Glimpses 2019: This year meant inching closer to ideological goals for BJP

The year that will give way to 2020 in a few hours, changed many things about India as we knew it. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party visibly changed. In the capital where its headquarter is located, and from where it's government –of India— is run, things changed more than ever since Narendra Modi took charge as Prime Minister in 2019, and was followed into the capital by Amit Shah as the president of the ruling party.

The biggest change is in terms of senior people in the party, people who built it as one with a capacity to be a pan-Indian entity. Former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj's death on August 6 left the party not only poorer but different. Though gifted with qualities that would make it a cake-walk for her to win Lok Sabha elections, Sushma had opted out of the race in 2019, citing health. Always in a saree, a big vermillion bindi and her hair partition filled with “sindoor”, she was never shy of wearing her Hindu identity everywhere on her. But beyond that, she was liberal and secular, however much a large section of her party dislikes those two words since Modi and Shah shifted base to Delhi. There was no tweeting about the many gestures that made her so— those were part of her way before the little sparrow flew into our lives through the digital space. It was all in the way she met and spoke to people. There was no special treatment of some, and there was no neglect of some –in fact there, there were no “others” in her inclusive world.

A few weeks later, came another change in the party, again on account of a huge loss in the form of the death of Arun Jaitely. Way before the Modi government of 2014, Jaitely had been the go-to man for Modi and Shah as they were traversing the legal labyrinth that came with Godara and its aftershocks. His contribution to their freedom and political rise is something that would do well be aware of. Perhaps they were, which is why they ensured he became part of their team even though he lost the Lok Sabha elections in Amritsar that summer of 2014. It was not that their payback time had come. They needed him the more as they were faced with the realities of Lutyens' Delhi, what another BJP leader Nithin Gadkari has dismissed off as “capital culture” that he was vocal in his dislike about.

One can hear voices here and there that the CAA, NPR, NRC fallout may have been handled way better had Sushma and Jaitely been around to give their suggestions.

What has changed is not just the majority of the BJP in Parliament being used to enact laws to see their ideological promises in their manifesto. It is the way the ruling party deals with the public who raise a voice against Prime Minister Modi or Home Minister Amit Shah, or any of the UPA government's policies. The party's interim president J P Nadda recently told a rally that anyone opposing the CAA would be anti-Dalit. His rationale — Modi is pro-Dalit, so opposition CAA which is about opposing Modi is being anti-Dalit! Whether it is the treatment of artists and writers who question that party's stand or act or views of Opposition leaders, 2019 saw the BJP lose much of its shreds of tolerance.

Those who came before Modi and Shah do not matter in this new BJP. While one misses the leadership of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, he has been spared of this change in the party he delivered!