A Napoleonic view of BJP

The Rise of the BJP: The Making of the World’s Largest Political Party

Author: Bhupender Yadav and Ila Patnaik

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 336

Price: Rs 699

In a country where swearing by the national movement is a prerequisite to wielding power, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) dramatic rise is paradoxical. The ease with which the party appropriated the freedom struggle and several of its nationalist stalwarts is at odds with the complete absence from that movement of the entire political fraternity to which the party is symbiotically connected. The BJP leadership may argue that the Sangh Parivar’s political wing came into existence after independence. But it cannot be denied that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the Hindu Mahasabha, consciously stayed away from the anti-colonial struggle and instead engaged exclusively in strengthening Hindu society.

All post-colonial governments till 2014 — including Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s — were legatees of the national movement. Because cultural nationalism — the RSS’ central idea — was considered politically incorrect, most social science narratives were critical of the BJP’s politics, especially on the issue of secularism. Although the party started securing some sympathy from a section of the intelligentsia from the late 1980s, courtesy the championing of the Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, it remained short of supportive analyses and books.

There were, of course, several decades-old hagiographies of Sangh Parivar leaders, besides a substantial volume of literature from the publications wing of the RSS and publishers who were part of the Hindu nationalist ecosystem. But, such “understanding” and “interpretative” accounts and books were absent in the mainstream publishing industry. In recent years this process has been reversed, partly because a non-critical approach while writing on the BJP, its affiliates and agitations it waged, is no longer frowned upon in academia.

As a result, we see the publication of a new generation of Napoleonic literature on the BJP, RSS and its leaders. The book under review evoked interest for its atypical collaboration between a political leader and member of the Union council of ministers, and an economist with a track record of commenting on policy issues in various media platforms but, crucially, not on political issues. The book held the potential of offering unknown information and analyses on the BJP’s trajectory over the past four decades and its astounding growth, which could be provided by Bhupender Yadav, while one expected insights from Ila Patnaik on the haphazard and often contradictory economic pursuits of the party and its affiliates. One had also hoped to understand why Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not turned out to be the market-reformer that his supporters expected him to be in 2013-14. Sadly, the book does not venture beyond what has been repeatedly stated by multiple commentators.

The only “new” detail that merits mention is a contentious one — that Vajpayee “knew” that the party was heading for defeat in 2004 and a day before the elections results he told Pramod Mahajan “to pack his bags and get ready to sit in opposition.” While this fact is in the realm of “insider information” and would make for a smart headline in today’s political climate when blame can be put at the doorstep of a leader long gone, the book does not examine if the discord between the BJP government and the RSS was a major factor in the decline in BJP’s performance between 1999 and 2004.

The essential deficiency of the book from start to finish is that it is structured as an in-depth “timeline” for the uninitiated and provides little depth or analyses. Needless spins are given to suit the political narrative. For instance, without providing any substantiation, the death of Syama Prasad Mookerjee is imputed to a conspiratorial element. Likewise, Jawaharlal Nehru is blamed for the woes in the Jana Sangh after the founding president’s death, that he “offered him [Mauli Chandra Sharma] a plum position” as a result of which he returned to the Congress.

The book is conspicuous in its misstatements and suppression of facts. Its claim that following the “struggle between the two communities” in Ayodhya in 1934, the “mosque was abandoned” is an example of the former. Likewise, an example of deliberate sidestepping of crucial issues is Vijayaraje Scindia’s scepticism of the path the BJP chose at its inception in April 1980. In its founding charter, the new party consciously opted to distance itself from the RSS and the Jana Sangh legacy because the collapse of Janata Party was to a great extent triggered by the dual-membership controversy. When the history of the BJP is written, the pre-Modi era would be demarcated from the post-2014 years, the latter being the period that the authors have closely watched the party. In 2001, when Mr Modi was asked by the central leadership to become Gujarat chief minister, it was to reverse the slide that started because of weak governance following the 2001 earthquake and allegations of corruption against the Keshubhai Patel government. But this book would like readers to believe that Patel’s declining health was the real cause of this switch. Such depiction makes this book a “must read” only for those who admire the BJP. Authors with access and direct knowledge into the working of a political party are a rarity. But when these advantages are not leveraged readers are left with little more than a sanitised account.