When Atal Bihari Vajpayee considered dissolving BJP: Story of how a young party found its footing

File photo of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani

When the BJP Wanted to Disband Itself: The Blueprint that Drove the New BJP

It is difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as BJP president, actually thought of disbanding the party. The party, which had imagined itself from Day One as an ‘alternative to Cong (I)’105 had suffered a crushing defeat in 1984, winning just two parliamentary seats in that year’s national election. Vajpayee, its most popular national leader, had himself lost his parliamentary seat from Gwalior to Congress’s Madhav Rao Scindia. Crestfallen, he commissioned a special twelve-member working group in 1985 to review the party’s functioning and to answer some tough questions on why the BJP found itself ‘miles away’ from its objective after its first five years.

One of these questions was whether the BJP’s creation itself had been a mistake and whether it should dissolve itself and return to its Jan Sangh avatar. In its first two years, as now, the BJP had focused on the nuts and bolts of building an organisation. As a review by L.K. Advani had noted in 1983, the organisation’s aim was ‘almost entirely on enrolling members, forming committees, and thus building the party’s organisational infrastructure right from the Panchayat level to the level of Parliament’.107 In its first two years, the BJP’s primary membership went from 2.2 million to 3.9 million. By 1983, it had succeeded in setting up district committees in 80 per cent of Indian districts, except the Northeast.108 Yet, the party was virtually wiped out electorally in the Rajiv Gandhi wave of 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Vajpayee’s response was to set up a working group, headed by Krishanlal Sharma and including the late Pramod Mahajan,109 to answer two questions

1. Whether the party’s defeat was because of its decision to merge Jana Sangh with the Janata Party in 1977 and withdraw from the Janata Party in 1980? Were both the decisions wrong?

2. Should the BJP go back and revive the Jana Sangh

Tasked with drawing up an ‘Action Plan for the future on all fronts— ideological, organisational, agitational, constructive and electoral’, the Working Group surveyed 4,000 party workers across the country, toured the states and met another 1,000 friends of the BJP. It answered in the negative to both questions.110 The Working Group found that the party had taken ‘a correct decision when it decided to merge with the Jana Sangh in the Janata Party, a wise decision when it decided to come out of the Janata Party to form BJP and a right decision when it chose to be BJP’.111 It was an important turning point for the party. It also provided the kernel for many of the underlying principles that appeared to drive Modi–Shah’s massive expansion three decades later: the focus on district-level party offices, training of cadres, emphasis on full-timers, leadership tours and agitations and a return to ideology.

Among the BJP’s shortcomings, the Working Group found that there was a communication gap between the leadership and the grassroot levels; ‘lack of political training in a systematic manner to educate the workers on political, economic, ideological and organisational matters’; ‘lack of agitations at national level on national issues’; and a ‘poor response from women’.112 At a deeper level, the Working Group argued that the BJP was facing an existential crisis because it had veered away from its core ideological identity—making alliances and diluting how it portrayed its core beliefs as a ‘party with a difference’. ‘We must admit that we have belied our expectations,’ the report said. It was not ‘popular support which is wanting but our strong will to take initiative for becoming the pivotal point of the change in the country. The Party must catch up with the time and play its historic role for providing a credible national alternative.’113 The party’s return to Hindutva under L.K. Advani followed soon thereafter. In less than five years, the BJP passed the Palampur Resolution in 1989, committing itself to the building of the Ram Temple.

To win elections, the report recommended expanding the membership of the party beyond its core cadres. The BJP had built a ‘cadre party’, but its leaders felt that this ‘by itself will not enable us to reach our goal’. It had to expand membership and to make ‘conscious efforts to enrol members from all sections of society’ to get a mass following. This meant getting ‘workers as leaders’. Just giving enough representation to various social sections did ‘not provide any weightage or leverage to that section’.114 Those who joined the BJP ‘must be shaped into leaders of that section’, the report recommended. This was essentially a call for making the party a vehicle for upward social mobility for ambitious politicians looking to make a career in politics. Both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, who began their careers as ordinary party workers, fit the bill. The fact that so many second-line BJP leaders started with such grassroots backgrounds and rose to the top echelons of their party is an important factor in the rise of the BJP. The 1985 report also emphasised ‘training for the management of elections to be imparted to party cadres’. Specifically, it asked for cadre-training camps at the district level, state and national levels at least once a year.115 This is exactly why institutions like Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini were created, and why this training culture is at the heart of the BJP’s expansion efforts.

This post-mortem also emphasised the need to enrol full-timers. ‘Everyone recognises the fact that politics has become very exacting and requires more and more hour to be devoted. The more and more full-time workers can be put in the field, to that extent, the grass-roots level work picks up.’116 This focus on full-time workers is precisely what Amit Shah emphasised during his tenure as party president, during which the party saw the most expansion. The report provided a template for leadership tours and agitations. ‘Agitate or Vegitate [sic]’, it declared. ‘Whether it is true or not with regard to other institutions or organisations working in other fields, it is quite true for parties and much more so to a party like BJP.’1

It will not be an exaggeration to say that the intellectual roots of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s leadership styles lie in these recommendations. In 2014, the BJP reinvented its tradition of pravaas—outstation trips by its leaders— mandating that all national office-bearers must visit nine states in one year. They would do so by rotation, ensuring that all states were covered. Amit Shah, for example, started his own pravaas from Naxalbari, where an armed revolt in the 1960s gave the Naxal movement its name. Between August 2014 and 2018, as party president, he had addressed 1,027 party organisation programmes, travelling 7,90,000 km or 519 km a day on average.118 In his first year and a half as president (August 2014 to end 2015), he stayed overnight on 102 occasions in various states.119 This data indicates the heavy emphasis that the BJP’s top brass puts on organisational work, compared to its national rival, the Congress.

In conclusion, the 1985 report extolled the value of the ‘Party office’ as the ‘nerve centre of the Party activities’ recommending that a ‘well-equipped, efficient, effective functioning office is a must at national level, State level and district level’. In particular, it found that the BJP had no offices in a large number of Indian districts. Hence, it laid down: ‘Party offices in a manner in which we require should be set up in all the districts throughout the country within a year.’120 Again, the roots of Amit Shah’s district office building drive can be traced back to this three-decades-old document. Although it took the BJP another three decades to follow through on the recommendations—only after it came to power under Modi, and had the resources to do so—the template used, with some modern modifications, was rooted in the party’s learnings in its earliest years.

The role of party structure as a tool of political mobilisation is relatively understudied in India. But, in a rapidly urbanising and demographically young India, it should not be underestimated. Some of the BJP’s electoral successes in recent years accrue as much to this grassroots work as to its larger ideological shifts. As Amit Shah put it, ‘That era has gone when two leaders in Delhi would shake each other’s hands in a drawing room and behind them a voter will follow like a bonded labourer. A voter decides his vote himself and uses it on the basis of what is better for his area, his country and for himself.’

Modi and Shah undoubtedly brought with them a new energy and a different leadership style to the BJP from 2014 onwards, and it completely changed how the party was run in the Vajpayee and Advani years.

(This is an edited excerpt from Nalin Mehta's 'The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World's Largest Political Party')