Recounting the long journey of the BJP from the days of the foundation of its predecessor Jana Sangh in the early 1950s, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday commended the party for successfully running a large coalition balancing regional aspirations in the days of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
He saw this success as an outcome of what he called the practice of democratic functioning the Jana Sangh and the BJP had nurtured for decades.
“India has had a multi-party system. So, coalition politics was very natural. To come together for greed is another thing, but it requires a different kind of practice to keep allies together and move forward democratically,” Mr. Modi told a large gathering of BJP workers at the inauguration of the new headquarters of the national BJP at Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg here. “Under Atal ji’s leadership and in the form of the NDA, the BJP successfully carried out an experiment of taking allies together, channelizing their strengths in the politics of coalition, balancing regional aspirations and sparking a new ray of hope in the country.”
He added, “There had been some experiments of coalition politics in 1967, but the later successes were phenomenal. The core reason for this is that democracy flows in our veins. In our thought, behavior, and tradition, there is democracy. It is because of this that we can take everyone along to a great extent.”
The coalitions of 1967 Mr. Modi was referring to were the Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal governments – a result of the alliance between socialists and the Jana Sangh to keep the Congress out of power – that came to power in some states.
Mr. Modi himself runs a coalition government amid a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. In the first half of the ongoing budget session, ally Telugu Desam Party had protested the absence of a special package for Andhra Pradesh in the Union budget.
Mr. Modi likened the existence of multiple parties in India to a “fascinating and beautiful bouquet” of Indian democracy, saying that they represented the aspirations of the Indian people in Parliament in their own ways and from their own perspectives.
“There are parties that are represented in Parliament. They have their own ideas and their own ways of looking at issues. And because of the presence of so many parties, the bouquet of Indian democracy looks fascinating and beautiful,” he said. “There are different hues and kinds of fragrance. There may be different ideologies but it is the beauty of our democracy that our brothers from different parties express in their own way the aspirations of the people.”
Mr. Modi recalled the efforts of party leaders and workers since the times of Jana Sangh leaders Syama Prasad Mookerji and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya to build the party. He extolled the commitment of Jana Sangh and BJP to their core principles and their contributions to nationalist campaigns after independence.
