The BJP has effected a long-delayed reshuffle of its office-bearers at the national level on Saturday, and the changes obviously have the upcoming assembly polls in Bihar as also West Bengal in mind. The new line-up should have been ready months ago, after JP Nadda was confirmed as party president in January. Covid came only two months later and affected national life. Yet, nothing prevented the party from revamping the central edifice all these months. Even now, when changes were effected, much is left undone as in the case of various states where revamps were expected. Clearly, after Amit Shah’s exit as BJP chief, the party is yet to gain the steam it lost.
The BJP’s organisational apparatus remains weak even in the Hindi belt, encompassing states like Rajasthan and Gujarat. Amit Shah managed the show with a single-minded approach to go for the kill when elections came, and left organizational matters on the back-burner. The party won the polls on the basis of the ‘bhashans’ by Prime Minister Narendra Modi from the pulpit, and his motivated identification of his self with India’s poor through tricks like presenting himself as a Chaiwala in the first LS polls and then as Chowkidar in the next polls. On the action front, this government too is found wanting on many fronts as was the case with the UPA dispensations.
The BJP, formed in the early 1980s as a party of Banias and Brahmins, got awed by the Mandal streak in politics in the Hindi belt and refashioned itself as a party of all Hindus from the 1990s, bringing in backward community leaders to chief ministerial positions first and a ‘rebranded BC’ like Modi to the PM’s post. Modi played to the gallery, just as Indira Gandhi did, and projected himself as the quintessential Indian sweating it out in the fields. That won the party votes, but it also made the BJP ignore party organization on sound principles and encouraging regional leaders who can pull the crowd. What came to its help in repeated elections to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies is the RSS clout, which worked from behind and in forceful ways. This also turned the BJP functionaries complacent. They kept looking up to the RSS and Modi to win polls without doing any legwork or sweating it out.
To the BJP’s advantage is the leadership vacuum in the Congress at its apex, with Sonia Gandhi not in good health and Rahul Gandhi seen wanting on many counts and lacking political maturity. It remains to be seen how the BJP gets the votes this time around in the state assembly elections.