Mumbai, November 15, 2024.
BJP leader and Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, in an interview took the blame for the recent Lok Sabha loss and said that he failed to counter the Opposition’s “anarchist” and “ultra-leftist” narrative.
He, however, said that it has all been sorted now with the help of organisations within the ideological family. Confident of a clear majority, Fadnavis spoke on a host of other issues. Excerpts:
I completely admit that during the Lok Sabha elections, we failed miserably to set a counter narrative and we have to be blamed for that. At least in Maharashtra, I failed and we were also over confident.
Basically during the Lok Sabha polls, we were not fighting against parties, but were fighting against forces… Bharat Jodo was a force, formed by people with anarchist and ultra-leftist mentalities. This force created a hyperlocal narrative, and when we realised that they were creating a narrative against us, we had no capacity, capability and apparatus to counter it. We could not do anything about it. But now we are completely ready and we have the capacity. We have nullified that narrative and fed the real narrative so now we don’t have anything to worry about.
The second thing is that we as a political party have a practice of fighting against parties but we are not used to fight against forces. When we saw that our fight was with forces, we went to organisations that work in our vichar parivar (ideological family) and we appealed to them that anarchist forces were preparing a narrative that will result in people losing trust in our system. We told them that since the counter to that cannot be done by us (a political party), it has to be done by forces that work in that area (for example if there is a worker, then people working in that field can only respond to the anarchist narrative).
We appealed to organisations working under our ideological umbrella that if you don’t have to come into politics, don’t come, but nationalist forces will have to respond to anarchist forces and you will have to talk against anarchy. Today, they have helped us and because of their help, they have countered the Bharat Jodo narrative of the anarchist forces. It started immediately after the Lok Sabha results in June. We kept meeting with them but this time we made a special appeal to the nationalist forces.
