Outside Ram Madhav's room at the BJP office, there is an unending string of visitors. He makes it a point to give a few moments to each of them. "This is what has changed for me after moving from the RSS to the party. In politics you have to be available to people and cadre all the time," he says.
In the past three days after he has started working at the party headquarters, Ram Madhav has attended every crucial meeting held by BJP chief Amit Shah. While he still stays, as of now, at the RSS headquarters at Jhandewalan waking up early and attending the shakhas, his hectic party schedule continues late into the night.
Asked about his role in the BJP, he says it was up to the party president to decide. But, he admits that being in the party would mean facing challenges, one of them being that of making the BJP a pan-India party. "Our primary challenge is that while the BJP has emerged as a national party, there are some states which require attention like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Once we do that then BJP becomes a pan-India party. This is a challenge we have to face in the coming days," he told dna.
The other immediate challenge is elections in four states — Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir. "We are confident of winning in all four states. The party president has taken meetings of the four state units. We have started preparing the cadre," he says.
The third challenge, he says, would be to strengthen the party at all levels. Pointing out that the BJP secured ten crore extra votes this Lok Sabha election in comparison to 2009 and a majority of these were from the youth, he said, "they were inspired by Modi's leadership and now we have to attract the youth into the party and give them responsibility. This popular support has to be turned into organisational support."
At 49, about a year younger than his party president, Ram Madhav was recently deputed by the RSS to work for the party along with Shiv Prakash. "This is normal practice to assign functionaries to work in different parivar organisations. We have been assigned to work in the party. This trend began long ago when the RSS deputed Deen Dayal Upadhyay and LK Advani etc to the party work," he says.
However, the Sangh has generally deputed members at a younger age and not at senior levels. Asked if the Sangh's decision to depute two of its members was to impress upon the party the need to toe the ideological line, he says "the party has been committed to ideology. Next year will be the birth centenary of Deen Dayal. The party will carry out a nation-wide campaign to propagate his ideology of integral humanism. The BJP has a distinct ideology... The essence is you have to put country first, people first."
With its government in power, he says, the party faces a new challenge of communicating its achievements to the people and for this a coordination mechanism would be worked out.
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