BJP's return to its roots

After a long hiatus, the party has come full circle in West Bengal - the state it began its ascent to power with

The genesis of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was actually in the politics of West Bengal, though the party was not able to develop itself in the state till recently. Following the murder of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) was banned by home minister Sardar Patel. M S Golwalkar, the Sangh’s head, was jailed four days later on February 3 along with 20,000 RSS workers. The ban was lifted on July 11, 1949, after the RSS agreed to write and submit a constitution (it functioned without one till then). The formation of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the wing that would contest elections and vie for political power, came in 1951, after the Sangh felt it needed political protection from what it saw as persecution by the Centre. The RSS would continue to remain apolitical in the sense that it would itself not contest elections. But it would “lend” its cadre, including a young Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Deendayal Upadhyaya, to the new political outfit it was forming.

The same period saw the resignation of Congressman (and former Hindu Mahasabha leader) SP Mookerjee from the Nehru Cabinet, on the issue of “appeasement” of Muslims. It also saw the death of Patel, in 1950, hastening Golwalkar’s desire to bolster Hindu conservatism politically. He aligned himself with Mookerjee, who would be the head of the new RSS party, and the frame and structure would be provided entirely by the swayamsevaks, who were spread nationwide.

Mookerjee felt Nehru was soft on Pakistan, and he was upset by the continuing violence and displacement produced by the partition of Bengal. He also determined that the issues that were of importance to his party were those that concerned India’s Muslims. The Hindutva focus on Muslim personal law and Article 370 came to us because of him.

On May 5, 1951, the Jana Sangh released an eight-point political agenda. These were: 1) United Bharat; 2) reciprocity instead of appeasement towards Pakistan; 3) an independent foreign policy; 4) rehabilitation of refugees; 5) increased production of goods and decentralisation of industry; 6) development of a single Bharatiya culture; 7) equal rights to all citizens and improvement of the backward classes; 8) readjustment of the boundaries of West Bengal and Bihar.

The only specific item on the agenda was the final point, a minor one, which demanded that some parts of Bihar be given to Bengal, revealing Mookerjee’s focus. Though the idols had been smuggled into the Babri mosque on December 22, 1949, Ayodhya never figured on Jana Sangh manifestos right till the time it was dissolved and renamed the BJP in 1980.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

In the one election he led the party to in 1951, the Jana Sangh won three seats, of which two were in Bengal, including Mookerjee’s own in Calcutta. Mookerjee was overweight and in poor health when he died in Kashmir in 1953, where he was campaigning against Article 370. In the second Lok Sabha election of 1957, Vajpayee was elected along with three others, but none from Bengal. This weakness after Mookerjee’s passing remained till the arrival of Narendra Modi. In the 2009 elections, the BJP had a single Lok Sabha seat in the state — Jaswant Singh winning in Darjeeling. In 2014, the BJP under Mr Modi won 2 seats but in 2019, the party won 18 seats out of 42, signalling the direction Bengal was now headed.

The partition of India happened in only two states, Punjab and Bengal. In Punjab, the ethnic cleansing was almost 100 per cent. Except for an enclave or two, the Muslims were forced out of east Punjab into Pakistan and the Hindus and Sikhs forced out of west Punjab into India. In that sense, Partition became the sort of solution in Punjab that the Congress and the Muslim League had reluctantly agreed to. In Bengal, it was different. A large Hindu population remained, and continues to remain though dwindling, in east Bengal and Bangladesh. An even more substantial Muslim population remains in west Bengal and India. There were villages and areas of the state where Muslims are dominant. Cow slaughter is legal in Bengal.

Till now, there was no top-down divisive politics in the state. The communal sentiment was present but kept deliberately suppressed in the decades when Bengal was under the Communists especially and then under Trinamool. Even the opposition parties did not touch that issue and violence in Bengali politics was essentially party violence.

This will change with the arrival of Modi and the BJP in force. The rhetoric has reverted to that of Mookerjee and “appeasement”. The things that the BJP finds most productive in terms of campaign themes are all available in Bengal. At over 25 per cent, Bengal has a higher ratio of Muslims in the population than Uttar Pradesh, another state where post-Modi, the BJP has thrived. Indeed, no other state has as much potential for growth for the BJP as Bengal but it has remained untapped.

We can conclude two things that are certain to happen from here on. The first is that no matter who wins the elections, the BJP will remain a powerful force in Bengal and perhaps even the dominant force. Even absent the issues, the structural advantages it has in terms of resource, cadre and support from the Centre are overwhelming.

The second is that Bengal will go through a phase of sustained division, induced tension and perhaps violence of the sort that we have not seen in another state in a long time. Love jihad, beef ban, congregational prayer, Pakistan, religious sites and such things have not been a part of political campaigning in Bengal, but they will now be and at scale. The issues and the spirit of Mookerjee will return as the BJP comes full circle in the state it had begun its ascent to power with.