All this while, the base of the RSS, Jan Sangh and the HMS was essentially upper caste, urban and middle-class. When the Jan Sangh merged with the Janata Party, it began to spread out under the cover of the JP movement. Inevitably, the socialists and old Congressmen who had been the major partners of the Janata Party, were alarmed. The party split vertically on the issue of ‘dual membership’, which meant that the Jan Sangh was expected to totally dissociate from the RSS. The BJP emerged out of the wreckage of the Janata Party. It is since then that the Sangh Parivar began to suffer from a ‘multiple personality syndrome’.

In the coming decades, the BJP which was reduced to just two seats in the Lok Sabha in 1985 and declared virtually dead, expanded along with the the new middle class and Mandir politics, just as the rural elite consolidated itself with the help of Mandal. Under the stewardship of Lal Krishna Advani, the BJP spread its tentacles all over a new urban middle class. In less than a decade, from 1990 when the Rath Yatra began, to 1998, the BJP-led 18-party front came to power with 182 seats.

The newly emerging middle class, which was the product of economic liberalisation, was the exact opposite of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, another Parivar outfit, which opposed globalisation and Americanisation. But for militant Hinduism, the BJP-led front could not have come to power. But to seek power through such militancy and to run a country like India, whose distinguishing characteristic is pluralism, are not easily reconciliable. That is why Vajpayee became the mask and Advani the face behind the mask. The moderates in the BJP became Vajpayee followers, the hardliners joined the Advani camp and the far right in the Parivar promoted the Togadias and Modis.

... contd.