In the recently held Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, Samajwadi Party was perceived as the most potent contender to the incumbent Bhartiya Janta Party. Amping up its inventory by riding on farmer sentiments and shaking hands with Rashtriya Lok Dal, the party gave a power-punched slogan, ‘Nayi Hawa Hai, Nayi Sapa Hai’ (fresh breeze of air and it’s a new Samajwadi Party)
Meanwhile, BJP leader Anurag Thakur came up with a rebuttal, ‘Wahi Sapa Hai’ (this is the same old Samajwadi Party), which became a launchpad for a social media campaign highlighting the weakness of the claims made by SP president Akhilesh Yadav. From putting across crime statistics during the SP rule to pointing out the list of its candidates with criminal backgrounds, ‘Yeh Wahi Sapa Hai’ quickly became a trending hashtag.
In no time, the SP’s political campaign was captured by the BJP, turned upside down, and used to its advantage. It would be more appropriate to say this was the “New BJP”, actively finding chinks in the armor of its opponents.
Journalist Nalin Mehta explores this re-invention — missed by the naked eye of many — in his new book, ‘The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party’. Rather than indulging in the usual political commentary based on subjective reasoning, Mehta’s book uses crunching of hard data to dig facts and insights.
Mehta, along with data scientist Rishabh Srivastava, sets up a data mining software called Normative Analysis of Reporting and Discourse, which the author refers to as NARAD.
According to Mehta, using the software, he and Srivastava analyzed 11,588 documents related to the BJP, published between 2006 and 2019 and consisting of 17.9 million words. These include speeches by BJP leaders, party press releases, fortnightly issues of BJP’s magazine Kamal Sandesh, and RSS’s weekly magazine Organiser.
The results of this data mining and crunching throw light on some interesting observations, which make certain conclusions evident. Mehta notes, “It wasn’t until 2019 that the BJP began to talk more about the Congress than it did about itself. That was for the first time the party, then in its fifth year in power, started talking more about the principal Opposition party than it talked about itself or its prime minister… we found that, in 2019, the BJP spoke more about Congress than on any other topic, including Modi, terrorism, defence or Kashmir.”
So, what was the reason behind this shift? The book explains that while it is natural for political parties to speak against their rivals, the strategy becomes lethal when one party’s failures can become the other’s strengths. Here, the BJP positioned itself as everything the Congress was not. “At the heart of the new communication was one core message: that the Congress remained a dynastic party, while the BJP, generally was not… at a time when most Indians had become disenchanted with claims about entitlement based on birth.”
Another important question the book seeks to answer is why and how BJP continues to grow in agrarian and rural India and attracts voters beyond the core base “despite tanking job-creation numbers, agrarian distress, and declining growth numbers”. Mehta provides an interesting answer to this puzzle. “The assumption so far has been that voters are turning rightwards because of BJP’s cultural nationalism and identity politics. Insights gleaned from the Narad Index show that the truth may be a bit more complicated… below the radar, the BJP has been focusing a great deal on the messaging to the farmers and on the narrative of development.”
He adds, “One of the findings that greatly surprised us was that, in its public outreach, the BJP speaks far more on these topics than about its core issues—terrorism, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya or national security.”
The book also explores some of the reasons behind the stupendous electoral success of the BJP since 2014 that have been already discussed by political analysts and psephologists. What this book does differently is provided these conclusions with a factual base that cannot be contested.
‘Labharthees’ or beneficiaries of the government’s social welfare schemes have been the major propeller of BJP’s electoral success. While implementation of welfare schemes in a developing country constitutes the major function of a government, converting these labharthees into potential voters has been a game that BJP has championed all along. As Mehta writes, “Nobody can claim that government systems worked perfectly, or that there are no flaws in them. That would obviously be wrong. The point is that the BJP, using its ground machinery and targeted messaging was able to reap the political benefits of its welfare spending, thus evolving a new model of politics in north India.”
The book further explains other much-talked-about reasons behind the emergence of the BJP into an election-winning machine. How the party expanded its social base beyond its traditional terrain by forging new political and social alliances and how it captured the social media space as a tool of mass communication, all have been documented in great detail.
In a chapter titled Modi@Digital: Why the BJP wins on Social Media, Mehta puts across an interesting anecdote. The readers would find it interesting to learn that before Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn had hosted Narendra Modi for a social media interaction. Mehta writes, “Soon after Google+ was launched in India, Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, appeared on the new digital platform to participate in a live and interactive Google+ Hangout session moderated by Ajay Devgn.” Reading the chapter makes it clear that the “differentiated communication strategy” adopted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the first-mover advantage gave BJP an upper hand in social media communication, which paid rich dividends to the party.
The emergence of the ‘New BJP’ is a story that runs parallel to the making of ‘New India’. But, the book does not attempt to trace this trajectory. It limits its probe to the reason behind BJP’s astounding electoral success. “Was it only because of a cultural shift in India? Or was its edifice of expansion built on creating a much wider, deeper superstructure of new constituencies of voters who aligned with it for reasons beyond the cultural divide? How did the BJP’s growth patterns differ across India’s regions, in new catchment areas where it had never held sway before, or in areas where it failed to make inroads? In other words, what really was happening in India, how did the BJP systematically become the country’s largest political party and its fulcrum of power? These are the fundamental questions I seek to answer,” writes Mehta.
And, the book does this with factual authority and academic rigour making The New BJP an essential read for those who want to unravel the secrets behind the saffron surge.
About The Author: Shishir Tripathi is a journalist and researcher based in Delhi. He has worked with The Indian Express, Firstpost, Governance Now, and Indic Collective. He writes on Law, Governance and Politics.
