‘HINDUTVA IS NOT RIGID. IT BELIEVES IN UNITY, NOT UNIFORMITY' - Bhupender Yadav

Before Bhupender Yadav became the Union minister of environment, forests, climate change, and of labour, he was a key general secretary in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In that role, he played a significant role in building the party into a formidable electoral machine that won two consecutive Lok Sabha elections. Now, along with economist Ila Patnaik, he has penned The Rise of the BJP, a book that offers a clinical analysis of the party’s evolution, its ideological moorings, its economic philosophy, and the lessons its phenomenal growth can teach us. In a conversation with Group Editorial Director Raj Chengappa, Yadav and Patnaik discuss what their new book is about. Excerpts from the interview.

- Raj Chengappa

Q.For decades, the BJP’s vote percentage hov­ered below 25 per cent. It crossed the 30 per cent mark in 2014, and in 2019 reached 37.7 per cent. To what do you attribute this quantum leap?

Bhupender Yadav: Firstly, if you analyse the BJP after the formation of the Vajpayee government in 1998, you will find that in 1998 as well as in 2014 and 2019, the BJP won maximum seats in the tribal areas. Secondly, there was a strategic change in the way the party was organised from just a core entity to several fronts and cells and then connecting with the voters at the booth level. Thirdly, Advaniji’s yatras helped the BJP reach rural areas where earlier the party had no presence. The fourth reason behind the sudden surge in the BJP’s vote percentage after 2014 was its unique digital campaign. So, if the yatras took the BJP to areas that were remote, the digital campaign helped it connect with the middle class through their phones. Most importantly, the party followed it up with mass contact programmes tailored to different regions. It also organised training programmes. That brought about a massive transformation. After winning the 2014 election, the implementation of massive welfare schemes that touched everyone led to the Modi government’s re-election in 2019.

Q. For the BJP and their mentors, the RSS, the main agenda for dec­ ades was seen to be building the Ram temple, abolition of Article 370, implementation of the Uniform Civil Code and focusing on cultural nationalism. But these do not figure as the primary drivers in your book.