From Our Bureau
NEW DELHI: In a dig at the Opposition, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday decried the family-led parties for never allowing the youth of the country to progress as “they have been always betrayed and today wwe should be proud that the BJP is the only party alerting the country of this phenomenon.”
He was speaking here at the celebration of the 42nd foundation day of the Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP), the world’s largest party, with no exaggeration at its phenomenal growth in eight years since he took over as the Prime Minister in 2014.
From Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kutch to Kohima, BJP has been strengthening the resolve of ‘Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat’ (One India, Great India), the Prime Minister said while addressing the party’s workers, MPs and MLAs on the occasion.
This year’s foundation day is important for three reasons, PM Modi said: “The first is that it coincides with the country’s 75th year of independence. The second reason is the rapidly changing global conditions, the changing global order, and the third reason is equally important that only a few weeks ago, the double engine governments of the BJP have returned in four states.”
The party has several events planned through the week, concluding with the commemoration of Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14. Currently the largest political party in India, both in terms of representation in Parliament, and in terms of party membership, the BJP has come a long way since its origins in the early 1980s.
Modi along with his comrade in arms Union Minister Amit Shah has transformed the BJP into an entity which very few of the generation that founded the party in 1980 would be able to recognize or identify with today.
The Gandhian Socialism was the mantra that former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had thought would work to catapult the BJP to power and become acceptable with the majority of voters, but its crushing defeat in the 8th general elections not only sidelined Vajpayee but dumped Gandhian Socialism into dustbin of history.
While addressing party MPs on Tuesday, the Prime Minister asked them rather had to remind them of service (Seva), an old school national BJP leader who has come up through RSS ranks said on condition of anonymity that the party and the government today runs with ‘Kanchan and Kaya” indicating that role of wealth and women is predominant.
In 1988, the BJP was only eight years old and had two MPs in the Lok Sabha as the party had suffered humiliating rout in 1984 general elections that were held in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
While the 42nd foundation day is being observed by the BJP as a grand event organized on a grand scale by professionals in which crores of rupees are being spent and celebrations are going to last for a fortnight, but the simplicity and dedication of the founding era are missing.
Transformation is visible when one recalls that party leaders used to be accessible and the party office situated at 11 Ashoka Road used to be an open house with journalists interacting with top party leaders like L K Advani, Kedar Nath Sahni, Kushbhau Thakre, Jagdish Prasad Mathur, Govindacharya and even that time national secretary Narendra Modi to name the few.
Now, the huge mansion of the party, situated at Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, is impressive, but amazingly it is virtually a closed shop where doors open only for those who matter and who wield some axe that grinds.
In the glitz of power, party’s growth reflecting in power and victories in elections, the BJP has surely distanced itself from the common man- an objective that was set as a goal by the Bharatiya Jan Sangh in 1951, by the BJP in 1980 and by the parent organization-the RSS in 1925.
