BJP Is World’s Most Important Party: Walter Russell Mead Writes In Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, one of the leading media organisations of the world has recognised the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the most important foreign political party.

According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal authored by Walter Russell Mead, “India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is, from the standpoint of American national interests, the most important foreign political party in the world. It may also be the least understood.”

“For the foreseeable future the BJP will be calling the shots in a country without whose help American efforts to balance rising Chinese power are likely to fall short,” the WSJ piece read.

The author Mead believes that BJP is poorly understood because it grows out of a political and cultural history unfamiliar to most non-Indians. The BJP’s electoral dominance reflects the success of a once obscure and marginal social movement of national renewal based on efforts by generations of social thinkers and activists to chart a distinctively ‘Hindu path’ to modernization, the Wall Street Journal piece stated.

“Like the Muslim Brotherhood, the BJP rejects many ideas and priorities of Western liberalism even as it embraces key features of modernity. Like the Chinese Communist Party, the BJP hopes to lead a nation with more than a billion people to become a global superpower. Like the Likud Party in Israel, the BJP combines a basically pro-market economic stance with populist rhetoric and traditionalist values, even as it channels the anger of those who’ve felt excluded and despised by a cosmopolitan, Western-focused cultural and political elite,” it added.

American analysts, particularly those of a left-liberal persuasion, often look at Narendra Modi’s India and ask why it isn’t more like Denmark. Their concerns aren’t wholly misplaced. Journalists who are critical of the ruling coalition can face harassment and worse. Religious minorities who fall afoul of the resurgent Hindu pride that marks BJP India speak of mob violence and point to hostile official measures like broadly drafted anti-conversion laws as well as occasional outbursts of mob violence. Many fear the power of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, a nationwide Hindu nationalist organization with close ties to BJP leadership, it added.

“After an intensive series of meetings with senior BJP and RSS leaders, as well as some of their critics, I am convinced that Americans and Westerners generally need to engage much more deeply with a complex and powerful movement,” Mead wrote.

From a fringe of mostly marginalized intellectuals and religious enthusiasts, the RSS has become perhaps the “most powerful civil-society organization in the world”. Its rural and urban development programs, religious education and revival efforts and civic activism, staffed by thousands of volunteers from all walks of life, have succeeded in forming the political consciousness and focusing the energies of hundreds of millions of people, the Wall Street Journal piece added.