Family sounds Familiar ?

" Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
------------
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity "


Yeats could have had the present day state of affairs within the BJP in his mind when he wrote these lines. Indeed, the locus has become unidentifiable.

Quetelet says, a thousand Stalinist purges and a country full of Gulags will not solve the BJPs problem. For it is not an issue of ideological purity, cadre motivation or alignment. It is more elemental than that...

The BJP is in utter chaos because it does not have a first family. Since there is no family there is no interest in perpetuating the party and keeping it in power. In the absence of this family, there are only individuals power hungry individuals.

Perverse (and sad) though the argument may be, it is entirely true and Quetelet believes that the truth is the only substrate on which politics can lead to power.

The BJP needs to subscribe more affirmatively to the theoretical and practical reality that a political formation in a democracy has to ‘sell’ itself to the voters. Therefore positioning is as important as advertising – i.e.- Who am I (or Who are We) is not more important than Why Buy Me (Or Why vote for us in this case). A party in the electoral fray will have to modify the voter’s current frame of reference by increasing the salience of that benefit which it is best capable of presenting to her/him. Since a family grows, evolves and perpetuates itself, it can control its positioning as a political brand much better than a consortium of individuals.

The persuasiveness of an appeal to the voter finds sharper cut through with a living family. Not for nothing has the family survived as the core unit of society, business even crime !!

To twist up a famous quote from Leo Tolstoy :

Happy (parties) are all alike; every unhappy ( party ) (lacks a family) of its own.