40 and going strong
Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior journalist
A small but significant detail in the BJP’s first three-day plenary session at Mumbai on December 28, 1980, bears recount if only to reinforce its penchant to use symbolism and nomenclatures in its public manifestations and extract out of those images and names deeper political messages. The plenary was hosted on the Bandra Reclamation Ground nine months after the BJP’s launch, following an arduous and painful split from the Janata Party (JP). The JP’s socialist component wanted the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS) to sunder its links with the RSS, its ideological fountainhead. From its viewpoint, the BJS had already made an enormous ‘sacrifice’ by dissolving its identity and merging with an inchoate assemblage of political entities bound together solely by their opposition to Indira Gandhi; asking to disown a parent was unthinkable. The RSS was the ballast of the anti-Emergency movement of which Jayaprakash Narayan was the popular face. But a section of the socialists thought it expedient to dump the RSS. Its political offspring, notably Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani, refused. The ideological churn birthed the BJP.
Mohammadali Carim Chagla, an eminent jurist, diplomat and former union minister was the guest of honour. For years, Advani mentioned his presence on the dais because Chagla presciently stated that India’s future PM was seated beside him. That was Vajpayee who went on to lead the country from 1996 to 2004 with interludes. An endorsement from Chagla was important for the fledgling BJP because the socialists had projected the BJS as communally biased. The plenary venue was named ‘Samata Nagar’ as virtue signalling of an ‘inclusive’ outlook that was essential to try and live down the image of an entity whose base consisted of upper-caste traders and entrepreneurs. The BJP’s core team of founders came from a certain social strain: apart from Vajpayee and Advani, the members were Nanaji Deshmukh, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sunder Singh Bhandari, JP Mathur, VK Malhotra, Kushabhau Thakre, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, Sunderlal Patwa and Shanta Kumar. They were Brahmin, Rajput, Kayastha and Vaish, or Punjabis who arrived after the Partition. The backward caste and Dalit representation was missing.
In the 40 years that the BJP traversed, from being on the fringes to getting absorbed in India’s mainstream and being elevated to a hegemonic status, the journey was marked by reversals and breakthroughs. Underlying was a commitment to the RSS ideology that was broken by pragmatism whenever the Sangh found it expedient.
The journey began with anointing a Brahmin, Vajpayee, as the PM to paving the way for a presidential style of governance led by Modi, who comes from a backward caste of oil-pressers. However, Vajpayee did not belong to the club of North Indian Brahmins who made the Congress their abode. In that sense, the arrival and rise of the BJP marked a turn away from the elitist politics. Once ensconced in power, the BJP had no qualms about internalising the traits of the genre it seemingly despised.
Its history pans into three broad phases: mass mobilisation deploying ‘Hindu assertion and pride’ as the instrument to regroup the divided and disparate Hindus, formulating strategies to construct coalitions of dissimilar parties and acquire power, and building on a huge reservoir of social, economic and political capital to emerge as the preeminent force.
Vajpayee’s advocacy of the rather woolly ‘Gandhian socialism’ got the BJP nowhere. It was overpowered by the Congress in the 1984 elections held in extraordinary circumstances. BJP’s Pramod Mahajan described that election as India’s first collective vote for Hindutva. Whether the Congress interpreted the outcome the same way is a matter of conjecture but Hindutva became the BJP’s handle. The VHP’s cleverly crafted ‘Ram Janmabhoomi Andolan’, which began in 1985, took time to take off. Once it did, the RSS, under the tutelage of its brilliant ideologues Dattopant Thengadi, Ashok Singhal and Morapant Pingle, coopted the BJP in the ‘movement’ and eventually handed over the leadership to Advani, although privately, Singhal was not happy with the change of guard. Vajpayee was kept out. Ayodhya yielded to the BJP its first political success in the 1991 General Election. It got its first government in UP that year.
UP was in the throes of backward caste empowerment, triggered by the upper caste backlash against VP Singh’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission’s recommendation for OBC reservation. The BJP anointed an OBC leader, Kalyan Singh, as the UP CM. His ascendancy anticipated a process of the conscious nurturing of OBC representatives as leaders that resulted in the emergence of Uma Bharti, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Vinay Katiyar and Modi.
The BJP acquired two ‘prized’ catches in 1995, when the national commentariat thought it had entered another phase of being ‘untouchable’. This belief was challenged the day BSP founder Kanshi Ram dumped his ally, the Samajwadi Party, and embraced the BJP in return for installing Mayawati as UP CM. The second was when Nitish Kumar and George Fernandes, who founded the Samata Party, aligned with the BJP.
Vajpayee became the PM with the help of ‘secular’ allies, including the DMK and Mamata Banerjee. The BJP represented a departure from Congress’s politics: it broad-based its social appeal by reaching out to the backward castes and Dalits, and displayed a willingness to share power in equal measure with smaller partners.
Modi reversed the route adopted by Vajpayee. Instead of befriending parties, he got the Hindus on his side and cultivated a large vote bank. Electoral success meant that even his strongest traducers returned to the NDA. Vajpayee couldn’t transform the idiom of Indian politics. Modi has, but the consequences are not desirable as one community has been on the receiving end of the BJP’s pursuit of majoritarian politics.
