Before campaigning for India’s general election started, in April this year, I was in Delhi discussing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s candidates in the capital with party workers. As we talked about the BJP’s prospects, I asked whether they thought the Congress would make something of a revival in Delhi. One party worker dismissed my query immediately. “Of course not, this is clearly Modi’s election!” he said. On the sidelines, the Aam Aadmi Party and the Congress were facing a breakdown in talks over an alliance that did not come through.
The BJP, at the time, was dealing with a public showdown of its own. Udit Raj, one of its prominent Dalit members of parliament at the time, was furious over the party’s delay in ticket distribution, specifically its reluctance to renominate him for his constituency of North West Delhi. After sending his followers to make a commotion over the tickets at the party office, Raj finally quit the BJP after the ticket was given to the singer Hans Raj Hans, and joined the Congress. In the press conference held by the Congress to welcome him into its fold, Raj had sharp words for his previous party, “There is a propaganda in the BJP that everyone in the party gets justice,” he said. “BJP’s karyakartas”—party workers—“use this propaganda as their weapon and as a source of pride, and say that the party will do what the internal survey says.” He argued that the survey’s findings indicated that the seat should have been given to him. “My only mistake was that I was neither deaf nor blind in the party. If that was the case, perhaps they would have rewarded me for being mute, and I could have even become the PM!”
Raj went on to cite more anomalies in the BJP’s conduct towards him, but it was his critique of its performance myth that was unnerving for the party. BJP members trolled him on Twitter for these statements. Maheish Girri, another MP who was denied a ticket, but accepted the decision, said that by leaving the party, Raj had stooped low for “just a ticket.” The BJP spokesperson Tajinder Bagga ridiculed Raj’s comments. What Raj was referring to, however, is a constant theme in the party, familiar to all its members—a notion that the BJP takes care of everyone, and rewards their commitment. “Sangathan sabka khyal rakhta hai”—the organisation takes care of everyone—is a common refrain in most party meetings.
This refrain has come under great strain ever since the BJP swept to power in an overwhelming victory in the 2014 general election. Since then, the party has seen increasing centralisation of power under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s leadership. As the BJP cemented its election victories, and aggressively expanded its base—the party has recruited many ambitious new members—it now boasts one of the largest memberships in the world for any political party.
Many from the party’s older cadre are skeptical about the new direction the BJP has taken. A member from the party’s older, and now retired, Jan Sangh leadership explained to me how he viewed the shift. “The party has expanded beyond our imagination,” he said. “The pressure on its margins has increased, and there is now more and more demand from these members to get their due for their work. This is only fair, I think, and while we were trained to keep our ambitions in check in our time, this is no longer the case today.”
The older order has been supplanted by a more direct relationship between Modi and the party’s grassroots. Speaking to his party workers in September 2018, the prime minister emphasised that it was the hard work and purposive action of the party’s innumerable workers that had launched it into the world. And just as Ram’s conquest of Lanka in the Ramayana was a result of the purposive action of his vanar sena—monkey brigade—and Krishna’s gwalas—cow herders—helped him lift the Govardhan mountain, it was the purushartha—the four core Hindu moral values, according to the Dharmashastras—of the party workers that lent the BJP its victory. He also added that while the reasons for the BJP’s success have been attributed to its leaders, or Modi himself, or favourable news coverage, the strongest link in these wins had been mera booth sabse majboot—my booth, the strongest booth—emphasising the undeniable strength of the BJP’s overhauled grassroots organisation.
During the 2014 election, Shah had introduced detailed strategies for booth management, including the appointment of panna pramukhs—party workers—responsible for mobilising voters listed in a single page of the electoral roll. BJP workers strengthened these further in this election, with the slogan of “Mera Parivaar, Bhajapa Parivar”—My family, the BJP family. Several party workers told me that they took to the streets again, working their way to every household during the election. “We would send our local workers to have tea at every neutral household for the four days,” a district booth manager told me. “In these four days, we would not discuss anything to do with politics. On the fifth day, we would make an appeal to them to vote for the BJP.” The party asked workers to collect phone numbers of undecided voters and set up call centres to tally these visits with phone calls, to ensure that workers accurately collected these details. According to the district worker, the accuracy of these visits was nearly eighty percent in Delhi.
