EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
The Bharatiya Janata Party was known till recently as a cadrebased party with its leadership schooled in the ideology and ways of the RSS. Now it has become a manysplendoured thing. In 2022, we find the BJP, along with their allies, ruling 17 states, covering over half of India’s population. With Modi and his chief strategist, the indefatigable Amit Shah, at the wheel, the broadening of the party’s footprint across the map has carried on relentlessly, without pausing for breath. The BJP has given tickets to 833 turncoats for the assembly polls in the last decade. Out of them, 44 per cent got elected, many of them twice. Within the same time frame, 462 moved out of the saffron fold too, but only 14 per cent of those could make a success out of their transition. Today, the BJP has 1,387 legislators in assemblies across India, out of a total of 4,120.
Even among chief ministers, you can count on bigwigs from other parties—most prominently Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma (Congress, 2015), who opened up the Northeast for the saffron party, Arunachal’s Pema Khandu and Manipur’s N. Biren Singh (both from Congress, in 2016) and Karnataka’s Basavaraj Bommai (who managed to convert from socialism to saffron back in 2008). This process has also enriched the talent pool available at the Centre. There are 16 ministers in Modi’s council who have come from other parties— among them, Arjun Munda (from JMM in 1998) came on board long before Modi became a national figure, Sarbanand Sonowal and Kiren Rijiju (AGP and Congress, both ’12) as he was making his strides to Lutyens’ Delhi, and the other 13 in the runup to 2014 or after, like MSME minister Narayan Rane (who merged his Maharashtra Swabhiman Paksha with the
BJP in 2019) and civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia (from Congress in 2020). This process has bled the Congress the most—the
BJP’s augmentation has been chiefly at its cost, so the Congress has registered a concomitant decline in its roster of recognisable faces.
The BJP is now the largest political party in the world. It had already achieved that distinction back in March 2015, less than a year into the reign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when it clocked 100 million primary members. At last count, in 2019, it had touched a whopping 180 million—or 13.31 per cent of India’s population—and we can safely assume that graph has breached 200 million by now. Its nearest rival, the Communist Party of China, has only 96.71 million—less than half—as of 2022. But then, the CPC doesn’t have to bother with democratic niceties like elections. Interestingly, the Indian National Congress still weighs in at No. 4, with 45 million members (the Democratic Party in the US is at No. 3, with 48 million). This is at the cadre level—the infantry, so to speak. What about the generals and their lieutenants, the leaders who represent the party’s face in the public? This is where the real haemorrhage has been happening for the Congress…and where the BJP has been writing a most remarkable chapter in the book of its evolution. Call it political Darwinism.
The BJP’s expansion has been happening in two ways. One geographically and the other in terms of the changing face of its leadership. It happens through unforced conversion or plain old defection, often accompanied by the drama of resorts. Take the case of Scindia, a former Congress general secretary and onetime trusted lieutenant of Rahul Gandhi. He staged a dramatic walkout from the Grand Old Party in March 2020 and went over to the BJP, taking 22 sitting MLAs along with him. Using that leverage, the BJP pulled in six more legislators. And that led to the collapse of the Kamal Nath government. Madhya Pradesh, which the BJP had lost in the December 2018 election, was now in its pocket. Somewhat similar scenarios have played out in Goa, Manipur and Karnataka.
Effecting wholesale imports is only onehalf of the story, as Senior Editor Anilesh S. Mahajan writes in our cover story this week. The real question is how well the immigrants adjust. For a strictly cadrebased party like the BJP, with its roots in the distinctly collectivised ideals of the RSS, the fact that most of the turncoats come with different political cultures poses problems at two levels. Firstly, these cultures are often individualistic—the Congress, for instance, gave a lot of space for such politics among its regional leaderships within its overall umbrella—and the question of integration is not easy. Secondly, it increases the sense of insecurity among the existing cadre and prima facie threatens to dilute the BJP’s political values. That’s why CMs like Himanta and Bommai have chosen to scotch this risk by going on the front foot and crafting a politics that can sync perfectly with Hindutva—indeed, taking it to an edgier rightwing space. But the challenge remains. “It might be a good strategy when the party is growing, but the real test is if and when there is a downturn. Will they stick around? Are they not joining because of political opportunism?” asks a veteran BJP leader. The BJP has changed the political landscape of the country by being the dominant force, but it has, in the process, changed itself. The consequences of this, for better or worse, will have a farreaching effect on the country’s politics. ■