Bharatiya Janata Party president JP Nadda has suggested that his party doesn’t need its ideological patron, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, to win elections anymore. In an interview with The Indian Express, he said: “Shuru mein hum aksham honge, thoda kam honge, RSS ki zaroorat padti thi…aaj hum badh gaye hain, saksham hain…toh BJP apne aap ko chalaati hai – We might have been less capable in the beginning, needed the RSS, but we have grown today and are capable. The BJP runs itself.” So does he not need the RSS for political activities? The ruling party president said in the interview that it was “not a question of need” as the RSS does its own ideological work and “we do ours”.
“Powered by our karyakartas (workers) we have emerged as the preferred choice of 140 crore Indians,” Nadda added.
Read between the lines. Essentially, he is saying that the BJP is winning elections with the power of its own karyakartas. That is to say that if the BJP wins the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the credit goes to BJP workers. Not the RSS karyakartas who have been aiding BJP’s victories through decades of hard work on the ground and by actively helping the party to capitalise on their goodwill during elections.
What prompted Nadda’s statement?
Not for a moment should you assume that Nadda is dissing the RSS. He won’t. He is a product of the Sangh Sakha and has held multiple posts in the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the Sangh’s student wing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was an RSS pracharak while home minister Amit Shah was associated with the ABVP. So, there is no way that Nadda would say anything against the RSS.
To understand why he said what he said, let’s look at what PM Narendra Modi had to say about the 2014 Lok Sabha election in an interview with British author and former BBC correspondent Lance Price. Price’s book, The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India, was released in early 2015. “Past elections have shown Indian culture is such that people have tremendous faith and trust in the individual. People wanted clarity about who the leading person will be and I was seeing this question asked in every meeting I attended and hearing vociferous chants of ‘give us a trusted name, not a party name’,” Modi told Price, as I reported in the Hindustan Times. “In all corners of the country, they believed Modi was the only hope and wanted to see him win,” the prime minister had said.
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BJP powerful in its own right
In a nutshell, the BJP’s victory in 2014 was all about Modi, not the BJP or the RSS. His views haven’t changed. Remember the number of times ‘I’, ‘Modi’ and his guarantees figure in his speeches.
So, what is Nadda driving at? He is suggesting that, while Modi might have been the biggest factor in the BJP’s victories, the BJP has also become big and robust in its own right. It needs the RSS only for ideological guidance, not to win elections. In 2019, the BJP became the world’s largest party, claiming to have 18 crore members. Sceptics might quibble that the party never made public the data of members constituency-wise or state-wise. But nobody can doubt that the BJP is now a mammoth no other party comes close to.
Nadda’s assertion about the BJP’s organisational strength is relevant to the succession debate, which should have ended with Amit Shah’s remarks that Modi will lead the country till 2029 and beyond. It continues nonetheless. If and when there is a battle for succession, the BJP’s organisational strength, largely attributed to Shah, is likely to become pertinent.
It’s generally considered that the RSS will be the deciding authority whenever a decision on Modi’s successor has to be made. But that can’t be the case if the BJP has become so capable that it can win elections on its own without any help from its ideological patron.
The RSS can, therefore, focus on its “socio-cultural” agenda, leaving the BJP to pursue its political agenda in its own way.
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Importance of RSS support
This brings us to the crux: Can the BJP do without the RSS? 2024 general election results may throw up some indicators. People sitting on either side of the fence may differ on who the winner will be but they tend to agree on one point—there is no Modi wave even though the PM remains very popular. That’s where the organisation – of the RSS and the BJP – becomes important, especially to bring those people to the polling booths who are otherwise indifferent this time.
There’s a significant chunk of people who may not be very enthusiastic about a third term for Modi but who don’t see any alternative in the Opposition camp. Given that there are no overpowering emotive issues at play, it becomes important that BJP/RSS cadres reach out to the people to tell them why Modi’s guarantees are crucial for them and the country.
After travelling extensively in Uttar Pradesh’s hinterland, my colleague Sanya Dhingra reported a lack of enthusiasm among the RSS cadres, especially in constituencies where the BJP has fielded defectors from other parties and where it has ignored Sangh workers’ choice to thrust another candidate. “My heart has soured, an RSS Swayamsevak (volunteer) on the ground told her, explaining why they were lying low this election.
A Sangh functionary pointed out to me that the states where the BJP is expecting an upswing in this election— Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, among others – are the places where the BJP is not strong organisationally and banks on the RSS for its growth. The Sangh works on charitra nirman or character-building. “But when the BJP inducts people without character from other parties, Sangh swayamsevaks are bound to go cold,” he told me. As my colleague Amogh Rohmetra reported, one out of every four Lok Sabha candidates of the BJP is a defector.
RSS karyakartas may, therefore, turn indifferent in these constituencies. Not that they will not vote for the BJP. Surely, they will. But they would loathe to brave the sweltering sun to convince people to come out and ensure the candidates’ victory. Usually, there is a constituency-level coordination mechanism between the BJP and the RSS during elections and the initiative for this comes from the candidates themselves. Defectors would find it difficult to coordinate with RSS swayamsevaks.
The 2024 poll results in states where the BJP has been traditionally strong and has built a robust organisational set-up down to the booth level – such as UP, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan – will indicate whether the party is in a position to come out of the RSS’ shadow.
Having said that, PM Modi is still a very strong pull factor for a large number of voters who don’t need BJP or RSS cadres to take them to the polling booths to ensure his victory. How many of them will do the same when the election is not for PM Modi is anybody’s guess. Nadda’s suggestion that the BJP is capable now and can run its own affairs without the RSS’ help can be truly tested only in the post-Modi era.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)