Lal Krishna Advani’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) founded the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with 25-plus partners in 1998. That launched India’s most successful era of coalition politics. Since then, three coalitions, without a core party with a majority, lasted full terms.
By the fall of 2020 now, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s BJP has finished the NDA and written new rules and equations in national politics. Mr Advani’s NDA is over, used, and discarded.
You might wish to compare this with the Ashwamedha Yagna of our Vedic tradition. Once your sovereignty is established with the display of an unstoppable horse across the nation, what do you do? Sacrifice that blessed horse. The NDA was that sacrificial horse. And we say it with no sense of judgement.
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