A picture and a video clip of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP national president Nitin Nabin went viral on 4 August. At the NDA parliamentary party meeting, they were talking and sharing a hearty laugh. No matter what the Opposition says about the PM’s laughter, I always find it so joyful and infectious. It reminds me of my childhood days when I used to be enraptured watching my grandfather laugh his heart out. Joie de vivre, as the French say about the joy of living.
The picture, however, left BJP leaders confused. Because they don’t know what made them so happy. Just the day before, the party had suffered a huge embarrassment as poll strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor trounced the BJP candidate in an Assembly bypoll in Bankipur, the BJP national president’s pocketborough.
If their laughter was meant to convey that all is well and jeet-haar lagi rahti hai (victories and defeats are part of life), the message wasn’t very reassuring. It was problematic on four counts.
The optics are all wrong
First, the situation demanded different optics. An apt picture or video clip would have the PM stare down at Nabin, virtually conveying to him—“If you can’t defend even your own Assembly seat, how would you lead the party into the next general election after 15 years of anti-incumbency?” Nabin couldn’t even find a suitable BJP candidate on his own family turf as his nominee, Abhishek Sinha, withdrew from the race a day after filing nomination papers, forcing the party to field another candidate. Imagine the BJP national president picking up party candidates for so many Lok Sabha constituencies as well as Assembly seats in other states.
Bankipur defeat poses questions about PM Modi’s selection criteria. Remember how JP Nadda virtually completed a second term as the BJP national president without being re-elected. It was because the PM and Home Minister Amit Shah launched what was probably the most intense talent search for an organisation head anytime and anywhere in world history. So much was the curiosity, suspense and anticipation in India and abroad! Modi-Shah finally picked up Nitin Nabin.
At 46, he became the youngest BJP national president. He is a Kayastha—an upper caste. Gen Z and even upper caste voters in Bankipur failed to appreciate the BJP’s masterstroke in making Nabin the national president. PM Modi isn’t feeling let down, though. At least, the photograph doesn’t suggest so. Nabin also doesn’t need to burden his conscience with any guilt. In 2022, the BJP lost on Nadda’s home turf, Himachal Pradesh, on his watch but went on to virtually have a second full term in office. Nabin may also have many questions about the choices of chief ministers and even party office-bearers, especially the Central BJP team he has inherited from Nadda.
The second problem BJP leaders and workers might have with the jolly picture is that it gives an impression that their leadership either don’t read the warning signs or are trying to laugh it away. At the government level, the all-is-well message comes from the one-year extension to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan and Union Home Secretary Govind Mohan. It’s a signal for continuity in governance.
As the Union Home Secretary to whom the Delhi Police report, Govind Mohan had direct accountability for the huge lapses in handling the students’ protest in the national capital. Let’s not even talk about his accountability for internal security, say, in Manipur or elsewhere in the country. The extension of his tenure shows that the government finds his record outstanding.
By the way, Mohan, a Sikkim cadre IAS officer, was once very close to the then Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje. As her secretary, he wielded enormous influence in Rajasthan. In a way, Mohan’s rise in bureaucracy has been inversely proportional to Raje’s dwindling political fortune during the Modi-Shah regime. That tells us again how career bureaucrats can be smarter than the smartest politicians.
Mohan’s predecessor, AK Bhalla, got four extensions despite the fact that he was the Union Home Secretary when the 2020 Delhi riots happened and when the situation in Manipur flared up. Bhalla was later made the Manipur Governor.
Once a bureaucrat earns Shah’s trust, he goes places. Look at the example of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. As additional secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs, he was deeply involved in the formation of the Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra trust, which has been under intense public scrutiny of late over donation theft. Kumar became Secretary of the Shah-led Cooperation Ministry before getting into the Election Commission.
Anyway, coming to the extension of the Cabinet Secretary and the Home Secretary, it may be a sort of assertion by Modi-Shah that they don’t see the need for any big change in the current governance model. They may go for a big overhaul after the
dust settles. An indication of that will come from PM Modi’s speech from the Red Fort on Saturday.
Also read: RSS-BJP are playing good cop, bad cop with Indian youth
Loyalty over performance
The third problem with the said Modi-Nabin picture is probably a hint or suggestion that failures of individuals don’t really matter to the BJP as long as PM Modi is leading from the front. Other faces or leaders in the party are like extras in a dance sequence, and how well they dance hardly matters to the audience. There is nothing new about it, of course. There are so many examples of BJP leaders losing Lok Sabha elections only to join Modi’s Cabinet. Those days are gone when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had used Jaswant Singh’s loss in the 1998 Lok Sabha election to stall his induction into the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government as the finance minister.
Nowadays, even when a sitting chief minister—such as Uttarakhand’s Pushkar Dhami—loses his seat in the Assembly election, the BJP retains him in the chair. It depends on his or her loyalty quotient, of course. In 2017, when veteran BJP leader and former Himachal Pradesh CM Prem Kumar Dhumal lost his seat, Modi-Shah chose to ignore his yeoman’s service to the party to install Jairam Thakur as the CM. There is a very senior BJP functionary who can truly relate to Nabin’s woes after the Bankipur loss. It’s Dushyant Kumar Gautam, a national general secretary. He lost from Karol Bagh Assembly seat despite a virtual BJP wave in the last Delhi Assembly election.
Last but not least, the Modi-Nabin photo may end up depressing the BJP’s grassroots leaders and karyakartas. They don’t have any say in the party’s decision-making processes, anyway. When Nadda’s extension as the BJP president ended in June 2024, nobody told them who authorised him to continue in the post for the next one-and-a-half years. Nobody told the karyakartas what went on behind the supposed ‘election’ of their party president, Nitin Nabin.
They enthusiastically participated in the party’s membership drive. The party leadership hasn’t bothered to release the membership data to inform these karyakartas about the number of members in their Assembly or Lok Sabha constituency. They are just expected to carry out the orders they receive from the party bosses.
Talk to mid-rung BJP leaders or karyakartas today. They are struggling hard to understand how the party bosses look at the seeming erosion of the party’s hold on the youth and even upper castes, and how they themselves are supposed to respond to it. What to speak of ordinary karyakartas, even BJP MPs remain clueless. They have been waiting to hear from PM Modi and HM Shah. In a first, the PM didn’t address the last two weekly NDA parliamentary party meetings even though he was present there.
PM Modi and BJP president Nabin laughing makes a great photo, but it has failed to cheer up millions of BJP workers and leaders. In their minds, they may be trying to figure out the difference, if any, between a family-ruled Congress and the BJP now.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)