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@Evening: 🤔 Believe It Or Not, The BJP Actually Risks Losing Relevance If They Don't Change Course
The BJP needs to rediscover its core if it has to stay relevant to India, according to Swarajya editorial director R Jagannathan. (He makes a detailed case in his article today.)
Context: The installation of the sengol in the new Parliament building appears to be part of PM Narendra Modi’s plan for the steady reintroduction of Hindu cultural symbols into the national discourse.
But Dharma cannot be introduced by stealth or through the back door.
The strategy of incremental cultural symbolism can be easily reversed after one electoral defeat.
The BJP needs to stand for one idea that cannot be defeated, and that is Hindutva, where the goal is not the suppression of so-called minorities, but the protection of the country’s Dharmic ideals.
With Hindutva, even if the party loses one election, it can come back the next time.
Without Hindutva, it has no reason to exist.
Hindutva is key. The Hindutva issues that matter to the party’s core have been addressed partly with the success of the legal battle on Ayodhya and the abolition of article 370.
But this is where the engine is stalling and the opposition senses that it is in with a chance if it can band together for 2024.
As Karnataka showed, the BJP’s welfarist measures can be trumped by even more egregious handouts to the poor and non-poor.
But the start must be made with Hindutva.
If the BJP does not embrace it fully and unequivocally, it will gradually lose power (though it can retain it through a coalition in 2024).
Because there will be nothing to differentiate it from the rest of the 'secular' political formations.
Case for a BJP 4.0. The party can reinvent itself with two core principles as its differentiating ideology: the establishment of a Ram Rajya, where economic prosperity is fused with the idea of a rising Dharmic power.
It must seek to replace the preamble's bogus 'secularism' with a commitment to Dharma, Artha, Nyaya, and Antyodaya.
The ideals borrowed from the French Revolution ("liberty, equality, fraternity"), goals never achieved anywhere, must be replaced with a broader Dharmic commitment to fairness and compassion.
Good economics and the protection of Dharma go together.
BJP v. 4.0 has to make a clean break from secularism and other things that hold Bharat back.
Bottom line: The sengol installed in the new Parliament must not remain a mere symbol. It must involve an unshakeable belief in upholding dharma.
