AS HE turns 75 Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi can lay claim to having redefined India’s fundamental political commonsense. Politics is most powerful when it provides large masses of people a new lens to make sense of the world around them – and Modi’s politics has provided one to his party BJP, and its ideology Hindutva.
In 11 years as PM, Modi has taken his party from a hesitant contender for power to the status of the default party of power in expanding geographical spaces – blunting the ‘communal’ charge thrown at the BJP.
On course to beating Jawaharlal Nehru’s record as the longest-serving PM, Modi has ensured that the BJP under him has consistently gone about reshaping the Nehruvian cultural consensus to make space for the BJP. A change from the earlier BJP government led by A B Vajpayee, this has helped the party tap into vast sections of mofussil youth who found doors to elite power corridors closed to them.
Towards this end, Modi has projected himself as “one among them”, in contrast to the anglicised minority seen as the fundamental base of the Nehru-Gandhi family. It’s the old elite who now feel pushed to the margins, with the PM famously defining this tussle in 2017 as one about “Harvard vs hard work”.
This is one reason that the Congress’s charge against Modi of running a “suit-boot ki sarkar” has not stuck.
Modi has also helped his party shed another tag – of being a “Bania-Brahmin”, or largely an upper caste, party. Starting with Modi, several OBC leaders hold positions of authority in the BJP, while under his government, a Dalit and then a tribal has been elected to the post of President.
The payoff has been evident in elections, where the BJP has been winning a significant section of the OBC and Dalit votes.
When the Opposition, particularly the Congress, tried to trip him on this by demanding a caste census, the Modi government punctured the campaign by announcing it would hold such a count as part of the Census.
These changes have set in even as the BJP has held on to its core of Hindutva, and scored success on most of its ideological promises – the Ram Temple has been built at Ayodhya, Article 370 abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir, while a beginning has been made towards a common civil code and one nation-one election.
In a reflection of how the polity has changed, even Opposition parties are wary of openly talking about Muslims as an electoral constituency now.
And the man at the heart of these changes, 11 years after he first came to power, remains indisputably Modi.
Born on September 17, 1950, to a Modh-Ghanchi family of Vadnagar in Gujarat, which would only later acquire the OBC tag, Modi made his way up slowly and steadily as an organisational man. He got his break with a chance to become the Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, in the wake of an earthquake that had left the state and the then BJP government shaken.
For a while, the Gujarat riots of 2002 under Modi as CM threatened to stall his political career, with Vajpayee as PM expressing displeasure with him openly, and countries refusing him visas. Having survived that phase of all-round opprobrium, Modi never looked back, gaining a new patina as the “vikas purush (development man)”, with Gujarat held up as a model for the rest of the country.
The Tata Nano, turned away from Bengal, found home in Modi’s Gujarat, while Vibrant Gujarat Summits were popularised as investment showcases. The huge Gujarati diaspora abroad multiplied this message of a leader with a difference.
After three terms as CM, the course to the Centre was ready for Modi to stride down. Having suffered two successive defeats by the UPA, the BJP was ripe for the taking. An ageing L K Advani proved no resistance.
When the BJP won in 2014 with a majority on its own – the first time a government had managed that in 30 years – Modi had arrived.
“The reason why Modi ji could break all binaries and hold the trust of the people beyond caste, urban-rural and other divides was his belief that performance and development will be rewarded,” says BJP leader and former MP G V L Narasimha Rao.
Adds BJP leader Vinay Sahasrabuddhe: “Rajni Kothari once famously talked about a Congress system. Now that system is gone and a BJP system has arrived. The BJP has achieved this through mainly three factors – the undisputed and strong leadership of PM Modi; his commitment to ideology and all ideology-driven agendas as they are the mainspring of our motivation; and the emphasis on good governance and development. He has never compromised with governance for the organisation, and vice-a-versa.”
And, Modi supporters believe, the juggernaut has not lost steam. Having added Operation Sindoor to his military successes against Pakistan, the PM now looks more comfortable than ever on the world stage. As US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable turns leave this stage shaky, all eyes are on if Modi can again get his timing right.