Decoding BJP’s Gujarat story: Hindutva became the defining political common-sense in the state thanks to the party’s better statecraft https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-edit-page/decoding-bjps-gujarat-story-hindutva-became-the-defining-political-common-sense-in-the-state-thanks-to-the-partys-better-statecraft/ November 16, 2022 Hilal Ahmed The popular "gujarat Model, Gujarat as Laboratory, does not explain what as per CSDS-Lok Niti survey fins two thirds satisfied with Gujarat Government;s performance. Hindutva as Challenger.. and Hindutva as a form of statecraft. - 1969 communal distrubance and civilian plan shot down by a pak jet, gave rise to anti-pakistan feeling which were onverted into anti-muslim expressions. Then the National Emergency and the reservation debate got BJP to dismantle KHAM and create a new Hindu constitutency.
The second trajectory of Hindutva post liberalisation. Pro-market forces to create a new corporate-oritnted development agenda. the globalised Gujarati indentiy was used.. a new coonstituency of voters with the help of grasrrotslevel political institutions, a new discourse for "samajik samraasta, combined with some welfare policies.
Gujarat Elections 2022: Decoding BJP's winning formula | Bharat Ki Baat (10 Nov 2022) https://news.abplive.com/videos/news/gujarat-elections-2022-decoding-bjp-s-winning-formula-bharat-ki-baat-10-nov-2022-1562667
By : ABP News Bureau | Updated : 10 Nov 2022
Decoding BJP’s Success In The Gujarat Local Body Elections https://swarajyamag.com/politics/decoding-bjps-success-in-the-gujarat-local-body-elections
by Dhaval Patel - Mar 3, 2021
Decoding the BJP’S model of welfarism
It positions welfare as empowerment, but strips it from the language of rights, and enforces it through centralised delivery mechanisms
Hindustan Times (Chandigarh)15 Apr 2022 https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-chandigarh/20220415/281895891783929 In the 2017 UP election, and the subsequent 2019 national election, welfare schemes were a loud and visible part of the campaign. The term “labharthi” (the BJP’S term for scheme beneficiaries) has entered the lexicon of political analysis.
The most visible aspect of the BJP’S welfare is its emphasis on direct benefits — cash transfers, providing toilets, housing, and since the pandemic, ration. Economist Arvind Subramaniam describes this as “subsidised public provisioning of private goods”, a “new welfarism” where public goods — health and basic education — are under-prioritised in favour of private benefits. Focusing on the political contract that underlies this new welfarism, political scientist Hilal Ahmed has recently characterised the BJP’S welfare as an electoral bargain struck by a “charitable State”. Welfare is not provided out of political duty, but rather as an act of benevolence linked to electoral return.
Building on “new welfarism” and “charitable State”, there are three distinctive characteristics of the BJP’S current welfare model.
First, a repositioning of welfare as “empowerment”, distinct from “doles” and “entitlements” (as they describe) of the past. “The poor need to be empowered... to fight poverty on their own strength”, the Prime Minister (PM) said in his early days in power as he sought to position the BJP’S welfare through the slogan “empowerment versus entitlement”.
Welfare, in this imagination, is about the State providing the tools to fight poverty through new welfarism, but the fight is an individual one. In its essence, this is a remarkably neoliberal take on welfare — a point that is lost in public discourse that tends to view any kind of welfare as Left-wing.
In an interview in the run-up to the UP election, Amit Shah reiterated this position. “We have provided gas connections, it is up to them to pay their bills,” he said, “We have made toilets…they have to maintain them…. what we did is.. to upgrade their lives — this is empowerment”.
Second, the idea of the labharthi.
Logically, a discourse on empowerment ought to create political space for a deeper articulation of citizen rights and identity. But what is distinctive about the BJP’S welfare is that it seeks to limit the idea of empowerment to the provision of benefits. The careful nurturing of the citizen as a labharthi is central to this framing.
