(This is an edited excerpt from ‘The Architect of the New BJP - How Narendra Modi Transformed The Party’, by Ajay Singh, the Press Secretary to President Ram Nath Kovind. It is the first book to offer a deep insight into the organisational skills of Narendra Modi and features exclusive interviews with many leaders and party workers.)
A perfect alignment between the party and the government was the sine qua non for the future growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the past, the BJP’s experience with mass mobilisation had been different. Its biggest mass mobilisation happened when LK Advani launched his Rath Yatra in 1990 to Ayodhya, on the issue of the Ram temple. Yet, that mobilisation did not have inclusive features in it…
…Modi’s experiments were different in nature. At the national level, that model was unveiled for the first time when he launched a massive mobilisation campaign to collect agricultural tools for building the Statue of Unity near the site of the Narmada dam in Gujarat in 2013. The project to build a giant statue of India’s first Home Minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, taller than the Statue of Liberty in the United States, was more a profound political statement than a whimsical endeavour. Modi, though not on the national stage then, mobilised not only the party cadre but also an army of his sympathisers around the nation to collect agricultural implements that would be melted to build the 182-metre-tall statue. It was promised that the contribution of over 5 lakh villages would be noted in a time capsule to be placed at the site for future records.
The whole project was unique and can help us understand a significant lesson in mass mobilisation in India. Though the Statue of Unity project was executed in a highly skilled and professional manner by international technical experts, Modi’s mobilisation campaign made each village of India a stakeholder in it. All those who donated their agricultural implements came to develop an emotional bond with the project. In this method of mobilisation, Modi has developed and refined over the decades of his public life, one can see a distinct pattern even in the alignment of the government’s programmes with the party’s organisational pursuits.
Govt & the Ruling Party: Being on the Same Page
On the face of it, there seems nothing unusual in having the two arms – the government and the ruling party – on the same page, but in India that is often not the case. The previous governments led by the BJP or the party’s governments in the states had a different experience. The tradition began with the Congress, where the party apparatus would emphasise its independence. The Communist Party of India, too, favours an independent politburo.
Sometimes the two sides are not in sync on purpose. It is not unusual to find a group of leaders in the government and the ruling party acting as a kind of internal opposition. That is a tactic aimed at representing a different view within the same party and not letting the opposition capitalise on it.
It would be safe to say that for national parties, it is a norm to keep the organisational agenda separate from that of the ruling side, though regional parties headed by strong leaders do not follow this practice. Such an arrangement, it is argued, promotes internal democracy. Notwithstanding its advantages, what it invariably does is create a dichotomy and factionalism, slowing down the processes of governance.
For Modi, as Chief Minister and then as Prime Minister, the priority has always been to keep the two sides together, working in unison to boost governance.
The National Executive Meet in 2014
That the BJP would lay as much emphasis on party-building as on ruling the nation was evident in its national executive meet in 2014, after the victory. The political resolution passed at the event stated:
There is a lesson for the organisation in these elections. The wave of a popular leader and sentiment gets converted into votes where the organisation is strong and the local leadership is established. That is why it is essential to strengthen the organisation in all the states of the country and that is our responsibility.
Having received the kind of popular support and mandate that no party had achieved in three decades, the BJP was by default bound to get strengthened as political workers and social activists gravitated towards the new victor. But the party actively sought them out at the ground level with a membership drive. In March 2015, party president Amit Shah orchestrated a campaign to enrol new primary members. The response was more enthusiastic than anticipated, as about 1 crore names were added to the ranks within a week. That month, the party announced it had 8.80 crore members on its register. It also celebrated the feat of having become the largest political organisation in the world, overtaking the Communist Party of China. A similar membership drive would be launched after the 2019 victory too, adding some 7 crore members. Today, the BJP has upwards of 18 crore members. That is just over 13 per cent of the country’s population. As the current party president, JP Nadda, puts it, the BJP has more workers than the population of any country except the eight most populous in the world.
The quality of the data is open to debate, but it does point towards a broad trend. Moreover, the numbers can be corroborated by considering the accompanying rise in the income and donations received by the party. In 2012-13, the party had a total income of Rs 324.16 crore, which rose to Rs 673.81 crore the next year, with elections round the corner. In 2014-15, the income was Rs 970.43 crore, while by 2019-20 the figure had touched Rs 3623.28 crore, going by the income tax returns and donations details submitted to the IT Department and the Election Commission, respectively, by the party, as compiled by the National Election Watch.
BJP's Strengthened Ideology: 1990s vs Today
Historically, parties start with a strongly articulated ideological vision but soon dilute it, either to seek acceptance beyond the core group or due to the exigencies of exercising power. Many of the leading political parties in India have stuck to this pattern. The BJP, too, came to power in the 1990s but as part of a coalition, and it had to keep the most significant parts of its founding vision in the deep freezer so as to win more allies and put together numbers to win power. What is noticeable about the rise and rise of the BJP under Modi’s leadership is that it has come along with not a dilution of ideology but only an accentuation of it. This more substantial party backing would then add ballast to the governance campaigns.
Modi had also realised from his Gujarat experience that the government’s welfare programmes would not be a fruitful exercise unless they were adequately promoted and permeated people’s consciousness. Besides the government machinery, the party’s organizational structure is an effective tool to make people aware of these programmes right at the beginning. In Gujarat, Modi frequently announced welfare programmes with grand events at village, block and district levels by mobilising people’s representatives to raise awareness levels among the masses. Such party programmes in alignment with government schemes are effective not only in connecting the party cadre to the masses but also prove to be an effective instrument to gauge people’s mood.
(The above is an excerpt from a book. Blurbs, paragraph breaks and subheadings have been added by The Quint for the ease of readers.)
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