagrante delicto with a colleague). The allegations against Akbar, it must be noted, do not refer to his tenure as a politician, but as a journalist. Anyhow, he was a chronic offender.

The Opposition would do well not to politicise the matter. Akbar may have been a member of the BJP,he was also a trusted lieutenant of late Rajiv Gandhi. This is one of the very rare instances when ideology has been set aside in a larger cause. Women and men, from the left, right and centre, came together to demand justice. Some things are bigger than politics.

The writer is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author.