When protests became stepping stones for BJP

THE BJP government at the Centre has been fortunate that barring two significant protests — one by the farmers of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and the other by Haryana's wrestlers — it has not had to grapple with challenges on the ground. Even these protests did not have far-reaching electoral implications for the BJP, except in Punjab.

This is why a statement reportedly made by Union Home Minister Amit Shah on wanting to study all post-Independence protests, especially since 1974, to analyse the reasons, the "financial aspects and final outcomes" and the covert players has aroused curiosity. The statement was said to have been made at a ‘National Security Strategies’ conference organised by the Intelligence Bureau in July, but reported just last week.

Was Shah's intent spurred by the welter of popular uprisings in the neighbourhood that either voted out a ruling party (Sri Lanka) or unseated an incumbent dispensation mid-stream, as in Bangladesh? (Nepal had not witnessed turmoil in July; it came later).

Sri Lanka and Bangladesh might have provided an immediate context for the Home Ministry's agenda, but the history of mass movements in India — which often began as localised demonstrations against specific issues before conflating with a larger mood of discontent against the existing political order and morphing into open confrontations with the government of the day — shows that ample precedents exist within India itself.

The supreme irony is that the BJP and its earlier incarnation, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (BJS), and the RSS either spearheaded the epochal movements or surreptitiously instigated and helped the aboveground initiators, if they felt the movements had garnered popular support and had the potential to change the political trajectory. Of all the quasi-political agents, the Sangh, with its extensive cadre network and propaganda tools, has the greatest capacity to mobilise support for a movement that is broadly in sync with its professed beliefs.

The Sangh's corps fit in perfectly with the distinction Prime Minister Narendra Modi made between an 'andolan jeevi' (a professional protester) and an 'andolan kaari' (a genuine protester) while speaking on the farmers' agitation in February 2021. The 'pracharaks' and 'swayamsevaks' will qualify as 'andolan kaari'. So, this fig leaf of a difference will presumably leave them out of the ambit of protests as and when Shah commissions the study or at least paint them as bona fide catalysts for a better life.

India's first historic post-1947 movement, the Navnirman agitation, lasted only three months (January-March 1974) in Gujarat but left an imprint on the political landscape.

It classically illustrates the RSS-BJP's outlook on protests. The BJP existed as the BJS and was a peripheral political player. But the RSS' students' wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), sought to maximise its presence through a protest that started against rising mess bills at Ahmedabad's LD Engineering College before snowballing into a statewide agitation.

The government of the day, led by Chimanbhai Patel, a member of Indira Gandhi's Congress Requisition or Congress (R), was accused of inflation, artificially engineering groundnut oil (Gujarat's staple cooking medium) price, food scarcity and corruption.

The RSS chose the BJS and the ABVP as vehicles to participate in the 'andolan' whose putative leader was the Navnirman Yuvak Samiti (NYS). The NYS's one-point agenda was Patel's resignation and dissolution of the Assembly. Patel eventually resigned, but the NYS, bereft of a mass organisational structure, membership, a constitution and a programme, disintegrated.

The BJS stepped in to fill in the vacuum, but because the 'andolan' was marked by its share of violence, the BJS distanced itself from the NYS and entered electoral politics with the Opposition, that banded itself together as the Janata Morcha and recorded a modest win in the election that followed. The BJS (that became BJP) gained a foothold in Gujarat through a mass movement. 'Andolan jeevi' or 'andolan kaari'?

The Navnirman agitation in the west became a template for Jayaprakash Narayan's 'Sampoorna Kranti Andolan' in the east and was one of the reasons for the imposition of the Emergency.

JP's crusade was a low-hanging fruit for the Sangh to pluck and savour the first taste of power on a larger scale because the 'andolan' had national resonances, unlike the Gujarat protests. No wonder the BJP describes the movement as the 'second freedom struggle' helmed by the Sangh.

In an article, Arvind Rajagopal, media studies professor at New York University, writes, "The Emergency, in fact, rendered the Jana Sangh...respectable, and paved the way for it to enter mainstream politics. In LK Advani's words, it changed what he called the 'untouchable' status of the Jana Sangh in politics." According to Rajagopal, the Emergency's importance to the RSS "needs to be emphasised because it helps place Hindutva in a wider historical place rather than in a timeless world of fanaticism."

So, while Opposition leaders were jailed, the Sangh, among other activities, played a major role in the production and distribution of underground literature. The RSS realised that popular mobilisation was a shortcut to getting political power and acquiring the legitimacy it badly needed after suffering the taint of Gandhi's assassination. JP was the perfect icon to imbue the RSS/BJP with that respectability.

The other standout mass movement is the countrywide mobilisation in support of demolishing the Babri mosque and "restoring" the Ram temple on the site that made a place in history. Twin objectives were achieved at a price that tore apart the fabric of communal amity, which had survived despite the Partition and the India Against Corruption (IAC) campaign. The Ram temple "movement" was owned wholly by the RSS, BJP and their cohorts and embraced by practically the entire political spectrum as the BJP strode rapidly to power.

Though it appeared that the IAC movement was authored by Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal and a motley group of his non-political associates, the RSS and BJP quickly sniffed out its political prospects and clambered on the bandwagon, though with no political dividends to claim immediately. At least, they got rid of the Congress in Delhi for time to come and eventually downsized Kejriwal.

Make no mistake. These are movements that will stand the BJP/Centre's scrutiny if it comes to that because in June 2023, the Modi government set up a team of experts to prepare exhaustive literature on the RSS-BJS's role in the Emergency and the Navnirman agitation.

They are convinced that if these "struggles" were not pivoted by the 'parivar', the Congress would never have been vanquished. Are protests pathways to victory rather than subversion?

Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist based in New Delhi, India.