VP's Exit Fuels BJP's Ideological Churn

Return to history is painful for leaders used to making it. Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar created history, but of a parliamentary kind dubious enough to earn him a membership of the government's echo chamber. Hence, his premature resignation was a thunderclap cleaving India's political skyline, creating a convulsion so fierce it shattered the BJP's carefully curated narrative.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

Cloaked in the polite fiction of "health concerns", Dhankhar's exit was anything but pharmacological. Once a formidable Jat strongman and one of Hindutva's most zealous standard-bearers, he rose from Rajasthan's feuding political plains to the gilded halls of Lutyens' Delhi, brandishing his saffron credentials like a badge of honour. But somewhere between adulation and ambition, Dhankhar overstepped.

He undeservedly became the Vice President and shrank the chair he occupied. His tirades against the judiciary as "anti-national saboteurs", and his rhetorical crucifixion of dissenters, once cheered by the Sangh parivar's digital armies, began to chafe the very edifice that had elevated him. Behind closed doors, the party grew wary of his uncontrollable candour. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence with a terse, curiously impersonal post on X that was more an epitaph than encomium, a flood of orchestrated condemnation burst forth. Sangh loyalists, ever attuned to the PM's silences, took their cue. Knives, once sheathed, swiftly came out.

However, Dhankhar's ignominious accidental exit has ignited the debate over BJP's unwritten diktat that leaders must retire from active roles after age 75. Now, insiders believe that the rule has been selectively invoked to purge a few and promote many more with hardly any ideological compatibility. Consequently, tried and tested Sangh veterans were denied an opportunity to serve either the party or the government.