One year later, BJP still has a lot to do

Exactly a year ago today, the high-voltage campaign run by the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi bore fruit in a manner no one could have predicted. The saffron party’s bête noir, the Congress, had been literally crushed, making many wonder if India would now really be a “Congress-mukt Bharat” — a country from which the Congress has been banished — which Mr Modi had made the leitmotif of his campaign rhetoric.

When the election results were announced on May 16 last year, it was evident that the new kid on the block was not the BJP; it was Mr Modi. The BJP had taken time off from the real world for long, and was unable to get its act together even months and weeks preceding the Lok Sabha elections of 2014, on which so much was staked. Its leaders — old and young alike — were jaded. They had few ideas. They loved to fight one another. And they were super ambitious.

Through the superlative win that he crafted, Mr Modi rescued the BJP from itself without letting go of the RSS’ ideology that his party flaunts, only taking care to conceal elements of it that are odious to India’s Constitution.

Such was the political climate in which the Modi victory came — the first time in a quarter century that any party in the Lok Sabha had a clear majority of its own — that he appeared to get carried away by the stupendous outcome.

He was perceived to be giving in to a personal-style rule, which if sustained would be resented, and then protested, for being completely authoritarian. While campaigning extensively for the Delhi Assembly elections earlier this year, he told the city audience on one forgettable occasion: “If you make the BJP win, officials will work extra hard out of fear of Narendra Modi.”

At the height of her power and popularity, even former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had not dared to talk in this fashion. There is a strong perception in Mr Modi’s party and among his countless admirers, who still give him leeway in the hope that a year is too short to judge, that promises have not been kept, that the PM has given his own party short shrift, and that even senior party leaders are afraid to express themselves.

Politically, thus, the BJP has not necessarily gained in stature in the eyes of the people although the country is governed in its name. More than one-party raj, the strongest impression today all over the nation is of one-person raj.

The Congress and regional parties opposed to the BJP have, meanwhile, moved to the centre of the action from the margins, with the once-ridiculed Rahul Gandhi advancing day after day and pushing the government on the backfoot. The Modi dispensation could have preserved itself better.