BJP hand in Congress glove
Narendra Modi's recent comparison of Congress with pre-Independence-era Muslim League is a direct attack on the GOP's credentials as sole inheritor of the freedom struggle legacy. It also tells us how far BJP has travelled to not just lay claim to this space but also is prepared to take it as its own — an effort at the heart of its revival since 2014.
BJP has, over the past decade, drawn on Congress' leadership pantheon. It took advantage of the latter's tendency to predominantly play up the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family while paying little or no attention to the contribution of others. As result, today, BJP has acquired a reasonable degree of ownership on legacies of leaders like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, B R Ambedkar and Subhas Chandra Bose.
Congress of that era had many political strands, and each of these leaders represented one thought or the other. What BJP has done is, it has worked on owning each of them, including Mohandas Gandhi. In fact, leaving aside Jawaharlal Nehru, BJP has accepted almost all greats from the decades of the 1920s and 1930s who shaped the Independence movement.
What's perplexing is that Congress has allowed this to happen without a contest. And it's not just about the distant past. Take P V Narasimha Rao, awarded Bharat Ratna by the Modi government, while Rao's own party is still unwilling to claim his legacy.
Modi has prised open this contradiction and, in the process, laid the ground to create a new legacy for BJP. But how? Both BJP and Congress are nationalist parties with
