It’s general election season again! Recently, the BJP went ahead and announced its first list of 195-odd candidates. One of the striking things in the list was the fresh candidates in many seats. Several sitting MPs, many of them high-profile, made way for fresh faces. In Delhi for instance, the party announced candidates for five of the seven seats. Of those five, four candidates, all incumbent MPs have been replaced with fresh names. What’s more, many of these replaced candidates gracefully took to social media platforms to thank the party and express their desire to move on and aside for other people. Similarly, many other sitting MPs were dropped all over the country. We don’t really know the inner dynamics or what really happened behind the scenes that led to specific individual decisions. However, one thing is clear. The BJP is good at something that is probably also its most underrated quality – managing organizational churn and attrition.
Any organization – a political party, corporate, institution thrives when it strikes a balance between two opposing qualities – loyalty and churn. Loyalty means the organization must be able to retain its talent. Churn means the organization must be able to replace its talent with better talent. It is hard to strike a balance between the two. Even the biggest companies in the world struggle to get this right. However, the BJP has time and again managed to adapt, reinvent, and keep on changing even though it is one gigantic organization.
Perhaps the lowest point of the BJP was in the 1984 general elections, when it won just 2 seats in the Lok Sabha. Funnily enough, nobody said opposition-mukt-bharat then as much as the term is used now. Since then, the party continued to claw back under the leadership of LK Advani, AB Vajpayee and other leaders to become a national force again. They came to power, but somehow could not retain it or have as firm a hold on it. The loss of elections in 2004 and 2009 meant the party had to go through yet another churn, an adaptation if it had to get back to power. It had to replace the leadership, the same one that that resurrected BJP in the first place.
BJP then did something extremely difficult, a relatively conflict free passing on of leadership to a new set of leaders like PM Modi (then CM) and Amit Shah. Of course, what happened to the party’s performance after that is history.
That big change was difficult – but it was done when the party was on the low, and in a crisis. It had lost power. What is perhaps even harder is what the BJP does now – which is to keep churning even when the party is on a high. It has the incredible ability to continuously keep adapting, not taking things for granted, and making key talent changes – even in good times. People come. People stay. People are also replaced. Are all replacements fair, perfect and timely? Perhaps not as nobody is perfect. However, the BJP does it much better than others. For why else will a party predicted to win in every possible opinion poll still making so many changes? Why is it not afraid to change, when the smug tendency is to keep the winning candidates stay and keep the status quo? It is because the BJP realizes that no matter how good things are now, nothing in life is permanent. Nothing great stays great unless one plans, adapts and does the hard work to keep it all going well.
Contrast that to the Congress, which has had ample opportunities, signals and big reasons to change in the last ten years. The first one was the 2014 defeat, which alone should have led to major introspection. Then it was the 2019 defeat, an even worse performance. There had never been a clearer sign from the Indian people. Indian voters were telling the Congress in screaming bold letters on hundred feet hoardings around the country – please change. The Congress did some tokenisms but did not change what was the biggest thing the public wanted changed (won’t repeat that here – we all know). Many old time Congress defenders argued that the Congress had won before. It still had takers of the way it was so why change? The same could also be said of the sitting MP BJP candidates that were dropped, but they were still replaced anyway. Meanwhile, the Congress didn’t change and here we are at the 2024 election, and I think we can all guess what is likely to happen.
Even at the state level, the Congress had been given screaming loud signals to change. In the previous MP and Rajasthan election, there was clamor to make Jyotiraj Scindia and Sachin Pilot the CM respectively. It would have required a generational change or churn in state leadership. The Congress didn’t act on this opportunity of projecting two young faces at the national level. We all know what happened later. The Congress recently lost those two states, and along with it a lot of morale and momentum for the coming elections.
There’s a lesson in this, not just for political parties or organizations, but for all of us. There’s an obviously simple but still highly profound quote. Nothing changes if nothing changes. If we do nothing to change our situation, our life will never change. In fact, it will probably get worse. The BJP, a party that seems invincible and can do no wrong, is meticulously culling and curating its ticket lists. It also does it for every election. It does it for sitting CMs. It does it for whatever part of it is not working optimally. It changes something. And often, change, while painful, is what leads to better results.
Remember: nothing changes if nothing changes. And the BJP, despite being the largest political party in the world, has this underrated quality of being able to churn talent and change better than many others.