BJP gears up for third battle of Panipat

The BJP National Council meet concluded on January 12 at the Ram Leela Maidan. It was the last massive party congregation, with delegates converging from across the country, before the general elections of 2019. The army of workers had come to endorse the candidature of Narendra Modi once more. It also sounded the bugle for the crucial battle of 2019.

The excitement was palpable, the wave-like energy was electrifying and party president Amit Shah’s inaugural address and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concluding address were both historic and galvanising. The call to every worker was to work hard, to pour every ounce of their energy to firm up their determination for the battle to make Narendra Modi, once more the Prime Minister. The call was for “Modi Once More”. 

Speaking to the sea of delegates, Amit Shah likened the battle of 2019 to the decisive third Battle of Panipat, in which the defeat of Marathas against Ahmed Shah Abdali ensured that India was pushed towards a state of subjection and slavery for about two centuries. That subjection was both ideological, intellectual, cultural and material. It was a subjection that gave rise to a class, among us, which—though weakened—continues to persist, a class for which nothing is sacrosanct, a class for which Bharat is a vague notion, for which our cultural and religious emotions, our heritage, our inheritance are commodities to be dissolved, a class for whom the nation consciousness is bogus, an imagination which has no basis or reality. 

Since Modi challenges that still lingering subjection, he prevents their perpetuation. Shah spoke of the battle of 2019 as one of those battles which must be won to prevent our relapse into subjection. Shah’s reference to the Third Battle of Panipat was thus deeply symbolic and thought-provoking. 
For the rank and file of the party, the message was clear: we do not want a formation led by a party and a dynasty which has no primary allegiance to the civilisational idea and vision of India. In the last four years, this political dynasty has worked to destroy our democratic spirit and fabric.

Their members have, in the near past, stood by forces inimical to the essence of India and continue to stall, by every means, the construction of a grand temple at Ayodhya dedicated to Lord Ram. Their only friends and well-wishers seem to be foreign commission agents and fading communist ideologues and rootless leaders back home. 

Modi spoke of the battle of 2019 as a struggle between dynasty, a sense of fiefdom and the Indian Constitution. He spoke of the struggle as that between nepotism and corruption and truth, transparency and accountability, between a weak, indecisive, halting and compelled coalition and a formation, a servitor and a vision that was decisive, compelling and transformative in nature and action.

The alliance that is now being formed against Modi is interestingly an alliance of those who had begun their political journey and articulated their political ideology in opposition to the Congress or whose leaders, being part of the Congress once upon a time, had broken away because they felt stifled and reduced before its “dynasty”. 

These formations had grown because they symbolised anti-Congressism. Their mandate was because their voters rejected the Congress, especially the “dynasty”, whose members had often either insulted their leaders or had politically betrayed them. 

The fear and obsession with Modi is now pushing these political entities into the Congress tent. The political future, however, of these artificial alliances is very clear. India’s political history of the last quarter century is there for all to examine. The Congress is an exacting, parasitic, undependable, self-centered and egotistic ally. Its energies are dedicated and concentrated for the perpetuation of one “dynasty”; all the rest are, in the long run, expendable.

Anirban Ganguly

Director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation

Twitter: @anirbanganguly