Nagpur calls time

A weakened Modi, a restless RSS, and an ECI scandal have brought a decade-old ideological rift to its decisive moment

THERE is a simmering undercurrent inside the BJP, a growing whisper of dissent against the party's upper echelons.

The immediate spark is the disastrously bloated plan to rejig Bihar’s voter rolls through the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

Behind the scenes, the BJP’s Bihar state unit believes that victory was attainable through the usual playbook of money, some muscle, and discreet EVM engineering in select constituencies. The SIR, this section believes, was both unnecessary and self-defeating -- a case of being too clever by half.

This unease is amplified by BJP’s ally Nitish Kumar and the JD(U). In their view, the NDA could have clinched Bihar by default -- after all, Opposition unity has remained fragile. Tejashwi Yadav’s RJD may have gained traction, but the Congress in preliminary talks was pitching for senior partner status, which the RJD wasn’t willing to concede.

The strategy as envisioned by Nitish’s camp was simple: let the Opposition implode, creating a three-way contest, and the NDA could then jump lanes to victory. Instead, the JD(U) fumes, an over-zealous ECI has thrown the electoral panorama into needless chaos.

The Supreme Court's 14 August interim order demanding that the ECI publish (in machine-readable format) the names removed in the SIR, provide reasons for each exclusion, and accept Aadhaar as a valid identity document, could bring hundreds of thousands of disgruntled voters back into play, many now predisposed to oppose the BJP/NDA.

If the ECI complies -- and that is still a major IF -- the opposition gains not just from numbers but from momentum. If it doesn’t, trust in the electoral system fractures even further. Either way, the “winnable” contest has just been thrown wide open.

As if that wasn’t enough, Rahul Gandhi’s 7 August exposé of alleged voter fraud, focused on the Mahadevapura segment of the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency, has triggered a deluge. Since then, both party-aligned and independent voices have flooded the media with more instances of egregious irregularities.

The BJP’s response has been clumsy, to put it mildly. On 13 August, Anurag Thakur shot back with his own list of "doubtful voters", naming the constituencies of prominent Opposition leaders: Wayanad (Priyanka Gandhi), Rae Bareli (Rahul Gandhi), Diamond Harbour (Abhishek Banerjee), Kannauj (Akhilesh Yadav), Mainpuri (Dimple Yadav) and Kolathur (MK Stalin).

Thakur's argument was that the Opposition’s own voter rolls are riddled with anomalies. But if anything, this strengthens the Opposition’s narrative that the 2024 Lok Sabha election was seriously flawed. Thakur's attempt at damage control merely served as confirmation of significant systemic flaws. (To his credit, he did come up with a quotable line: "The dust was on your face, and you kept cleaning the mirror".)

This is set to snowball. At least two groups I know of are working flat out to examine the Varanasi voter rolls, to try and establish that Narendra Modi's re-election was flawed. Whether that can be proved — in fact, whether that is even true — is debatable, but if voter irregularity surfaces, it casts further doubt on Modi’s legitimacy, at a time when the PM is beleaguered on multiple fronts both internal and external.

BENEATH the surface of the BJP’s escalating turmoil in Bihar and the national voter-roll controversies lies a more subtle, but no less consequential, dynamic: the growing impatience within the RSS.

A quiet battle is being fought behind the scenes, between Modi/Shah on one hand and the party's ideological parent on the other. And at stake is the consequential question of party leadership.

Officially, JP Nadda's second three-year term as BJP national president ended in January 2023. Keeping the 2024 general election in mind, the party extended his term until June 2024. Since that date, the party has had no officially mandated president, with Nadda functioning as placeholder.

Modi and Shah have on multiple occasions traveled individually to Nagpur, attempting to sell their choice of Nadda's successor to the RSS hierarchy. At one point, they even mooted the possibility of installing a woman in the role -- "Oh look how progressive we are!" was the selling point. One name that was floated was Vanathi Srinivasan, MLA representing Coimbatore South and national president of the BJP Mahila Morcha, a post she has held since October 2020 (Srinivasan is also a member of the BJP's Central Election Committee).

