It is difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when Atal Bihari Vajpayee, as BJP president, actually thought of disbanding the party. The party, which had imagined itself from Day One as an ‘alternative to Cong (I)’105 had suffered a crushing defeat in 1984, winning just two parliamentary seats in that year’s national election. Vajpayee, its most popular national leader, had himself lost his parliamentary seat from Gwalior to Congress’s Madhav Rao Scindia. Crestfallen, he commissioned a special twelve-member working group in 1985 to review the party’s functioning and to answer some tough questions on why the BJP found itself ‘miles away’ from its objective after its first five years.
One of these questions was whether the BJP’s creation itself had been a mistake and whether it should dissolve itself and return to its Jan Sangh avatar. In its first two years, as now, the BJP had focused on the nuts and bolts of building an organisation. As a review by L.K. Advani had noted in 1983, the organisation’s aim was ‘almost entirely on enrolling members, forming committees, and thus building the party’s organisational infrastructure right from the Panchayat level to the level of Parliament’.107 In its first two years, the BJP’s primary membership went from 2.2 million to 3.9 million. By 1983, it had succeeded in setting up district committees in 80 per cent of Indian districts, except the Northeast.108 Yet, the party was virtually wiped out electorally in the Rajiv Gandhi wave of 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Vajpayee’s response was to set up a working group, headed by Krishanlal Sharma and including the late Pramod Mahajan,109 to answer two questions
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