Swamy impact, shifting goalposts—7 takeaways from BJP’s national convention

19/02/2024

If you watched and read about the deliberations at the two-day national convention of the Bharatiya Janata Party that concluded on Sunday, you might have got a sense of déjà vu: One leader after another singing paeans to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, resolutions showering praise on him, the PM’s name figuring 84 times in the 11-page political resolution, and deafening Modi-Modi chants. Nothing new. There were some interesting titbits, for sure. One of three resolutions devoted a paragraph on five Bharat Ratna awardees. It cited party veteran LK Advani’s contribution as “a fighter for democracy against the Emergency” with no mention of his role in the Ramjanmabhoomi movement. That was understandable, too, wasn’t it?

Seven key takeaways

There are broadly seven takeaways from the speeches delivered and the resolutions passed at the national convention.

First, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy had the mighty high command on the backfoot. He had threatened to take legal action against the party on “the lack of internal party elections as violative of statutory and constitutional provisions” and the extension of BJP president JP Nadda’s term in contravention to the party constitution. He had written to the Election Commission about it, and wrote to Nadda on 6 February 2023, informing him about the same.

Nadda’s three-year term as BJP president had ended in January 2023, but it was extended till June 2024 in view of the Lok Sabha election. The party’s national executive had approved the proposal to this effect. On Sunday, the BJP’s national convention amended the party constitution, authorising the parliamentary board to take decisions regarding the president, including his term and extension, in emergency situations.

Second, the resolutions and the speeches at the convention highlighted the three prongs of the BJP’s campaign strategy for the 2024 Lok Sabha election — Modi, Ram, and Rahul Gandhi.

The three resolutions were on: Viksit Bharat (Developed India), Modi’s Guarantee; Bhajapa-Desh ki Asha, Vipaksh ki Hatasha (BJP- Country’s Hope, Opposition’s Despondency); and the Ram Mandir. In a similar exercise in January 2019, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, BJP’s national council had passed two resolutions — on the welfare of the poor and agriculture. The shift in the BJP’s strategy is obvious: From Modi and agriculture and to Modi and Ram.

Third, the latest resolutions mark another shift — from the BJP’s claims of undoing the wrongs of the Congress governments in the past 70 years to taking people into a new era or kalachakra in which cultural renaissance and civilisational pride must get primacy over immediate temporal, mundane concerns. The day of the consecration of Ram Lalla in the Ayodhya Temple — 22 January 2024 — was the “renaissance of India’s spiritual consciousness and the beginning of the journey back to great India”. “This heralds the establishment of Ramrajya in India for the next one thousand years with the beginning of a new kalachakra (wheel of time),” said the resolution on the Ram Mandir. “Even a millennium from now, people will continue to discuss with fervor this timeless era under the leadership of the Hon’ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi ji,” said the resolution on Viksit Bharat, Modi’s Guarantee.

A millennium from now! Well, why not? That’s the essence of the BJP’s resolution. And when one talks in terms of decades and even a millennium, a difference of two-three years for temporal achievements doesn’t really matter. The resolution also said that India will become a $5 trillion economy by 2027. In December 2023, Union home minister Amit Shah said that it would happen by the end of 2025. In January 2024, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said it would happen by FY28. A couple of weeks later, urban and housing affairs minister Hardeep Puri said, “There is no need to wait (for $5 trillion economy) until 2028; it will happen by 2024-25.”

Well, you may be confused about the timeline, but a couple of years here and there have to be insignificant in a new kalachakra. It’s as much a trifle as asking for a timeline for the 2021 Census or the rollout of women’s reservation in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies.

The shift from 2019

Fourth, when Ramrajya gets established, the BJP can let go of smaller, temporal things. The 2019 resolution on agriculture had a subhead that read: “Aim of Doubling the Farm Income”. Four months before that too, in September 2018, the party’s national executive had affirmed the government’s “resolve to double the income of farmers by 2022”. “There are two commitments that I am extremely passionate about—doubling of farmer income and housing for all by the year 2022. With your support, I am sure both will happen,” PM Modi wrote in the BJP manifesto dated 8 April 2019.

