Vandita Mishra writes: AAP has given BJP building blocks of what could become a new layer in the political vocabulary

Category : Politics | Sub Category : National Posted on 2025-02-13 19:13:57

---

The Narendra Modi-led BJP and the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP — Delhi’s victor and vanquished — rose to national prominence at about the same time. The Delhi 2025 verdict represents a new turn in the story of two parties, and two politics.

After 2014, the Modi-BJP rearranged the political vocabulary by, broadly, dividing the political party’s appeal to voters into two categories: One, the public provisioning of private goods alongside cash transfers and subsidies that reach into households to touch individual labharthis (beneficiaries). Two, the projection of larger wholes that offer belongingness, be it desh (nation) and desh-in-videsh (India in the world), or Hindu samaj (religious identity). And a kind of religious nationalism that combines the two narratives and sets up an Other or Others (Muslim and left-liberal/ “urban Naxal”) to define itself in opposition to.