The two-day meeting of the BJP national executive, which ended on Sunday, confirms what everyone has been thinking — that the issue of nationalism, as the saffron party understands it, and of appealing to the dalit constituency, are uppermost in its mind as it prepares to face future electoral challenges, specially in politically pivotal Uttar Pradesh.
If Prime Minister Narendra Modi prides himself as being Mr Development — at the executive he once again urged the faithful to carry forward the mantra of “vikas”, “vikas”, “vikas” — he will be only too aware that his personal lead in the campaigns in Delhi and Bihar in 2015 on precisely this issue didn’t yield dividends. (And if the PM can’t persuade voters that his government is devoted to the development agenda, who can?)
The party thus seems to be left with little choice but to change tack and devise a new electoral formula. As recent events show, the new gambit is to make an emotional appeal on the nationalism question (the necessary obverse of this is to decry the Opposition parties, particularly the Congress, as “anti-national”), and on the BJP’s claim to enhancing dalit welfare.
Mr Modi appears to endorse the new battle-plan, which seems to suggest the focus might shift from his personalised style in elections to the more general appeal to nationalism. Having kept a sphinx-like silence in the past two months on issues ranging from the suicide of dalit scholar Rohit Vemula in Hyderabad to the tumult surrounding the issue of nationalism and the arrest of some JNU students on the charge of “sedition”, that led to international criticism of the Indian authorities by intellectuals, the PM said at his party’s national executive that his party and government “was accepting of political criticism in itself, but not of the nation”.
The BJP is not about to answer the question “Why not?”. The political resolution noted that “freedom of expression” and nationalism do necessarily co-exist”, but this fundamental right cannot include appeals to destroy the country. This appears as wishy-washy a defence of free speech as any. The dalit question is an electorally sensitive one, but there was little that could be cited as governmental achievement on this. So the party is content with raising memorials to B.R. Ambedkar.
The Prime Minister plans to visit his birthplace, Mhow, on April 14 and, as he declared on Monday, his government will erect a “world class memorial” in the nation’s capital to Dr Ambedkar. The PM denounced the Opposition as a bunch which only raises “irrelevant” issues, and was hailed by M. Venkaiah Naidu, a Cabinet colleague, as “God’s gift to India”. The two, together, point towards hero-worship, paving the way to possible authoritarianism.
