BHARATIYA JANATA PARTY PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

On 29th March, 2015, at BJP’s
old office at 11, Ashoka Road, a digital counter was ticking. Party workers,
office bearers and even staff, all were staring at the digital screen. The
screen was showing the total number of party members enrolled through the
party’s new ‘Sadasyata Abhiyan’ (Membership Drive). The party’s national
president Amit Shah was in office that day. With a childlike eagerness in his
eyes, he too was looking at the digital counter. As soon as the counter hit
the target, the whole office erupted in euphoria. It reached 8.8 crore
members, surpassing the Communist Party of China. The ambitious membership
drive was Shah’s idea. Next day every leading newspaper reported it bold and
clear—BJP becomes the largest political party in the world. How did this
happen? Was it merely a numerical exercise which boosted Bharatiya Janata
Party’s fortunes or was it the case of an idea whose time had come? From a
mere two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984 to now having decimated the
opposition, can this juggernaut be attributed to only the Modi-Shah duo or
the reasons run deep into the complexity of the highly misunderstood Hindutva
movement? To answer these questions, Shantanu Gupta travels back into the
history of the Right-wing movements in India, from their ideological origins
to the evolution of their nationalist idea, bringing together a comprehensive
study of not just BJP as a political party but of an ideological entity which
defines the nationalist movement in the country like never before.