In this formulation, the citizen is cast as a recipient, a beneficiary of welfare beholden to the benevolence of a charitable State rather than a citizen actively claiming rights from the State. By thus stripping welfare of the language of rights, the BJP has effectively created a new language of political mobilisation. The “labharthi varg”
is distinct from caste and identitybased politics that draws on an imagination of empowerment as identity assertion through a language of group rights and dignity.
Third, the strategies through which the labharthi is mobilised — centralised delivery and direct attribution to the party leadership — are designed to build the moral legitimacy of the PM and establish trust, what political scientist Neelanjan Sircar has termed the “politics of vishwas (faith)”.
This is not about establishing the patronage of the “mai baap sarkar”. Rather, it is about establishing an emotive connection and deep loyalty to the party leadership. Individual benefits, rather than diffused public goods such as education, are compatible with this politics. Tangible benefits make it easier for party workers to mobilise voters and invoke the image of the PM as the provider. And when benefits fail to reach — despite the noise there remain households that are waiting for the promise of ration, toilets and housing — this loyalty is extracted from the promise of the future. After all, “Modi hai to mumkin hai (Modi can make it possible)”.
Sociologist Patrick Heller coined the term “patrimonial welfarism”. This comes closest to describing the BJP’S welfare model: Welfarism that derives its power from the party leadership, while at the same time, leveraging specific welfare benefits as an instrument to establish the leadership’s moral legitimacy with voters.
This is not a uniquely BJP strategy. Politicians going back to late Tamil Nadu chief minister (CM) Jayalalithaa and even Indira Gandhi deployed versions of patrimonial welfarism. But the political reach of the BJP’S welfarism, one that several CMS across the country are now adapting, requires deeper engagement. What does it do to democracy when voters are cast as labharthis rather than rights-claiming citizens? How does this shape citizen expectations and democratic accountability? These are questions all students of democracy must ask and answer. This piece is a provocation to further this debate.
Yamini Aiyar is president and chief executive, Centre for Policy Research The views expressed are personal
Decoding the BJP’s victories: Trends of continuity with some significant change Suhas Palshikar December 19, 2017. BJP has gained in voteshare, widened its base among Dalits and even Muslims — but it has lost seats. The Congress has gained seats, but it has retreated among traditional supporters and the poor. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/decoding-the-bjps-victories-in-gujarat-himachal-pradesh-assembly-elections-trends-of-continuity-with-some-significant-change-pm-modi-4988846/ Such is the BJP’s dependence on him that it could not have won but for the campaign by the Prime Minister, and voters’ connect with him. The Congress tried hard to keep the campaign to the state level and question the BJP’s claims of development, but Modi upended that narrative, pitching the election as a test of his personal popularity and of his policies as PM. Two weeks before voting began, 11% respondents in the CSDS survey said Modi would be the most important factor in deciding their vote, not any party or candidate. The PM’s concerted — and controversial — campaign in the last two weeks is likely to have swayed voters in the final stage; indeed, of those who made up their mind during that period, 53% voted BJP, the survey showed.
Decoding Gujarat’s ‘resort’ politics by Rajdeep Sardesai July 31, 2017 The rise of the BJP in the 1990s and the Gujarat riots of 2002 sharpened the battle lines but there was still a measure of what Gujaratis would term, in keeping with their mercantilist traditions, as political ‘len-den’ (give and take). Even in the mid 90s, when Shankarsinh Vaghela split the BJP and ferreted his MLAs to a resort to Khajuraho, it was primarily a battle for supremacy within a ‘parivar’.
What is BJP's ideology?
By Hilal Ahmed on February 03, 2014 https://www.epw.in/blog/hilal-ahmed/what-bjps-ideology.html According to the national website of the Party, Hindutva and Integral Humanism are other two components that constitute the ideology of the party. The philosophy of ‘Integral Humanism’ is based on the four lecturers delivered by Deen Dayal Upadhyay in the mid-1960s, which are also available. These lecturers offer a critique of national politics by evoking the intrinsic relationship between individual and society.
https://www.pressreader.com/india/hindustan-times-chandigarh/20220415/281895891783929