‘First attack the corrupt. Then embrace them.’ These words of senior lawyer and former Union Minister Kapil Sibal sum up the mode of operation of the present regime. This brings out the real colour of the party that rules the country. It was the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement led by Anna Hazare, and the BJP’s vociferous support to it, that catapulted the party to power in 2014. It supplemented its campaign to capture power with the slogan ‘party with a difference.’ As the party’s tryst with governance progressed over the years, its anti-corruption plank started crumbling. Now, as it enters the last year of its second term, its slogans too have undergone a metamorphoses. Corruption is no more a taboo, as is clear from the developments in many states.

The latest developments in Maharashtra mirror the new face of BJP. It was none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had coined a new expanded form for NCP as ‘Naturally Corrupt Party’. In fact, Ajit Pawar and eight of his MLAs joined the Maharashtra government, of which BJP is the leading partner, even as the ink was still wet on the newspapers that printed Modi’s accusation that NCP was involved in corruption worth Rs 70,000 crores. The saffron party did not bat an eyelid in accepting the leaders of the NCP which none other than its supreme leader had classified as corrupt. It is not the first time nor going to be the last time the party would probably be taking into its fold those whom they branded as corrupt. State after state, many leaders whom BJP had branded as ‘corrupt’ are joining it, and in no time they come out clean.    

India, which the Prime Minister referred to as the mother of all democracies in his recent address to the United States Congress, is straying away from democratic path. Rules are being bent one by one as state governments are toppled one after the other. Democracy is founded on the formation of governments through popular election. People’s mandate is the heart and soul of democracy. But what we got to see earlier in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Goa, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and now in Maharashtra and other places is not electoral democracy, but ‘electoral autocracy’. Electoral defeats have not deterred BJP from forming governments in many states. It has become routine for the party to use not so fair means to boost its numbers in states where it has not got a clear mandate to form the government. 

The saffron party finds it easy to wean away elected representatives from other parties, and the investigating agencies under the government come handy in this dubious operation. This way, BJP is proving that it is indeed a ‘party with a difference.’ In Maharashtra, four of the NCP MLAs who became Ministers are reportedly facing probe by Enforcement Directorate and other investigating agencies. However, BJP has no qualms to dine with them as they have now been ‘cleansed’. It is not without reason that Opposition parties have lashed out at the BJP, saying that the corrupt become ‘clean’ once they pass through the ruling party’s “washing machine”. It is nothing less than a magic that scamsters in the Opposition become saints once they join the BJP camp.