 "BJP is now a two-horse chariot")
A scene at the party’s national executive meeting paints a picture of how the BJP plans to execute this strategy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah sat next to each other on the dais at a meeting held in New Delhi this weekend. On Shah’s right sat senior leader L K Advani and on Modi’s left was Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The backdrop was of a huge hoarding with larger-than-life pictures of the two men from Gujarat on one side, and on the other side were tad smaller photographs of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Advani.
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The speeches of Modi and Shah reflected this division of labour. The thrust was somewhat identical to when Vajpayee and Advani were at the helm of the party. Vajpayee represented benign pluralism of the BJP and Advani followed the aggressive Hindutva line.
On Sunday, Modi attempted to be Vajpayee Mark-II. In his speech, references to the BJP’s commitment to nationalism were cursory and he also alluded to the recently held world Sufi conference. However, much of Modi’s speech was devoted to the government’s development agenda and its social welfare schemes. The PM said his government would march forward with one mantra — “development, development and development”. He asked party workers to not get distracted by other issues thrown at them by opposition parties.
Shah persisted with the nationalism line. He said criticism of the nation was not permissible, while that of the party, the government and its leadership would be tolerated. The political resolution of the party said it was unacceptable that people have refused to raise the slogan “Bharat Mata ki Jai (victory to mother India)”.
The BJP has laid out its politics for the next three years. It will go into the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on the twin planks of nationalism and development. During the two-day BJP national executive, Shah’s speech focused on the issue of nationalism, as did the press conferences of Jaitley, senior leaders Rajnath Singh and Ravi Shankar Prasad.
The only person to talk about development was Modi. To buttress the point that Modi was India’s “vikas purush”, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu described him as the Modifier of Developing India.
A BJP strategist said there was clarity in the party that it needed to keep its core support base engaged by keeping the pot simmering on the issue of nationalism, while the PM would lead the government to retain all who had voted for Modi for his promise of achhe din, or better days.
For this, the party machinery would organise events that “exposed” the Opposition’s lack of commitment to the cause of nationalism. The PM, however, would always be seen on platforms that espoused social harmony and would inaugurate projects that signified development.
The Prime Minister’s Office had identified construction of roads, development of ports, electrification of villages and development of the telecom sector as some of the key projects to showcase the government’s intent as well as delivery. It is also hoping that money, in the form of subsidies, would start reaching each beneficiary’s bank account by the time the next Lok Sabha elections come around.
BJP leaders said it had the Congress and Left parties on the run on the issue of nationalism, which would help it outmanoeuvre the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress as also the Sangh Parivar’s ideological enemies, the Left parties. On Wednesday, on the martyrdom day of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, the BJP launched a three-day event to highlight the “bankruptcy” of the Congress on the issue of nationalism.
But what has worried the party leadership was a re-run of the 2004 India Shining campaign. It leaders pointed out that the Vajpayee government of 2004 couldn’t adequately spread its message of its achievements and lost the elections. In the national executive, both Shah and Modi harped on the need for the more-than-110 million workers of the BJP to take the message of the government and the party to the grassroots, and devised several plans to ensure round-the-year engagement of party cadres with the people at large.