Covid-19 ostensibly threw a proverbial spanner, but doubling farmers’ income is no longer talked about at all. As for housing for all — rebranded as Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana — it has got a new deadline in 2024. Incidentally, the resolution on agriculture also spoke about the Swaminathan Commission report and how the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government sat “idle and quiet on this significant issue of the welfare of the farmers of our country”. Cut to 2024: Farmers in Punjab and elsewhere are agitating over a host of demands, including the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission’s recommendations. The BJP’s new resolutions are silent on this issue — only a single paragraph talks about ‘farmers’ welfare’, with no mention of doubling their income or the Swaminathan Commission.

The dynast question

Fifth, running down the opposition is a given. The national convention passed a separate resolution on the opposition’s hatasha or desperation. The BJP still finds juice in the opposition’s dynastic politics, no matter how many dynasts it has inducted—the latest being former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan, son of ex-CM Shankarrao Chavan. “Sonia Gandhi’s aim is to make Rahul Gandhi the Prime Minister, Sharad Pawar’s to make his daughter Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee’s make her nephew CM, Stalin’s to make his son CM, Lalu Yadav’s to make his son CM, Uddhav Thackeray’s to make his son CM, and Mulayam Singh Yadav ensured that his son becomes the Chief Minister,” Amit Shah said at the national convention.

The BJP’s resolution echoed the same. While the party’s targeting of dynasts is an old strategy, what’s interesting is how Shah chose seven of them—Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagham. This fits into PM Modi’s revised stance on dynasties — dynasts are okay, but dynastic parties are a threat to democracy.

There is, however, another dimension to this. While the BJP is not a dynastic party, riling against such parties begs the question about its allies — two factions of the Lok Janshakti Party, led by late Ram Vilas Paswan’s son and brother, Anupriya Patel’s faction of the Apna Dal, Ajit Pawar-led NCP, and Conrad Sangma-led National People’s Party, among others. Shah was also silent about other dynasts such as Sukhbir Badal of the Shiromani Akali Dal, Nara Lokesh of the Telugu Desam Party, Jagan Mohan Reddy of the YSR Congress Party, and Naveen Patnaik of the Biju Janata Dal. The BJP is obviously confident that voters treat BJP dynasts and opposition dynasts differently.

Sixth, India Today’s latest Mood of the Nation survey indicated that the country is divided over whether or not the Modi-led government has reduced corruption, with 46 per cent of the respondents saying ‘yes’ and 47 per cent saying ‘no’.

But the BJP’s resolutions suggest that it is convinced that corruption charges against opposition leaders still work electorally. They cite cases against leaders of the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) even as they defend central investigation agencies, asking why opposition parties didn’t act against leaders from whose houses ‘corruption money’ was recovered. The BJP-led government can afford to carry out opposition-centric investigations because as the PM said at the convention, his 23 years in power have been “aarop-mukt” or taint-free.

Seventh, BJP’s resolutions reflected concern regarding the growing perception that the party is bringing down elected governments to usurp power. Or so it seems from the concerted attack on the Congress for destabilising governments in the past, starting from the misuse of Article 356 by former PM Jawaharlal Nehru to bringing down the governments led by Chaudhary Charan Singh, Chandra Sekhar, Deve Gowda, and Inder Kumar Gujral. The resolution on the opposition also cited the imposition of the Emergency in this context. “The Congress that called Mamata Banerjee the most corrupt leader has got her as a part of INDI alliance,” it said further, unmindful that Banerjee has refused to tie up with the Congress in West Bengal. For that matter, Modi had called Ashok Chavan “Congress’ Adarsh candidate” in 2014 only to induct him into the BJP a decade later. Similarly, Modi and Amit Shah had called the Sangma government in Meghalaya “the most corrupt” in the run-up to the assembly election in 2023 even though the BJP had been a part of it. The NPP won the election and the BJP joined the Sangma-led government again. Ostensibly, you can’t use the same moral compass for the opposition and the BJP.

DK Singh is ThePrint’s Political Editor. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)