In the recently held Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, Samajwadi Party was perceived as the most potent contender to the incumbent Bhartiya Janta Party. Amping up its inventory by riding on farmer sentiments and shaking hands with Rashtriya Lok Dal, the party gave a power-punched slogan, ‘Nayi Hawa Hai, Nayi Sapa Hai’ (fresh breeze of air and it’s a new Samajwadi Party)
Meanwhile, BJP leader Anurag Thakur came up with a rebuttal, ‘Wahi Sapa Hai’ (this is the same old Samajwadi Party), which became a launchpad for a social media campaign highlighting the weakness of the claims made by SP president Akhilesh Yadav. From putting across crime statistics during the SP rule to pointing out the list of its candidates with criminal backgrounds, ‘Yeh Wahi Sapa Hai’ quickly became a trending hashtag.
In no time, the SP’s political campaign was captured by the BJP, turned upside down, and used to its advantage. It would be more appropriate to say this was the “New BJP”, actively finding chinks in the armor of its opponents.
Journalist Nalin Mehta explores this re-invention — missed by the naked eye of many — in his new book, ‘The New BJP: Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party’. Rather than indulging in the usual political commentary based on subjective reasoning, Mehta’s book uses crunching of hard data to dig facts and insights.
Mehta, along with data scientist Rishabh Srivastava, sets up a data mining software called Normative Analysis of Reporting and Discourse, which the author refers to as NARAD.
According to Mehta, using the software, he and Srivastava analyzed 11,588 documents related to the BJP, published between 2006 and 2019 and consisting of 17.9 million words. These include speeches by BJP leaders, party press releases, fortnightly issues of BJP’s magazine Kamal Sandesh, and RSS’s weekly magazine Organiser.
The results of this data mining and crunching throw light on some interesting observations, which make certain conclusions evident. Mehta notes, “It wasn’t until 2019 that the BJP began to talk more about the Congress than it did about itself. That was for the first time the party, then in its fifth year in power, started talking more about the principal Opposition party than it talked about itself or its prime minister… we found that, in 2019, the BJP spoke more about Congress than on any other topic, including Modi, terrorism, defence or Kashmir.”
So, what was the reason behind this shift? The book explains that while it is natural for political parties to speak against their rivals, the strategy becomes lethal when one party’s failures can become the other’s strengths. Here, the BJP positioned itself as everything the Congress was not. “At the heart of the new communication was one core message: that the Congress remained a dynastic party, while the BJP, generally was not… at a time when most Indians had become disenchanted with claims about entitlement based on birth.”
Another important question the book seeks to answer is why and how BJP continues to grow in agrarian and rural India and attracts voters beyond the core base “despite tanking job-creation numbers, agrarian distress, and declining growth numbers”. Mehta provides an interesting answer to this puzzle. “The assumption so far has been that voters are turning rightwards because of BJP’s cultural nationalism and identity politics. Insights gleaned from the Narad Index show that the truth may be a bit more complicated… below the radar, the BJP has been focusing a great deal on the messaging to the farmers and on the narrative of development.”
He adds, “One of the findings that greatly surprised us was that, in its public outreach, the BJP speaks far more on these topics than about its core issues—terrorism, the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya or national security.”
The book also explores some of the reasons behind the stupendous electoral success of the BJP since 2014 that have been already discussed by political analysts and psephologists. What this book does differently is provided these conclusions with a factual base that cannot be contested.
‘Labharthees’ or beneficiaries of the government’s social welfare schemes have been the major propeller of BJP’s electoral success. While implementation of welfare schemes in a developing country constitutes the major function of a government, converting these labharthees into potential voters has been a game that BJP has championed all along. As Mehta writes, “Nobody can claim that government systems worked perfectly, or that there are no flaws in them. That would obviously be wrong. The point is that the BJP, using its ground machinery and targeted messaging was able to reap the political benefits of its welfare spending, thus evolving a new model of politics in north India.”
The book further explains other much-talked-about reasons behind the emergence of the BJP into an election-winning machine. How the party expanded its social base beyond its traditional terrain by forging new political and social alliances and how it captured the social media space as a tool of mass communication, all have been documented in great detail.
In a chapter titled Modi@Digital: Why the BJP wins on Social Media, Mehta puts across an interesting anecdote. The readers would find it interesting to learn that before Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn had hosted Narendra Modi for a social media interaction. Mehta writes, “Soon after Google+ was launched in India, Narendra Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, appeared on the new digital platform to participate in a live and interactive Google+ Hangout session moderated by Ajay Devgn.” Reading the chapter makes it clear that the “differentiated communication strategy” adopted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the first-mover advantage gave BJP an upper hand in social media communication, which paid rich dividends to the party.
The emergence of the ‘New BJP’ is a story that runs parallel to the making of ‘New India’. But, the book does not attempt to trace this trajectory. It limits its probe to the reason behind BJP’s astounding electoral success. “Was it only because of a cultural shift in India? Or was its edifice of expansion built on creating a much wider, deeper superstructure of new constituencies of voters who aligned with it for reasons beyond the cultural divide? How did the BJP’s growth patterns differ across India’s regions, in new catchment areas where it had never held sway before, or in areas where it failed to make inroads? In other words, what really was happening in India, how did the BJP systematically become the country’s largest political party and its fulcrum of power? These are the fundamental questions I seek to answer,” writes Mehta.
And, the book does this with factual authority and academic rigour making The New BJP an essential read for those who want to unravel the secrets behind the saffron surge.
About The Author: Shishir Tripathi is a journalist and researcher based in Delhi. He has worked with The Indian Express, Firstpost, Governance Now, and Indic Collective. He writes on Law, Governance and Politics.
