cover of ‘Rise of BJP’ By Bhupendra Yadav and Ila Patnaik
The BJP’s main plan in 2014 was not to become complacent after its victory, but to commit to building the party as an organization. The BJP assessed its growth prospects, acceptability and representation and started building on them.
During the Congress rule, constitutional institutions were actively misused to target BJP leaders. Concocted cases were registered against top BJP leaders including Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. After the Samjhauta Express blasts, Congress leader P. Chidambaram laughed at ‘Hindu terrorism’. The party tried to attack the Sangh Parivar and the BJP by branding them communal and projecting Hindutva as a divisive strategy. Both the Sangh and the BJP felt it was imperative to counter the Congress’ misinformation and stigma campaign. At this time Suresh Soni was the Joint General Secretary of the RSS and coordinated with the BJP on behalf of the RSS. Soni worked closely with Modi, Shah, Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj and other senior BJP leaders on key issues. RSS’s Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat had a modern and practical and open approach. Suresh Soni as Joint General Secretary of RSS and Bhaiyaji Joshi as General Secretary worked in close coordination and had a moral influence on the BJP. This close coordination helped the BJP grow and expand its voter base by countering the Congress narrative on ‘Hindu terror’ and discrediting the campaign against BJP leaders.
Meanwhile, the BJP was moving towards a change of party president. The first cabinet featured Rajnath Singh as the Home Minister. BJP rules forbid a person to hold two posts – one in the party and the other in the government. The principle is one of prime minister who focuses on policy and party president who focuses on the party as an organization. Therefore, a new party president was needed. The natural choice was Amit Shah.
Amit Shah came to prominence in 2014, when under his leadership the BJP won seventy-one seats in Uttar Pradesh, compared to ten in 2009. It was arguably the biggest election victory in the history of the BJP. This achievement would have been remarkable had the election campaign been led by someone from Uttar Pradesh; This was extraordinary considering that Amit Shah was from Gujarat. He took over as the party president on 9 July 2014. At the age of fifty, he was the youngest BJP President.
It would have been easy to be victorious in July 2014, it would have been natural to be complacent. However, there were important aspects about the achievements of the BJP, which required mature appreciation. The vote share of BJP in 2014 was 31.3 per cent. 5 In many ways, this was an election that Congress lost through a combination of anti-incumbency, policy paralysis and corruption; Such unusual moments will not always happen again in the future. There were many important parts of the country where BJP got less than 5 per cent votes. These included large states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, West Bengal as well as the north-eastern states. In addition, there were around 200 constituencies where the BJP did not have an effective presence. The 2014 National Council meeting held in New Delhi said, “There is a lesson for the organization in these elections. The wave of popular leaders and sentiment gets converted into votes where the organization is strengthened, and local leadership is established. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the organization in all the states of the country and it is our responsibility.
Shah looked to the future and prepared the BJP to build a new level of organizational capability, one that would garner a high vote share even in the face of an anti-incumbency wave, one that would have its own merits without a particularly weak opposition. will win on the basis of One that will expand geographically and be adopted by a wider group of the population. Such strategic thinking was part of the culture of the BJP. For example, in 1957, Deen Dayal Upadhyay said, ‘Today’s opponent should be our voter tomorrow. Tomorrow’s voter should become our member the day after tomorrow and our member should later be converted into our active worker.
While the party president has an important role, there is an ethos of avoidance of top-down control, and there are other components in the core team. Traditionally, organizational secretaries have played a very important role in the development of the party organization and its ideological anchoring.
In the early years of the party, Sundar Singh Bhandari was the organizational secretary, who hailed from Rajasthan and introduced the culture of Pravas (organizational tour) within the BJP. He strengthened the party in Rajasthan and a large part of North India. Kushabhau Thackeray strengthened the party in central Indian states like Madhya Pradesh. Thackeray did important work in the tribal areas of the state. Even though he was not an exceptional public speaker, his transparent decency inspired a grassroots activist. KN Govindacharya gave a new dimension to the BJP, which increased its acceptance by widening the social base of the BJP.
During his tenure as Organizing General Secretary, Modi imparted a political acumen to the systematic internal processes of the BJP that took every decision and led to the party’s large expansion in North India. Ram Lal also did some very important work in expanding the BJP by motivating the grassroot level workers with systematic and systematic outreach. V. Satish, BL Santosh, Shiv Prakash and Saudan Singh as Joint General Secretaries have likewise contributed to an efficient, capable and thoughtful organization. These layers of competence were created not only at the level of the national party. Even at the state level, the organization secretaries ensured that the party cadre is motivated, deepening the relationship with the people on the ground.
The equation that the BJP shared with the RSS helped in its ideological expansion. The RSS helped in cadre feeding through ideological engagement with BJP workers at the grassroots level.
The modern BJP represented the culmination of decades of work, combining organization design, ideology, political strategy, social acceptance, election campaign methodology, mass membership, communication, fundraising and population-scale outreach.
On 9 August 2014, Amit Shah addressed the BJP National Council meeting at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi. He focused on building the organizational capabilities of the BJP, making the BJP an impersonal institution. He said: ‘I want to say a few things to the party workers in the context of the near future. If we look at the functioning of the booths at the national level, we come to know that the booths are weak.
They need to be strengthened. Second, BJP workers should not leave any election from Panchayat to Parliament. Every election is an opportunity for expansion, every election is an opportunity to connect with the masses, every election is a window to take the ideology of the party to the people. The party should contest all elections no matter what the outcome.
I want to tell all the units of Bengal, Odisha, Seemandhra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Kerala that people of these areas voted for us but we could not convert votes into seats because our vote capture machinery, our organization is weak. these states.’
As part of this work program to strengthen the party, he introduced two amendments to the party constitution. One was concerned with making the party’s membership an online, technology-driven practice and the other dealing with the responsibilities of the party’s primary and active members. He executed one of the biggest expansion programs that transformed the BJP into the largest mass party of the country.
One of the major reasons for the BJP’s defeat in 2004 was that when the party was in power from 1998-99 to 2004, most of the big and experienced leaders became part of the government. The BJP had the experience of being in the opposition and strengthening the organization but its first chance to remain in power and manage the organization came in 1999. There had to be a link between the work of the government and the organizational campaigns. But unfortunately the connect was missing. In 2014, when the party came to power again, the BJP actively worked on the organizational front to manage its campaigns and movements. The BJP ensured that the party workers remained associated with the activities and campaigns of the party for 365 days. Amit Shah introduced changes in the party which had become the need of the hour. The Namami Gange event was one of the prime examples of this government-party linkage. When the government announced the program, BJP workers were linked to the Namami Gange project. When the government launched the Swachhta Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), party workers started a nationwide project for cleanliness. When the Prime Minister gave the slogan of ‘Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao’, the party started campaigns related to the program. It established a strong link between the implementation of the policies of the government and the actions and programs of the party.
(Published with permission from Penguin Random House, from ‘The Rise of the BJP’ by Bhupendra Yadav and Ila Patnaik. Order your copy Here,
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