An expansive view of the BJP

The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party

Author: Nalin Mehta

Publisher: Westland

Pages: 840

Price: Rs 999

There is no doubt that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India’s most dominant political party. After Prime Minister Narendra Modi assumed office in 2014, it registered remarkable territorial and social expansion. From being a traditional urban-based party with upper caste Hindus as its primary constituency, the party has penetrated rural hinterlands besides making inroads into other backward castes and Dalits, especially non-dominant communities in these caste groups. But does this make it the “world’s largest political party“? This claim was made in early 2015 at the end of an extensively publicised membership drive. Unlike China’s Communist Party, which follows an elaborate procedure of waiting and vetting applicants for their ideological commitment and motivation before enrolling them, a “missed-call” and a nominal fee was all that was required to become a BJP member. This programme was aimed at thumbing down already outsmarted adversaries. But should this claim be accepted in toto and put on the book’s title? This would have been justifiable for a party publicist but not when the author positions himself as non-partisan and states that the work is not about examining “whether what the BJP stands for is right or wrong for India or whether Hindu nationalism, as opposed to Hindu traditionalism, in a Hindu majority democracy is good or bad.”

This apart, the book comprehensively examines multiple facets that have contributed to the BJP’s success in consolidating gains made in 2014 to ensure permanence of presence. 

Nalin Mehta combines scholarship, in-depth reportage and first-person interviews with a wide range of senior BJP leaders and junior functionaries. It is commendable that many of these interactions, begun in 2019 it appears, were continued through the pandemic and would have entailed taking health risks. The book in its tonality, however, buttresses a harsh reality of Indian politics. A “price”, in the form of not being strictly impartial, has to be paid for gaining and retaining “access” to the leader(ship). As a result, there are tracts that are uni-dimensional while examining issues or initiatives. For instance, the narratives of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s chaupal initiative ignores the fact that it was mainly supporters that turn out for such gatherings.

Data journalism has made its advent in recent years. The author goes one step beyond crunching data from official sources and claims to have generated his own databases and indices. When this is limited to straight analysis of textual matter, as on how different issues are prioritised on different platforms of the Sangh Parivar —the results are enlightening. For instance, we know that the word “Modi” has the highest mentions on the BJP page while the sarsanghchalak’s Vijayadashami speeches and Organiser mention “Hindu” most frequently, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh page gives top billing to “temple”. Even on this, it would be interesting to break down the periods of mentions into “during elections” and “in between polls”, instead of in a single calendar year as the author does.

But when his database involves subjective categorisation, the conclusions become problematic. For instance, it is widely accepted that the BJP won major victories in Uttar Pradesh in 2014, 2017 and 2019 mainly because it won over sub-castes of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Dalits excluded from the power pyramid during the tenures of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party. From here, the author contends that besides the electoral constituency under Mr Modi, there has been a social transformation of the BJP. Mr Mehta questions the integrity of the data collected by Christophe Jaffrelot and Gilles Vernier as part of the project of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data and the analysis that flowed from it. The two scholars have not merely rebutted the author’s contention, but questioned the honesty of the much-mentioned Mehta-Singh Social Index. The disagreement is over how the two databases categorised some castes as OBC or not. Without stepping further into this academic feud, as a long-time Sangh Parivar observer, it would be closer to say that while the BJP has somewhat altered its chaal, and  chehra (strategy and public representatives) there is no significant alteration of its charitra (characteristics). Witness, for instance, the resurgence of Rajput assertion and this caste’s over-representation in executive positions in UP since 2017 besides cracks that recently surfaced in the party’s social coalition.

The book’s assumption is that the BJP’s current domination is permanent and does not factor possible erosion that may surface in subsequent elections. For instance, the author refers to the inroads the BJP made in rural Bengal in 2019 but this was not repeated to that extent in 2021. The book also looks at the successes, not the failures — such as why BJP has somewhat succeeded, periodically, in Karnataka, but has not done so in other southern states. Or, why the party often faltered in states where it is an incumbent.

Lucidly written, Mr Mehta breaks down BJP’s multiple strategies, much of which has been written over the past few years. But on issues that trigger a political furore every now and then, the author takes no stand, conveying the impression that his silence, too, is appreciative.

The reviewer is a NCR-based author and journalist. His latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India . His other books include The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times.  @NilanjanUdwin