why we need the BJP

It was in 1989, as a 12 year old deeply interested in the political gossip that Dad and his friends shared over tea, that I started taking a liking for the Bharatiya Janata Party. I saw several of my Hindu friends as completely irreligious in the ritualistic sense. I never saw them at temples or at pujas and all religious holidays were spent playing cricket in the umpteen grounds that dot Jamshedpur, the city I was born.
I started liking being a Hindu. I believed and still do that it gave a man a huge amount of freedom to go about his day in the ways he felt fit.
A nation consisting predominantly of Hindus I believe should have been no different. But slowly I saw change among some of my friends. As teenage years went past, I saw some of my friends – who till yesterday didn’t seem different- suddenly pulling out their skull caps in public.
Others stopped playing with us during Ramzan. When we asked them why, the stock reply was that you people- the phrase always comes with its own set of offensiveness – don’t have to fast like we do but we know how to respect our God.
Something had changed. As the years passed by, many of these friends slowly started cutting off from the rest of us, looking down on us who had taken to enjoying the odd sip of whisky during boisterous parties in our college hostels. I heard the word ‘kafir’ for the first time outside my history books in first year of college in Mumbai from a particularly zealous lot of Muslim students from Bhiwandi. But that was just a small prick in a hostel teeming with students from nearly all other communities in India and be they Hindus, Christians, Sikhs or the avowedly ‘non-Indians’ from the North-East, they went about their day and work without any overt religiosity. Low marks in Accounts didn’t make them jump to the conclusion that the professor was a bigot who hated Sikhs or Hindus or Christians or anybody with slanty eyes.
I sit and back and think what went wrong in the past 60 years. Why has the young Muslim started carrying so much bile within him for the country? How is he any more deprived than I am when it comes to jobs, riches, housing, transport and general well being?
Why is it that one community is running towards its religion the moment any topic that requires application of thought comes about?
I saw my answers in the BJP. Led by two lions who had come forward to ensure everyone from the hare to the lamb to the deer to the tigers and the foxes all stay fed and happy in the confines of the forest.

The party with a difference. That party that would lead India into an era where inherent Hindu secularism leads the way rather than the pseudo-secularism of Nehru and his Gandhi brood.

But alas these two stalwarts- Atalji and Advaniji- never saw when patently Congress-culture afflicted virus like Pramod Mahajan and the likes entered the party and left it sick, dry and hollow from inside.
They didn’t have the foresight to realise when the party went from being one with a difference to being no different from the Congress, of course minus the sycophancy for the divine right of the Gandhis to lord over the party and nation that prevails in the Congress.

For someone who started following the BJP at the age of 12, seeing the party in such blood-curdling despair and sorrow in exactly two decades is numbing.
But hopefully the bloodletting will dispel the bad blood that ran through its veins ever since the party started growing exponentially after the Babri Masjid adventure.

India needs the party because we are a huge bunch of Hindus here, patently hypocritical and selfish self-seeking people. Dealing with a community, quickly closing ranks keeping fossilized value systems as their base, is not going to be easy.
A liberal, nationalistic, right-wing Hindu party is needed to guide us. It is a vacuum the old BJP falsely promised to fill, hopefully the new BJP- as and when it emerges- will in earnest.