BJP shows trust is won by hard work

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BJP shows trust is won by hard work

Saturday, 21 January 2023 | Sumeet Bhasin

BJP shows trust is won by hard work

Politics is not the means to grab power for the BJP but to serve people, for which it has toiled for decades

The national executive meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) affirmed that politics for the party is a means for service to the people. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s concluding speech in the meeting laid the roadmap for the party to further deepen ties with the people through selfless service. The spirit that guided the BJP to work for the people, who were in distress following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, remains at the centre-stage of the core thinking of the party leadership.

Politics is not the means to grab power for the BJP. The party will choose to walk the long path in the service of the people. The BJP has toiled for decades. The party has a core ideology, which united the cadre and the workers. The ideology is that India’s national interest is supreme. Nation First, thus, is not just a slogan, but ‘Dharma’ of the BJP. This has been reiterated in the national executive meeting of the BJP.

Opposition can take a closer look and learn several lessons from the functioning of the BJP. First is that there is no short cut in politics. The BJP has never taken the shortest route in achieving its political goals. The BJP will prefer to take the long route than compromise with the national interests. This is the foremost lesson that Opposition parties can learn from the BJP. Congress in particular is in a dire need to take lessons from the functioning of the BJP.

Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi is leading the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. No one knows what the aims are of the yatra, for there is no vision. Congress has never engaged in politics of agitation. This has been because Congress has always been used to being in power and its leaders never thought of being with the people. In contrast, the BJP has spearheaded several agitations, and fought against Emergency when Congress threatened democracy.   

Even during the yatra, Rahul Gandhi has sought to showcase that he could attract the well-known faces. But he could not avoid irony and contradictions. He held an interaction with the former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan. All that Rajan advocated for the wellbeing of the economy has already been done by the Modi government in the last eight years. Yet, Rahul Gandhi delighted in his company, as if an unheard of economic prescriptions were emerging out of their ‘enlightened’ conversations. The people were rightly ridiculed, as the show lacked the substance.

Yatra without a vision is bogus. In contrast, PM Modi has been leading the country with a clear vision, which has been well brought before the people on several occasions, which enjoy the popular support as reflected in the mandates of 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and several Assembly polls.

Even in the national executive meeting of the BJP, PM Modi laid down the roadmap for the next 400 days, which included the task to the BJP workers to form a close bond with the people living in the border areas. The Modi government is already implementing the ‘Parvatmala’ scheme to mainstream the development works in 13 Himalayan states, which have borders with neighbouring countries. By asking the BJP workers to forge close bonds with the people living in the border areas, PM Modi has again accorded ‘Nation First’ spirit to the party workers.

Also, PM Modi called for the BJP workers to help the government achieve saturation of the schemes run by the Central and the state governments. Besides, PM Modi also reiterated to the BJP workers to reach out to the weaker sections of the society and help them climb the social ladders with economic empowerment.

The message of PM Modi and the style of functioning of the government under his leadership is that of participative governance. When the Modi government launches schemes such as ‘Pradhan Mantri Aadarsh Sansad Gram Yojna’, the effort is to take forward the participative governance model, which involves the elected representatives, the people and the officials who execute the works.

It may be noted that the

BJP narrowly lost the elections for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi despite 15 years of anti-incumbency, because the people have forged close bonds with the party. The BJP by sticking to the participative governance model has shown that democracy can actually deliver when the people take part in the decision making as well as in the implementation of the works. This is sharply in

contrast to the Opposition parties who still practice from the comforts of the drawing rooms with armchair experts.

The political resolution adopted in the national executive of the BJP is also an outright condemnation of the ‘stone-pelting’ politics of the Opposition parties, which levelled all sorts of unsubstantiated allegations against the Modi government in the last eight years. But the allegations were found to have been bogus and mischievous even by the judiciary, while they were trashed by the people’s courts on several occasions. The Opposition parties need to indulge in soul searching with honest study of the political resolution adopted by the BJP’s national executive, which is a document of the monumental failure of the Opposition parties in discharging their duties as mandated by the people.   

The BJP national executive also extended the tenure of the party chief JP Nadda. The Congress and other Opposition parties should count the number of BJP presidents since 1980 and compare with their heads of parties in the same period. In Congress, non-Gandhis have held the position of the party president barely for a few years. But the BJP has shown that democracy truly delivers when it’s practiced within the party, as is the case in the election of the party president. A party worker can truly aspire to become the president of the BJP.  

But the Congress never tires of launching, relaunching a leader who has repeatedly failed. Congress still has a 30-year-old election strategy. The party has become a poor sibling of the wizard of freebies, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), in taking the shortcut to grab power.

Former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who was the trusted aide of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has been on record to say that reviving the Old Pension Scheme will jeopardize the prospects of the next generations, while committing to policy bankruptcy. But Congress has no shame in promising in elections that the party will bring the OPS. It can numb sensible people that Congress had carried forward the decision of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to introduce the New Pension Scheme.

The BJP has come to power by toiling hard with the people for decades. The party was at the

forefront in the agitation for the liberation of Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, cow slaughter, Ram Janmabhoomi, triple talaq. The Opposition parties need to learn a lot from the BJP.

(The author is Director, Public Policy Research Centre)

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