BJP’s rise is about filling a void, not just ideology
What is needed now is a redefinition of Viksit Bharat, one that measures development not in GDP alone but in how its gains are distributed across caste, community, gender, and the urban-rural divide.
Under Modi, Hindu cultural assertion braided with modernist economic aspiration. In his article on the BJP’s forty-sixth anniversary (BJP’s relevance owes to ideological clarity, IE, April 4), Ram Madhav talks of ideological clarity triumphing over decades of drift. The party, he argues, shed Gandhian socialism and found its true form in “cultural nationalism” and “integral humanism”. The broader public, he asserts, “seems to identify with this” vision. The lotus, he declares, has bloomed fully. But has it? And how?
The BJP’s rise is not just the story of an ideology whose time has come. It is the story of a vacuum created by the Congress’s downslide, driven not by ideological defeat but by the erosion of generational memory and structural transformation. For nearly five decades after Independence, the Congress drew legitimacy from a political imagination forged in the freedom struggle and sustained through nation-building endeavours. But memory often fades with the generation that carries it. For today’s median voter, born in the 1980s, Congress is less the party that steered Independence, and more the party of coalition compromises, scams, and a leadership speaking to an India that no longer exists. The 1991 reforms deepened this void in three ways: Generating corruption on an unprecedented scale; fuelling a hypercompetitive broadcast culture; and replacing the Nehruvian social contract with a market logic the Congress could never fully own. Into this vacuum stepped the BJP. Cultural nationalism may have supplied the BJP’s narrative, but it found resonance in a society experiencing political dislocation. The triumph was not of ideology alone, but of an ideology that organised anxieties, identities, and divisions.
Share
