Most thinking, writing, research and scholarship on the Bharatiya Janata Party obsesses about its Hindutva ideology, the parent Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the BJP’s election strategies. The 40th anniversary of the BJP is an occasion to think deeper about the meteoric rise of this party.
Hindu nationalists had been around since Independence in both politics and society. But the turning point of 1980 was crucial, because it’s this avatar of Hindutva that has now become so wildly successful that it mirrors the Congress hegemony of yore.
The Congress party likes to be proud of its legacy, of being a 135-year-old party. This historical heft exists only in the imagination of its supporters, because the Congress has been transformed so many times that nobody really sees it as the party of Gandhi or even Nehru anymore.
If you were an anti-Congress person in 1980, it would have been very depressing to see Indira Gandhi getting voted back to power just three years after the humiliating defeat in 1977.
It would have been even more depressing if you were a Hindu nationalist, because even the main opposition, Janata Party, didn’t want you. The secular socialists challenging Indira Gandhi under a coalition decided no one could be a Denver of both the Janata Party and the RSS. Choose one. The Hindu nationalists were out, forced to form their own new party, a fresh start after all these decades of being around in Indian politics but not really going anywhere. They still wanted to lay claim to the Janata legacy, so they called it the Bharatiya Janata Party. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the founding president.
The Congress and other opposition parties today are not doing half as badly as the BJP was in the 1980s. It may thus be useful to take a closer look at what the BJP did right to reach where it has.
Convert ideological cause into mass movement: The single biggest factor in the rise of the BJP was the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. The party did not immediately succeed — it gained power at the Centre for the first time only in 1996. But the Mandir movement took the party’s ideology from the fringes to the masses.
The Congress and other opposition parties today worry a lot about ideology as Hindutva becomes dominant. The Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, arguably the biggest political movement in post-Independent India, is a good example of what ideological success takes. Some of the other major disruptions in Indian politics have also happened due to public movements and mass mobilisation, most recently the 2011 Jan Lokpal movement.
National first, states will follow: Throughout the 1980s, the BJP was a fledgling party, winning a few seats here and there in various elections. But it was the nationwide Ram Janmabhoomi campaign that lifted the BJP’s fortunes in national as well as state elections.
This is in contrast to the approach the opposition has taken today, seeing state elections as the way to gaining power in Delhi. Creating a national narrative and campaigning around it to win Lok Sabha elections does not necessarily need state politics. Narendra Modi in 2014 and 2019 once again showed how national elections don’t have to be a mere sum of the states. To succeed nationally, think national. States will follow.
Also read: How is Modi’s BJP different from the one founded by Advani-Vajpayee 40 years ago?
Institution building: Lal Krishna Advani built this new party from scratch. He created a new, second rung of leadership, some of whom are still around (Rajnath Singh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Kalyan Singh, Narendra Modi). By building leaders, processes, institutional systems, Advani created a foundation on which the tall building stands today.
Who in the Congress party, or even most other parties, is trying to do long-term institution building?
The right face: L.K. Advani stood aside and let Atal Bihari Vajpayee take centre stage, because Vajpayee was relatively the more moderate and acceptable face of the BJP for coalition-building and gaining power. As an orator, Vajpayee was far superior, and thus the right face for the public.
This was despite Advani playing a bigger role in building the BJP and taking the party to the masses through the Mandir movement. Contrast this with the Congress, which isn’t willing to even try a non-Gandhi as its face, no matter how much the Gandhi family fails at the job.
Balance ideology and strategy: The BJP has been clear about both furthering its ideology and winning elections. There is no contradiction between the two. Furthering the ideological cause needs power. And gaining power may need tactical compromises with ideology.
So when the BJP was founded in 1980, it adopted both Deen Dayal Upadhyaya’s “integral humanism” and Gandhian socialism as its dual principles.
Since 1980, it has oscillated between a hardline approach and a moderate approach. This oscillation sometimes seems like desperation, doing whatever it takes to win power.
But seen as a whole, it seems to be a well-designed strategy. A moderate position helps the BJP gain new followers, supporters, and voters. And once it has gained their support, the BJP brings back its hardline Hindutva stance. The formula repeats on a loop. The Mandir movement was preceded and followed by a ‘moderate’ approach. Modi the ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ did a development-only campaign in 2014.
This alternating approach helps achieve both objectives: ideology and power.
The Congress and other opposition parties often see a contradiction between ideology and power. They think they can’t win elections because their commitment to secularism isn’t selling, and some of them think they should junk secularism. But the alternating strategy of the BJP provides a good model.
Also read: Why can’t the opposition tell people to do things from their balconies?
Guard ideological space: There are many secular parties in India, but there is only one Hindutva party. The Shiv Sena is not really a Hindutva party anymore, but even when it was, it was the only one and the BJP allied with it. The BJP has ensured in its 40 years of politics that there are no Hindutva splinter groups. Having been on the fringes of power, it knows the importance of ideological consolidation. All Hindutva forces are together, from the BJP to the Bajrang Dal.
The Congress, by contrast, allowed itself to be splintered again, thus fragmenting secular politics. This fragmentation did not happen for ideological reasons but for the inability of the Congress high command to accommodate the aspirations of local leaders amid factional in-fighting. Most recently, the Congress’s refusal to promise a Rajya Sabha seat to Jyotiraditya Scindia led to his exit. The BJP doesn’t make such mistakes and when it does (Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharti), it rectifies them.
Accommodate caste: The BJP used the Bofors sentiment to piggyback on the popularity of then prime minister V.P. Singh, with the larger aim of defeating the Congress. But when V.P. Singh announced OBC reservations by implementing the Mandal Commission report, the BJP opposed it. Exploiting the anti-reservation sentiment, the BJP was able to break away the upper caste supporters of the Congress. Simultaneously, the BJP worked on the OBCs. Today, the BJP has a prime minister from an OBC community. RSS member K.N. Govindacharya worked on the OBC project.
By contrast, the Congress allowed itself to be uprooted by the rise of the OBC movement and has to date not been able to figure out the caste strategy. Most of the top national leaders of the Congress party are still upper caste, with notable exceptions in some states: Ashok Gehlot, Siddaramaiah, and Bhupesh Baghel.
A re-invention of caste strategies in different ways is the need of the hour in all parties. The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) are struggling to reconcile the Yadav vote-bank with other castes. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is limited to its Jatav vote. How the BJP can be an upper caste-dominated party and still woo OBCs, even Dalits and tribals, is a model to study.
Propose to oppose: L.K. Advani always spoke of the BJP as an alternative model, and alternative vision. It wasn’t simply anti-Congressism (the failed Janata Party and Janata Dal experiments had little other than anti-Congressism going for them). The BJP’s successes have come through proposing rather than opposing. Even a negative campaign like demolishing a historical mosque was articulated through a positive-sounding proposal of building a mosque elsewhere. Narendra Modi proposed a different model of governance and development (no matter what you think of it), and did not limit himself to opposing the UPA-2.
The Congress and much of the opposition today come across as having no positive agenda other than anti-Modism. It may do well to look at the history of the BJP to see why positive campaigning works best.
The author is contributing editor to ThePrint. Views are personal.