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     Teluguvaadu Junior Artist Username: Teluguvaadu Post Number: 165 Registered: 11-2012 Posted From: 117.195.237.125 Rating: N/A |
Today, Advani and Modi represent two visions of the party and its possibilities The Jana Sangh and then the BJP have always oscillated between a strategy of ethno-religious mobilisation and a more moderate approach to politics. Deendayal Upadhyaya had shown the way when he tried to combine a militant anti-cow slaughter movement in 1966-67 and a new kind of association with opponents of the Congress (including some leftists), with whom the Jana Sangh formed coalition governments (the famous Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments) in 1967. That was the golden age of Lohia's "non-Congressism". This tension is in the DNA of the BJP: on the one hand, as an offshoot of the RSS, it has to promote a Hindu nationalist agenda, on the other hand, as a political party, it has to broaden its base by diluting its ideology. After more than six decades (the Jana Sangh had been founded in 1951), the trajectory of the party remains a zigzag. Certainly, the Jana Sangh had given up its Hindi-only policy as early as the 1960s in order to expand southwards. But the Hindutva agenda has surfaced repeatedly, largely because its architects did not see any contradiction between ethno-religious mobilisations and the electoral process: after all, the polarisation of voters along religious lines could only help the BJP in a country where Hindus were in a majority. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/a-tale-of-two-bjps/1133187 / |