This populist restructuring of the party—with Modi as leader and the workers as diligent followers of their prime minister—which used to follow a more decentralised and ideologically tight-knit model, has been largely welcomed by its ground-level party workers. As the election results were announced in May and the magnitude of the victory became clear, a proud BJP worker I was speaking to exclaimed: “Earlier the MPs elected their leader. Now the prime minister makes the MPs!” For many party workers, the election margin of 2019 has made it clearer that the BJP does not need any stratagems other than the popularity of its leader to continue its forward march. It only requires a forceful narrative, and workers to implement that narrative. With its booth managers, panna pramukhs, a centralised booth-management apparatus and large coffers of political funding, the party has largely circumvented the need to rely on other means to ensure political success.
Every electoral win for Modi since 2014 has also caused disquiet among the second-rung leadership, which faces further marginalisation. The expectation of reward for their years of service has become less and less of a surety for the political future of a large number of these mid-level politicians, who no longer expect the party to look after their welfare, or expect to be rewarded for their longstanding loyalty. “You think your older leaders are flies—they have sat on the produce for too long, you want to swat them away,” a former BJP state legislator from Delhi told me. “But tell me, will the new lot be any different? No matter how many times you swat the flies away, they will always come back, won’t they?” For these leaders, politics is, by definition, a long-term investment in a muddled and complex political infrastructure, and they do not think replacing old, experienced local faces is a solution for non-performance in the party. However, they are also acutely aware that for now, every election is Modi’s election, and as long as the wins are coming, there is little audience within the party for them to air their grievances, so they can do little but bear the consequences of these wins.
For the ground-level workers, the weakening of the mid-level leadership is largely a welcome development. They believe it is necessary to shake the complacency of the diggaj—political heavyweights—who need to be disciplined and realise that they are not indispensable. Workers upset with the factional wrangling of the pre-Modi BJP era—characterised as it was by what Christophe Jaffrelot described as the horizontal followings of different Sangh and BJP leaders and their affiliated party cadre—have largely accepted the fate of these sidelined leaders, and have even enjoyed their much-awaited demotion. Those who have accepted the change have often gleefully remarked, “This is the BJP. No one here knows if they will get a seat tomorrow! The BJP is not afraid to drop anyone.” For them, the relegation of their older leaders to inferior roles has enabled the party to break through its rusted and outmoded deferential relationships, as the older second- and third-rung leaders were considered a roadblock to the party’s highest potential.
Repeating anti-incumbency experiments across municipal, state and national elections, the party’s leadership has been able to orchestrate a part replacement of its local leadership in different states—Chhattisgarh, New Delhi, Rajasthan and Gujarat to name a few—in the guise of removing all “non-performing” leaders, largely belonging to the first and second levels of leadership in these states. They have been replaced by a more politically inexperienced crop of new faces, most of them bearing loyalty to Modi and Shah. Among those dismissed are prominent names, such as Abhishek Singh, the son of Raman Singh who was denied a ticket from his constituency of Rajnandgaon in Chhattisgarh. Similarly, Jaswant Singh’s son Manvendra and BC Khanduri’s son Manish both joined the Congress. Even former chief ministers, such as Chhattisgarh’s Raman Singh and Rajasthan’s Vasundhara Raje, were replaced by new leaders following electoral defeats in their states. Their requests to be accommodated at the centre were not granted.
Over the course of my research, I asked workers what they thought the BJP would look like in a decade. They evoked subtle outlines of the Sangh’s design for a majoritarian future. In this design, which is never fully articulated but expressed in spurts, ran-niti—military strategy—overcomes and surpasses the need for rajniti—politics. The workers know that leaders are dispensable, but the grand design of the scheme for the Sangh is not, and cannot be, interrupted to meet the demands of the BJP’s political class.
In the Sangh, according to the party workers, everyone—including their own leaders—are secondary to this future. And the unhappiness of those sidelined is a small inconvenience to reach the summit of their larger project. The workers see their political fate tied with Modi: it is in their interest to ensure he wins, and he needs their continued support for his continuing juggernaut of electoral dominance, even as he alienates large sections of the party’s middle. The question that they do not seem to be asking is what will happen to the party in the future, when these same workers will ask for their due. Will the BJP reorganise its party structure and find ways to accommodate more breakthroughs from the lower levels into positions of power? Or conversely, as the neglected and unhappy older members have warned, will its populist streak weaken the nature of the organisation? For the moment, the party’s ideologically motivated cadres are content to overlook these questions and deliver Modi’s messages with diligence, as long as it pays them electoral dividends.