Forget swadeshi, Modi wants BJP to emulate cricket and not kabaddi

Modi wants party workers to learn from cricket's far reaching popularity to spread the message of BJP's ideological tenets

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under its indefatigable president Amit Shah, claims to have enrolled nearly 100 million new members since November 1, 2014. It is already the largest political party on the planet – having made a little over 10 million members - more than the number the Communist Party of China boasts for itself. The BJP, if all its members were to populate one single country, could soon pip the Philippines as the 12th most populous country in the world.

On Monday, Shah asked party workers to launch a ‘mahasampark’ or contact programme for its new members from May 1, followed by training workshops August onwards. The BJP also wants its leaders and workers to take up ‘constructive’ programmes for total abolition of manual scavenging, and to work for the poorest.

  

In this, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah are clearly busy trying to replicate another Gujarati. A century back, Mahatma Gandhi had reinvented the Indian National Congress from a talking house dominated by English speaking upper crust lawyers and landlords into a mass based party that was oriented towards agitation politics, encouraging swadeshi and for social reforms like fighting untouchability.

Modi wants party workers to spread the message of BJP’s ideological tenets like ‘Antyodaya’ or ‘Ekatm Manavavad’ or integral humanism in easy to understand language to the man on the street. At the party national executive in Bengaluru, Modi illustrated this with examples of cricket and kabaddi. Modi said kabaddi, despite having been played in the villages and towns of India for past several  centuries, couldn’t catch the fancy of the nation like cricket did within a short time. 

The PM said cricket with its myriad complexities lends itself well to detailed commentary. Commentators, particularly those on the radio, came up with easy to understand words in Hindi and listening to the commentary was like watching the game. But kabaddi never could develop something similar. Modi suggested BJP leadership and workers should explain BJP ideology during the contact programme and training workshops from stories and words that even a common villager can understand.