Prime Minister Narendra Modi is now well in control of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). He has installed his close lieutenant Amit Shah as the party president. However, people’s memory is short. The founding president of the BJP was Atal Behari Vajpayee who subsequently occupied the office of Prime Minister to lead the NDA government, a coalition of several parties.
The miracle of Congress demise took place under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narain, a Gandhian socialist. There was such a strong anti-Congress movement that all non-Congress parties, including the Jana Sangh, came together on one platform. The old Jana Sangh members were very particular about maintaining their links with the RSS. This meant that the Hindutva ideology would remain to define the party’s agenda.
JP’s clothes of secularism did not fit the pro-Hindu Jana Sangh. Despite that, JP admitted it into the opposition coalition fighting the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. JP was conscious that the Jana Sangh was a political arm of the RSS. But he had been given an undertaking that the two would part company.
When the Janata Party came into being, JP insisted on the Jana Sangh members, who occupied key positions in the Janata Party and government, severing links with the RSS. JP knew how they had created an atmosphere where a Hindu would assassinate Mahatma Gandhi. Nathuram Godse touched Gandhi’s feet and shot the Mahatma point blank. It became clear later that there was a well prepared plan. The RSS was banned. The organisation’s chief M.S. Golwalkar was arrested. He was released after a year or so on the assurance that the RSS would not enter into electoral politics. It is another matter that they hid the fact that they are the guiding force of first the Jana Sangh and today the BJP. It is the RSS that selects the BJP candidates for both the State Assembly elections as well as the Lok Sabha.
The undertaking given by the Jana Sangh regarding severing its links with the RSS was a ruse to join the Janata Party. JP’s reminders to Jana Sangh leaders to make good on their promise had no effect. How could they do so, when the Jana Sangh itself was an RSS creation, with the avowed aim of creating a Hindu Rashtra? Initially, the Jana Sangh members tried to explain to JP that the RSS wasn’t what it was made out to be. When it came to the crunch, they refused point-blank to break ties with the RSS. JP felt cheated. But by then he was too sick to go back to the people to expose the Jana Sangh. He did make it public that his trust had been violated but he was helpless because of ill-health.
When the Janata Party raised the question of membership issue, the Jana Sangh members preferred to walk out. But by now, the Jana Sangh, now metamorphosed as the BJP, had acquired considerable credibility, something that the Jana Sangh had not managed for several decades after Gandhi’s assassination.
The two-year stay in the Janata Party and the portfolios they held in the central ministry helped the BJP immensely. It sought and got control of important portfolios like information and broadcasting. It also gave it the credibility to rapidly gain new members and saffronise them.
The BJP also adopted at that time a positive stance which confused the Hindu intelligentsia. Atal Behari Vajpayee was at helm of affairs, and he did a balancing act and rode two horses at the same time. Simultaneously, issues like Ayodhya-cum-Babri Masjid dispute and other factors, also enabled the BJP to gain considerable following and led to the BJP winning 181 Lok Sabha seats in 1998, against its usual single digit tally, in a 545-member house. After that, even JP’s close followers found alibis to join hands with the BJP in the NDA so as to stay in the driving seat.
The BJP was now desperate to widen its base. Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani minimised the differences between the political BJP and the totalitarian RSS. He had done everything to “unify” the Hindus, the most dangerous being the rath yatra to Ayodhya that he led across northern India, dividing Hindus and Muslims who had lived together for centuries. Advani was so satisfied with the result that he equated the rath yatra with Gandhi’s Dandi Salt march.
Prime Minister Modi is underlining all the time that he is bigger than the party. Even after four years’ of rule, it is not clear in which direction he is taking the country. Granted that his diluted form of Hindutva is spreading in the country, but this process has stopped at the Vindhyas. The southern states do not seem to give the impression of full participants.
And once again, the introduction of Hindi is creating the same problem, as it did during the last days of Jawaharlal Nehru. Then his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, assured the nation on the floor of the house that the switch over to Hindi would take place only when the non-Hindi speaking states were ready for it. It is up to Modi to see how he is able to reconcile the two different trends. Only time will tell if he can to do so.
