From the ‘BJP Eleven’ of 2014 to only Modi in 2019: a column on the BJP manifesto

A column published after the BJP released its 2019 Lok Sabha manifesto on Monday argued that the party had been fully remade around Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and that the manifesto’s cover showed this more clearly than anything else.

Two covers compared

The 2019 cover carries only Modi, with the slogan ‘Sankalpit Bharat, Sashakt Bharat’ (Resolute India, Strong India). The columnist wrote that the contents had moved away from jobs, unemployment and growth towards national security, with brief mentions of the surgical strikes of 2016 and the Balakot strikes of February 2019 inside Pakistan.

The 2014 cover, by contrast, carried the party’s senior leaders, from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Rajnath Singh to younger leaders such as Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and Vasundhara Raje. Modi had the biggest photograph then, but the column described him as the captain of a team of heavyweights rather than its sole face.

Leaders left out

According to the column, Advani, the six-time Gandhinagar MP and a BJP founder who had made way for party president Amit Shah in that seat, was not invited to the launch, and neither was former president Murli Manohar Joshi. It suggested Advani’s recent blog saying the BJP never branded opponents anti-national may have counted against him. It also noted that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had said she would not contest, that Raje and Shivraj Singh Chouhan were absent after losing their states, and questioned the place given to Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who headed the manifesto committee.

Votes in Modi’s name

The writer argued that, in the Hindi heartland at least, votes were being sought in Modi’s name rather than the candidates’. In Bisada in western Uttar Pradesh, where Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched in 2015, voters complained about BJP MP Mahesh Sharma but remained enthusiastic about Modi. Schemes such as Ujjwala gas cylinders and the strikes on Pakistan were linked to Modi personally. Even so, the column said there was no Modi wave, and that the alliance of Mayawati’s BSP, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Ajit Singh’s RLD offered Uttar Pradesh voters an alternative.

What happened next

In the 2019 Lok Sabha election, counted on 23 May 2019, the BJP won 303 of the 543 seats, and Modi was sworn in for a second term on 30 May 2019. Amit Shah became Union Home Minister in May 2019.

Originally published on 9 April 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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