When was bjp in power in india

As years passed, the Congress became a playground for political entrepreneurs, factions and wily provincial satraps, in their unceasing pursuit of power and wealth, flaunting loyalty to the high command. In his famous speech, as the newly anointed president of the Congress, Rajiv Gandhi lamented that power brokers converted the party into a feudal oligarchy, that corruption became the hallmark of leadership, and that the party was a mere shell without substance.

Was he not aware of the inconvenient fact that nothing else but lineage parachuted him to the coupled-up positions of prime minister and the president of the Congress?

Once again, after a generation, Rahul Gandhi is caught in the same predicament of proclaiming a commitment to the lofty ideal of strengthening democracy while he is conscious of the fact that it was the family connection that enthroned him in the highest position, a position he wants to abdicate.

The Congress as a party is caught in the toughest political bind ; the prospects of the party falling apart without a dynastic leader, and the bleak chances to prosper with a dynastic leader at the helm.

The decline of Congress dominance in the s and s opened up many possibilities. For a short while after the Emergency, the Janata Party appeared to be a solid alternative giving rise to speculation of the possibility of a two-party system taking shape.

But the party was shattered soon by the internecine quarrels of its ambitious leaders. Again, after a decade, the formation of the National Front government led by the Janata Dal in kindled hopes of forging a formidable third front, consisting of parties that professed secularism and social justice. But this experiment ended in a fiasco. One more experiment in to form a United Front government consisting again of many disparate parties too collapsed in no time.

State-based parties came to prominence in these years of political churning and governmental instability. They claimed themselves to be the representatives of regional interests, guardians of state autonomy, cultural moorings of their people and the aspirations of the backward social groups. But their practice did not match their claims. Many of them had degenerated into family fiefdoms, and outfits of personal aggrandisement, political corruption and bad governance.

They have shown how parties can be reduced to personal fiefs and political power can be passed on to family members like private property. It could sense the political vacuum in the wake of Congress decay and the disintegration of the third front. This new political strategy, known as social engineering, contributed to the electoral success of the BJP in the late s. This massive change in its support base pushed the party to the centre stage. But we know that Modi was not the first leader to make it a political issue.

Political Hindutva has been around quite for some time, since the s. Polarisation of voters did not happen in In , the percentage of Muslims who voted for the BJP had actually increased to eight percent and it remained at that level in Can we then say that Vajpayee was a more polarising figure than Modi? What Modi did was to consolidate the Hindu vote. In , about half of the people wanted Modi as the Prime Minister.

Close to one-third of those who voted for the BJP said that their voting preference would have changed if Modi was not the prime ministerial candidate Shastri No believer in democracy can dismiss this as false consciousness or attribute it to the condition of being misled by propaganda.

So, the question we should ask is: How did Modi strike a chord with ordinary people? I can think of three ways. One, Modi was subjected to severe public scrutiny for ten years under the United Progressive Alliance UPA government which could not indict him despite setting up special investigation teams and carrying on years of prosecution in the highest courts.

People empathise with leaders who they perceive are persecuted for political reasons by the regimes of the day, whose leaders themselves are corrupt and cling to power by fair means or foul. Two, his social background. He hailed from an ordinary family.

He is not a janeudhari, has no famous gotra to flaunt, no claims to illustrious lineage or wealth. He has not received education in any premier institution. He does not speak the language and lingo of the urban elite. Still the party stuck together. Their obsession with unity is based on the deep understanding of the flaws of Indian society," says Prof Sitapati.

Political parties are coalitions of competing interests and factions usually held together by charismatic leaders, ideologies, organisational prowess and, in India's case, caste. Dissent and intra-party conflict are common. India's parties have been splintered by competing egos of leaders and factional feuds. Leaders have broken away from the Congress to form successful regional parties.

But many found him ruthless, self-aggrandising and solitary," says Prof Sitapati. It is very hard to separate the political entity from allied and nominally political entities associated with it. The networked model means that the BJP gains a lot of strength from its grassroots organisations and its dense networks help keep individuals inside the tent, so to speak," Prof Vaishnav, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told me.

It is not that dissenters have not left the BJP. Perhaps the reason is BJP is a deeply ideological party and the ideological glue holds it together - and you will find this in the parties on the Left and Right," says Rahul Verma, a political scientist and co-author of Ideology and Identity, a book which explores the role of ideology in Indian politics.

Whether the BJP will stick together forever is impossible to predict. Its take-no-prisoners style of politics means they have thrown open their doors to defectors - often tainted - from other parties. This can lead to inevitable contradictions over ideological 'purity'. That's why elections are the cornerstone of BJP's existence. Mr Verma says BJP's social base is expanding but their leadership still remains predominantly upper caste.

That's another contradiction the party might have to grapple with in the future. The issue of reservations for historically marginalized castes again proved to be a sticking point.

The V. Advani to take to the road to undercut the fallout from the issue of OBC reservations and create pan-Hindu pressure to construct a Ram temple on the site of the Babri Masjid.

In these elections, the BJP went to the polls banking on the Ram temple agitation, although it combined this outreach to Hindus with advocacy of greater economic reforms. In the wake of the elections, the BJP earned a plurality of seats in the lower house of parliament and had an opportunity to form a government, but it failed to cobble together a majority on the floor of the Lok Sabha.

