What BJP Can Teach Congress

Political success comes from ideas, not intellectual laziness

- Hilal Ahmed

Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ is an important initiative. It aims to pose a challenge to BJP’s ideological dominance. Congress has come out with a few attractive slogans and a website is dedicated entirely for making it a people’s initiative.

This attempted ideological refashioning has its own political significance. The old secular/communal binary has already lost its electoral importance; while, the conventional Mandal politics based on an imagined unity of all deprived sections has virtually failed. In a way, Bharat Jodo Yatra is the first positive resolve to produce a counternarrative since 2014.

It will be too early to predict the future of this initiative. However, it gives us an opportunity to examine the factors that have helped BJP to establish its dominance over Indian politics. Two core formulations, the idea of New India and Hindutva constitutionalism, need to be given serious intellectual attention in this regard.

The idea of India

Non-BJP parties often criticise Hindutva politics as a threat to what is called ‘the idea of India’. It is argued that Hindutva represents a parochial, narrow-minded, majoritarian, communal ideology, which is incapable of accommodating the religious and cultural plurality of the country. VD Savarkar’s book Hindutva and the writings of RSS’s ideologue MS Golwalkar are invoked to justify this formulation.