After Modi, who? 

Narendra Modi is in the tenth year in office now as Prime Minister and on his way to seeking a third term in 2024. He will also be turning 74 next year. So, the question looms for the BJP – sooner if he chooses to live by his own stop-at-75 dictum, later if he doesn’t -- who after Modi?

There are at present no challengers to his leadership within his party. Amit Shah has declared, after the party’s defeat in the Karnataka elections, that Modi will be PM again if the party wins the 2024 elections.

Modi has only recently returned from the US after a tour that must count as a personal high point for him, notwithstanding its low point about his reluctance to face a full-blown press conference and drawing global attention to not having had a single press conference in India during his time as PM, a glaring flaw in the eyes of mature democracies. 

Also Read | My Gorakhpur visit exemplifies both development and heritage: PM Narendra Modi

Modi still keeps a back-breaking schedule people half his age can’t keep up. He jets across the globe a dozen times a year, meeting heads of state and Fortune 500 CEOs, and dazzles the Indian diaspora wherever he goes, with the spotlight always on him. 

With equal zest, he criss-crosses the country on whirlwind tours all year, and goes on statue and project unveiling sprees and revels in inauguration of temples choreographed to attain
the maximum effect of pious pageantry. His image management is calculated to portray him as a messiah, as
India’s man of destiny. 

He campaigns for central and state elections with vigour and addresses hundreds of rallies, from morning till night tirelessly, to consolidate the Hindu vote. 

When such a driven and charismatic leader as Modi, with a cult following and larger-than-life image, gets on in his years, the question arises -- among the public, and in the party and its Parivar -- “Who will replace Modi when
the time comes?”

In parties controlled by dynasties, common in Indian politics, a favoured offspring takes over the reins at an
opportune time. 

The BJP, however, is different. Its ideological fountainhead, the RSS, orchestrates its leadership succession – as it did when it backed Modi in 2013, steamrolling L K Advani into submission and oblivion. 

Modi is now the unquestioned leader of the party, towering over all others. He is feared by both his party colleagues and the RSS. And the RSS leadership is cautious in making it known whom it favours as his successor. Does it prefer one of the two hard-liners and rivals, Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath, pre-empting Modi’s choice? Will it push for Nitin Gadkari, seen as being close to the RSS and as an affable, moderate and acceptable face across the political spectrum, and who would be welcomed by business? Does the RSS have the courage to ride roughshod over Modi and project its own man? Maybe it will reveal its cards only after the results of the 2024 election. 

It is public knowledge that as Chief Minister of Gujarat, Modi had all but banished the VHP and other saffron outfits from the state. It is also
rumoured that Modi’s writ runs in
the RSS now. Will he anoint his successor then? Who will be the torchbearer of his legacy?

But first, what does Modi stand for? What will be his legacy? 

It may be better for Modi to first bring clarity on his vision and what he stands for, and then choose the successor best suited to carry forward that vision.

A quick survey of our long history reveals some insights. The Great Emperors of India -- Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka and Akbar – were all ruthless, bloodthirsty warriors during the initial years of their reign but, with their empires straddling vast, chaotic and diverse lands, they eventually realised they could hold and knit them together  only by bringing all their multifarious religions, faiths, creeds, castes and tribals into harmonious co-existence. They learnt, at great cost, that tyrannical attempts to homogenise India’s people fail.

If you take an overview of the state of the Union today, the Opposition is in power in 70% of the states. The BJP has drawn a blank in the South, and is in power in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh by engineering defections and splits, and is in coalition in Haryana and a couple of states in the North-East. It is firmly in the saddle on its own only in Gujarat, UP, and Assam. It is obvious that if the party continues with its present policies and ideologies of majoritarian politics, if it constantly keeps the communal pot on the boil, the land will be riven by violence, and development will suffer,   threatening its very integrity. As the Karnataka elections have vindicated, in the end, people care most about jobs and livelihoods over all else. 

If Modi were to look back on his own ambivalent actions and speeches over the last nine years, he may realise that his vision is muddled with mixed messages. He gives a call to defend the Hindu faith, demonising Muslims, while paying tribute to Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha and Golwalkar of the RSS, both his idols. While he remains silent on lynchings in the name of cow protection in the Hindi heartland, in the North-East and Kerala, where the populations consume beef, the BJP changes tack, saying it respects the food habits of other faiths. He invokes Gandhi, whose ideals are antithetical to those of Golwalkar and the RSS, and pays homage to the Mahatma with elan when he hobnobs with foreign heads of state. At other times, he pays obeisance and exhorts the country to emulate Subhas Chandra Bose and Sardar Patel, Bhagat Singh and Swami Vivekananda, each antithetical to the other. Modi freely appropriates each of them as his icons. Who is the real Modi? 

If Modi’s vision is to build a great nation, then he must unite the country and win back the states and their peoples, if not electorally then through the spirit of cooperation. To do that, he must tone down Golwalkar and tone up Gandhi. Infusing our people with a sense of pride in our civilisational ethos, cultural heritage and the grandeur of its luminous spiritual quest is necessary but by following oceanic minds like Vivekananda, as distinct from the fervent ideology of Golwalkar.

It may be preposterous to suggest, but Modi can imbibe some ideas of Nehru for a good measure of socialism and scientific temper and present a cohesive ideology, a larger pantheistic vision to truly make India a modern, developed, egalitarian society and vibrant democracy. 

A genuine, moderate, conservative right-of-centre party, if BJP can become one, is necessary for a robust democracy to balance parties with socialist and fanatical left-of-centre ideologies. Can Modi re-fashion and leave behind such a BJP as his legacy? Is there anyone in his party who has the leadership qualities to take it forward?

(The writer is a soldier, farmer and entrepreneur)