A coalition of several state-level parties—known as the United Front—assumed power with the support of the Congress Party. The United Front government did not last long, and a midterm election was held in The elections conducted in the aftermath of the India-Pakistan military conflict in Kargil helped the NDA to return to power once more. In clinching the general election, the BJP meticulously stitched together a unique coalition, drawn not only from its traditional upper-caste supporters but also from many voters belonging to marginalized communities, including OBCs, Dalits, and Scheduled Tribes STs.

The fact that social conservatives voted for the BJP was nothing new; such conservative voters, many of whom belong to the upper castes, have consistently supported the BJP. These emergent BJP supporters tend to be skeptical of government intrusion on matters of social norms as well as economic policy, and they tend to prefer a state that limits its involvement in the business sector.

In stitching together this historic assemblage of voters who disfavor both statism and recognition, the BJP was greatly aided by the foibles of the Congress-led UPA government in the lead-up to the election. During its decadelong stint in power, the UPA government had unveiled a number of signature welfare programs such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme designed to benefit the poor and historically disadvantaged groups like Dalits, Muslims, and STs.

In short, Modi singlehandedly added a new segment of voters to the BJP who otherwise likely would have not voted for the party. One of every four respondents who had voted for the NDA said they would not have voted for it if Modi had not been its candidate. In , the BJP under Modi, as political scientist Suhas Palshikar argues, suddenly became a party of different meanings for different echelons of Indian society:.

To its core constituency, it continued to be a party of Hindutva; to the OBCs, it represented a vehicle of political power, a vehicle articulating and absorbing their democratic upsurge; for power-seekers, it was a convenient platform offering the possibility of tactical use of the Hindutva weapon when required; for devout Hindus, it represented the religious assertion of the Hindu religion; to the new and upwardly-mobile lower-middle sections, the party represented new possibilities of economic benefit.

With its landslide win in , the BJP ushered in a far-reaching recalibration of the social coalitions that confer political influence in India. And the party still holds more state legislators members of the legislative assemblies, or MLAs than the Congress Party see figure 3. Now the political calculus that informs electioneering in India revolves around the BJP; nearly all political alliances are predicated on embracing or countering the leading party. Looking ahead, an important hurdle confronting the BJP is how to keep its diverse coalition together, especially as the overlap between two of its key constituencies—those who favor Hindu nationalism and those who disdain identity-based quotas—shrinks.

The flurry of protests surrounding the issue of reservations in educational institutions and civil service posts such as the unrest in the Patidar community in Gujarat demonstrates that many young Indians appear to favor a meritocratic alternative to the status quo. However, a CSDS-Lokniti poll indicates that the majority of these same young Indians do not openly support the excesses of Hindutva policies or political tactics that disparage or devalue Muslims.

Instead, this demographic group backs a more progressive social policy platform and prefers a government that curtails the extent of its economic interventionism. This sea change is reshaping Indian voting coalitions and their views on issues of statism and recognition. Yet sometimes the BJP supports strong government intervention, like when it comes to outlawing the slaughter of cows; the party maintains that killing cows violates Indian social customs. Presumably, electoral calculus undergirds this policy position.

Consider, for example, two nationwide opinion polls conducted by CSDS-Lokniti in and in , respectively. Furthermore, the youth survey reported a substantial plurality of upper-middle-class, urban-dwelling young people who have finished graduate school a group that is historically more likely to vote for the BJP stand opposed to both identity-based reservations and prejudices against Muslims. These trends are likely to deepen, if the available survey evidence is any guide. But it would be unwise for the BJP to expect that this support will persist indefinitely.

This allowed him to go on the offensive on the campaign trail, promising voters a future marked by greater egalitarianism irrespective of differences along caste, religious, or class lines.

Empowerment, not entitlement, would be the hallmark of a BJP government. Though the BJP government has made gestures such as the decision to demonetize high-value currency notes to undercut corrupt practices, it has failed to offer an alternate economic vision that could be shared by most Indians.

Starting in the late s, the political concerns of OBCs and Dalits took on added political salience as some political actors began mobilizing to give voice to lower caste concerns. One prominent RSS figure advocated for the party to recruit leaders from lower castes, a tactic that allowed the BJP to make inroads in multiple corners of the country, especially in northwestern India.

After a string of electoral losses in and , the BJP stormed back to power in by simultaneously maintaining robust upper caste support and bringing substantial numbers of OBC, Dalit, and Adivasi voters into the fold. This political sea change is remarkable.

The BJP faces a monumental political quandary, a mismatch between a voter bloc that draws support increasingly from lower caste communities and an immutable leadership that has retained its historical upper caste tenor. This logjam of depressed lower and intermediate caste representation in the Congress Party eventually prompted an exodus of those voting communities as they turned to other parties that would give greater voice to their political concerns.

Countless Indians who are not from upper castes are bound to harbor ill will over the fact that they are underrepresented in prominent positions such as parliament and state assemblies, lofty posts in government officialdom, private companies, and even less prominent public-sector jobs including the education sector.

This could lead to a politically explosive debate and conflicting demands as some groups seek expanded reservation status to cover previously uncovered populations while other quarters call for the government to scrap the reservation system altogether. Many young Hindus are leery of quotas that single out specific castes or religious communities, though a significant share of them even those who support the BJP are open to such measures for economically marginalized groups, according to a CSDS-Lokniti tracker poll survey.

When political parties seek to expand their reach, they often develop contradictory tendencies.