BJP is the only party based on ideology, says Amit Shah

The BJP is the only political party in India that has been consistently growing on the basis of its ideology, while others have slid into becoming “family concerns” rather than political parties, BJP president Amit Shah said on Saturday.

Addressing a National Writer’s Meet organised by the Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Research Foundation (SPMRF) affiliated to the Sangh Parivar, for bloggers and writers here, he gave an overview of the growth of the BJP from its Jan Sangh days as well as his view of the political scenario of the country.

“If anyone asks me the difference between the ideology of the Jan Sangh and the Congress, it can be summed up in only sentence — Nehru’s Congress wanted a nav nirman, or creation of a new nation, forgetting everything of its past, while the Jan Sangh wanted a punar nirman or reconstruction of our country, on the basis of our common culture, knowledge base and ways of living.”

Mr. Shah said: “If you look at the trajectory of most parties you will see that they have declined due to lack of ideological growth. The socialists after the death of Ram Manohar Lohia split, some, joined the Congress, others went with Choudhary Charan Singh. Those split too, and later came to represent single caste groups and now more sadly, only particular families. The Congress too has gone down that road,” he said.

He enumerated several programmes of the government like Skill India and Jan Dhan Yojana as spawning a “humane measure of growth” rather than in the strictly economic sense.