New Delhi: After a decade with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), former Union minister Birender Singh bid it farewell earlier this week and joined the Congress. According to him, in the BJP, leaders who are not from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) are often regarded as outsiders, issues in the BJP are viewed through a caste prism, and people like him, who have been raised to believe that one can observe one’s religion without being a “dharmandh” (bigot), find it hard adjust. In an exclusive interview with ThePrint, Singh also criticised, what he described as the “glycerin-induced tears”, that the BJP has sheds for farmers and the poor.
Seated inside the official residence of his MP son Brijendra Singh, the senior Haryana leader talked about the reasons for his disenchantment with the party, the difference in the way politics is practiced in the Congress and the BJP, his efforts to resolve issues like farmers’ agitation and wrestlers’ protests, and the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
For Singh, who was with the Congress for over 37 years (since his first election in 1977) before he joined the BJP in 2014, returning to the Congress is not just ghar wapsi (homecoming) for him but also “vichar dhara wapsi” (return to ideology).
Before Birender Singh, his father Neki Ram Sheokand was also a senior Congress leader who was a minister in joint Punjab before 1966 and then again under Bansi Lal in 1968.
Birender Singh said that he has been brought up in a milieu where, due to the influence of the Arya Samaj, one could observe one’s religion without being a darmandh. However, he said that the BJP’s ideology did not align with this.
Moreover, he added, “Leaders from different political parties who join the BJP are never adopted as their own by those from the RSS cadre. All those who don’t have an RSS background are always considered outsiders in the BJP.”
However, he hastened to add that bringing talent from outside has been a useful experiment by the BJP since 2014 and this has helped the party to come to power and also retain it for 10 years now. “It would have taken the BJP decades to create its own leaders capable of winning elections. Instead, they bring in leaders from other parties who have the capacity to win and field them as candidates,” he said.
Singh said that another thing he didn’t like in the BJP was the way the party believed in giving “freebies”.
“The BJP has acquired a mastery in distributing freebies. It’s making people dependent and curbing their natural struggle for amelioration of their conditions. Giving people a free ration is like, ‘we won’t let them remain hungry but at the same time we won’t allow them to grow in life’. I don’t understand… when Modi claims that 13.5 crore have been lifted out of poverty, how come the number of people getting free ration has not come down?” he said.
Birender Singh said that he has watched how ministers under Prime Minister Narendra Modi function and how they functioned under former PMs like Manmohan Singh and Rajiv Gandhi and found many differences.
Explaining one major difference between the BJP and the Congress, he said that while in the Congress, people could join and have a different view from the party’s leadership, this was not possible in the BJP, which is a cadre-based party, or, as he put it, “a regimented party”.
“I handled important portfolios, like drinking water and sanitation, at a time when Modi launched Swachhata Abhiyan, rural development, and panchayati raj. I had several ideas which I thought could benefit people, but I faced obstacles when it came to implementing these ideas. And this impacted governance, too. Under the Modi government, a minister is not supposed to implement one’s own ideas or formulate one’s own policies. A minister has to be effective in implementation, but one doesn’t need to think up ideas because the ideology comes from above. This is because the BJP is a cadre-based party backed by the RSS and has certain ideologies which are translated into policies,” said Singh.
When ThePrint asked him to elaborate on his observation that caste influences how the BJP looks at issues, Singh said that when women wrestlers were sitting on dharna, demanding justice for the alleged sexual harassment they suffered at the hands of BJP MP and former Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, he spoke several times with BJP President J.P. Nadda, a person he calls a friend. He said he also sought time from Anurag Thakur, Union sports minister, but didn’t get an appointment.
“A wrestler is a wrestler. A woman is a woman. The caste should have nothing to do with it,” said the Congress leader, referring to how the BJP is seemingly ignoring Jats in Haryana and Rajasthan, pitted other castes against them to polarise voters. Incidentally, all protesting wrestlers were Jats.
Also read: ‘My father & I considered outsiders in BJP’ — Hisar MP Brijendra Singh, who quit party to join Congress
‘400-plus a distant dream’
While rejoining the Congress at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) headquarters, Birender Singh had appealed to the people to join hands to “save the democracy and the Constitution”. Speaking to ThePrint about this, he said that certain actions of the Narendra Modi government, like efforts to destabilise Opposition-ruled state governments, the electoral bonds scheme, and appointing election commissioners by excluding the chief justice of India from the panel indicate that democracy and the Constitution could be in peril in future.
Singh also likened the BJP’s empathy for farmers and the poor to be nothing more than “glycerin-induced tears”. Talking about his efforts during the farmers’ agitation of 2021-22, Singh recounted how, at the request of farmer leaders, he spoke to then agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar. He proposed fixing a benchmark for the purchase price for each crop if the government couldn’t ensure a minimum support price (MSP). However, his proposal was rejected, with the government expressing a preference for a free-market approach.
Talking about the Congress, Singh spoke about Rahul Gandhi’s pan-India popularity. According to him, the BJP targeted Rahul only because the party “knows that the Congress party led by a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family can prove to be its biggest challenge”.
“After Rajiv Gandhi’s death, BJP leader Sushma Swaraj once met me at a social gathering and asked whether Sonia Gandhi will join politics. When I said not immediately but she definitely would eventually, Swaraj answered that if this was the case, the Congress would come to power for another term,” he said.
Trashing the BJP’s claims of winning 400-plus seats for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Singh said that as someone who has over 50 years of experience in politics, he can say with conviction that “rajneeti karwat le rahi hai” (politics is turning). “If it turns a bit faster, people will have surprising results to see, but even if it turns slower, the BJP’s targets will prove a distant dream,” he said.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
Also read: ‘No democracy within BJP’ — Hisar MP Brijendra, father Birender Singh go Congress way