Modi will kickstart the anniversary celebrations on May 25 in Mathura, the birthplace of Deen Dayal Upadhyay.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Mathura yatra” on May 25, the eve of the first anniversary of his government, is being seen as part of a bigger strategy to refurbish the image of the party as also his own. The move is also understood to be the beginning of the party’s UP campaign for the 2017 Assembly election in this politically crucial state.
Modi will kickstart the anniversary celebrations on May 25 with a rally at Nagla Chandrabhan village in Mathura, the birthplace of Deen Dayal Upadhyay – a patriarch of the party's ideological daddy, the Bharatiya Jan Sangh.
The anniversary comes at a time when several top BJP leaders, including LK Advani, MM Joshi and Arun Shourie, are seething and sulking over being sidelined in what is being described in party circles as a “one man show” being played out by Modi in cohorts with his trusted lieutenant, BJP chief Amit Shah. There has been talk of even the RSS being largely ignored in the way the party and the government are being run by the two men at the top.
However, for the record, everything seems to be hunky dory. “The Prime Minister is toeing the Jan Sangh line to the hilt,” says UP BJP spokesman Vijay Pathak. “The Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, the Rs 12 accident insurance and the Rs 330 life insurance schemes reflect the ideology of Deen Dayal Upadhyay ji which was focused on welfare of the poor,” he asserts.
Former BJP MP and veteran writer-journalist Rajnath Singh ‘Surya’ supports the view as he says: “Modi has followed the Jan Sangh philosophy throughout the first year of his government. Some elements in the media are unduly criticizing the PM on this count.”
But, party insiders say the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, the Kisan Sangh and the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, all arms of the RSS, are not too happy with the way Modi is being seen as pro-industrialist, an image recently crystallised by certain provisions of the Land Acquisition Bill and the ease with which the government has been allowing hikes in FDI.
Besides, another major area where Modi has been seen to be lacking, particularly by the Hindutva forces within the so-called ‘sangh parivar’, relates to the Ayodhya Ram temple reconstruction.
While Modi is himself the MP from Kashi (Varanasi), a part of the Ayodhya-Mathura-Kashi “temple liberation” triumvirate, he has never spoken out on Ayodhya or Mathura. The hi-profile anniversary kick-off from Mathura on May 25 is seen as part of this “damage control”, as it were.
“The media is reading too much of politics into it,” says UP BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpayee. “We are celebrating the anniversary as ‘Jan Kalyan Parv’ (people’s welfare day), and only trying to reach out to the people to tell them what the Modi regime has done in the past one year,” he adds.
Also Read: PM Modi has successfully used social media to shape his public image: Study
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