Bhupendra Yadav, Arjun Ram Meghwal, and Dharmendra Pradhan were among other names mooted by Modi and Shah, who hoped that there would be agreement on the next party president by 15 August.

To the mounting frustration of the Modi/Shah combine, the RSS nixed every single suggestion. The Sangh's point of view is simple: It does not want any candidate for the top party post who owes allegiance to Modi and Shah.

In its turn, the RSS has been pushing just one name: Sanjay Vinayak Joshi, a hardcore RSS man with a history of opposition to Modi and Shah. Joshi was, remember, deputed by the RSS to Gujarat back in 1988, and played a pivotal role in building the party's grassroots strength. Once Modi became CM, Joshi was gradually edged out of the state party affairs. The RSS pushed him onto the BJP's national executive, and Modi and Shah pushed him out again via a sexually explicit CD that is widely believed to have been doctored.

The RSS believes -- has believed, for a while -- that the time is ripe to take back control of the party. This isn’t mere ideological squabbling, but a quiet recalibration aimed at reclaiming the organizational prerogatives or the RSS at a time when overreach from the Centre has exposed vulnerabilities across the BJP-NDA bloc.

BACK in 2014, fresh from his sweeping general election victory, Modi had moved swiftly to establish total command over the BJP.

One of his first acts was to sideline the Sangh's tallest veterans — LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and others — into a token Margdarshak Mandal. The stated reason was an age limit of 75, but Modi's real message was that this was now his BJP, not that of the RSS. The Sangh had to publicly hold its tongue and suffer the humiliation in silence.

Back then, Modi could get away with it. He had the numbers, the aura and, in Amit Shah, a party president who was totally loyal to him. The RSS continued to provide foot soldiers at election time, but control over the organization and, crucially, over candidate selection, rested firmly with Modi’s inner circle.

That grip has now been loosened. The 2024 election stripped away the sheen of Modi's invincibility. Early in the cycle, Nadda had come up with the vainglorious boast that the BJP was all grown up now and no longer needed the RSS to help win elections. Once the party’s performance in the first three phases proved less than optimal, Nadda — and Shah — had to swallow their pride and rush to Nagpur asking for help on the ground.

This buttressed the RSS argument that Modi is no longer a guarantee of electoral success; that, in fact, Modi is increasingly becoming a liability. Equally, Shah is no longer the infallible 'Chanakya'; that his awareness of diminishing marginal returns at the hustings has triggered potentially damaging over-reach. And to make matters worse the ECI, once a silent partner to Modi and Shah, has now become a public embarrassment for the party.

For the RSS, the ECI imbroglio is more than an institutional mess -- it has handed the Sangh leadership a convenient stick to beat the Modi–Shah combine with, a way to signal that their way of doing politics has run its course.

The Sangh’s push now is two-fold. First, to reframe 2014 as an act of hubris that alienated the organization’s old guard. And second, to ensure that the next BJP president is its own man, someone rooted in shakha culture, loyal to the RSS first and the Prime Minister second, if at all.

This is not mere cosmetics. The party president controls state unit appointments, candidate lists, and the internal machinery that wins elections. Install a loyalist there, and the RSS reclaims the party cockpit.

For now, the Sangh is playing it quietly, as a much-needed rebalancing to secure the future of the party -- no public ultimatums, no overt break. The rhetoric is of “party health” and “collective leadership”.

But inside the Parivar, there is a shared understanding of the subtext: the RSS lost the BJP to one man’s dominance in 2014. In 2025, it is taking the first steps to win it back. The ongoing ECI controversy is simply the lever it has been waiting for.

PS: While I was writing this, Modi was busy making a speech from the Red Fort. Curiously, for the first time in 12 tries, he invokes the RSS and showers praise.