44 years on, two things that have changed in Modi’s BJP, and one that hasn’t

As the BJP heads for a likely third successive term in power, it’s fascinating to debate how true it looks to the original proposition: a party with a difference.

It was going to be a party with a difference, now Bharat Ratna Lal Krishna Advani promised as the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, subsumed in the doomed Janata Party experiment of 1977, was reborn as the Bharatiya Janata Party on 6 April, 1980. It was Easter Sunday; convent-educated Advani would say with delight that his party was resurrected on the same day as Jesus Christ.

Forty-four years later almost to date, as the BJP heads for a likely third successive term in power, it is fascinating to debate how true it looks to that original proposition: a party with a difference. How might it look when it turns 50, six years from now?

The basic postulates marking that difference from the rest (though mostly the Congress), will be its adherence to ideology and ideological purity, unapologetic Hindutva, an economics drawn largely from a founding father — Deendayal Upadhyaya — hard nationalism, humble, abstemious lifestyles and a collegial leadership.

At the peak of its political power now, the party, however, shows marked elements of ‘difference’ also from its own original proposition. An almighty personality cult to begin with. Until the rise of Narendra Modi, the party’s leadership was collective, for a long time led by a duo: Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani, the voice and the mind of the party, respectively. Leading from behind were the grandmasters of the RSS in Nagpur.

All this looks radically different now. Modi has risen as the sole, unquestioned leader. This is a fundamental shift in the party’s launch model. Of course, he has earned this on merit. This lies in his ability, like Indira Gandhi did for her Congress, to get the additional ‘Modi vote’, without which his party might have struggled even to reach 200 Lok Sabha seats. Vajpayee’s best was 182.

It now reaches a vote share and seat numbers that his party’s founders might have dreamed of but probably didn’t imagine becoming a reality in their lifetimes. It’s wonderful for the BJP. But it also marks a change in its original proposition, which was opposed to one-man (one-woman in this case, Indira’s Congress) parties. As it passes its 44th resurrection day, this BJP is as much Modi’s as the Congress was Indira Gandhi’s during her second coming in early 1980.

In the course of time, Advani and the party think tank he headed came up with the proposition that made their party stand out among the competition in India: its chaal, charitra aur chehra (its direction/method, character, and image).

We shuffle the order of the three attributes just a bit to take this argument forward. So: chaal, chehra and charitra. On the first, the party shows no deviation. If anything, its ideological positioning is the same as its actions and policies.

The slogan of sabka saath/sabka vikas/sabka vishwas might have been written by any of the founders of the party, or even the RSS. The party’s method and direction are consistent, from foreign policy to economics to welfare, religion, and society.

The next point, chehra, or the face (image), is where we see changes. The most evident, we spoke about earlier on: a one-man leadership. After Indira Gandhi, Modi is our first leader to be able to swing a nationwide ‘lamppost’ election: This lamppost is my candidate, vote for it.

This is great for the BJP, though contrary to its founders’ idea of the ‘image’, which, in that spring of 1980, would have been the opposite of Indira’s Congress. Now it has evolved into a mirror image.

The decline in the sway of the RSS is, in a way, collateral damage, though I am not sure the Sangh would see it that way today. The BJP’s ideological school is not only enjoying power and influence it might not have imagined, it is also seeing many of its dreams realised: Article 370, Ram Mandir (and probably Varanasi and Mathura to come), triple talaq and some more.

It was probably because of the breathtaking pace of the BJP’s rise under Modi that the party soon realised it had a human resources crisis. It simply did not have enough prospective leaders among the RSS alumni. They needed a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. One aspect of it is what we’ve seen in Maharashtra and Bihar.

The other is a wide open door for defectors from traditional rivals. Many of them come for easy power, some because they detest their original leaders, but many more are embroiled in corruption allegations and come to escape the ‘agencies.’ However much the Opposition may talk about its “washing-machine politics” the BJP couldn’t care less. What matters in politics, ultimately, is the election result. The rest is just noise, it seems to believe.

As a result, these acquisitions haven’t just got protection, many have risen to key positions that would normally be reserved for the party originals. This includes four chief ministers, all in the northeast where the BJP barely existed. Of these, Himanta Biswa Sarma is also the party’s czar in the northeast. At the high command level, Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda, who came in from the Biju Janata Dal, is now in charge of the campaign in Uttar Pradesh.

Former Assam chief minister and now cabinet minister Sarbananda Sonowal is a parliamentary board member. Besides assorted national vice-presidents, Basavaraj Bommai has been a chief minister, while D. Purandeswari(Andhra Pradesh) and Sunil Jakhar (Punjab) are state chiefs. And Samrat Choudhary, formerly a Lalu family and RJD loyalist, is the BJP’s deputy chief minister in Bihar. This is a spectacular change in the party’s cast of characters. It also underlines a change in character, or charitra.

Looking at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg outside my window is a prolific BJP campaign hoarding. It hails Modi as a fighter against corruption and features black and white (more black than white) silhouettes of familiar opposition leaders among the ‘corrupt’ he is up against. One of these is also in a typical AAP cap and wrapped in a muffler to leave no doubts. This is the party reasserting a charitra different from all of them. How it works with so many recent imports, from Ajit Pawar to Ashok Chavan and more, remains a question.

This week, The Hindu ran the findings of a CSDS-Lokniti poll. Its findings on the popular view on corruption are intriguing. It finds that 55 percent of Indians believe corruption has gone up in the past five years. That is 15 percentage points more than a similar poll showed in 2019. The percentage is mostly common across income segments, a little bit worse, in fact, among the poorest. Yet the BJP is positioning itself now as a party of anti-corruption crusaders. And you know what, the same poll says only 8 percent of people see corruption as the biggest issue, number four alongside the Ram Mandir and after unemployment (27 percent), prices (23 percent) and development (13 percent). This is a different political era, a different BJP. Is this also a different Indian voter?