How BJP Became The Congress It Promised To Bury
The Congressization of BJP is complete not when the party loses an election, but when its own natural constituency — the Hindu conservative voter, the middle-class professional who believed in accountability, finds themselves filing a writ petition against a government they once trusted.
Eleven years is long enough to stop calling something a work in progress. BJP came to power in 2014 on the back of genuine voter exhaustion — with Congress, with dynasty, with coalition deal-making, with the casual arrogance of a party that had governed so long it had forgotten to be accountable. “Congress-Mukt Bharat” was not merely a slogan; it was a diagnosis. Millions accepted it. I was one of them.
Yet as Congress has receded and that frustration becomes a distant memory, BJP increasingly resembles what it promised to replace — not in ideology, but in method. The hubris is visible. The accountability is selective. And the institutional capture that was once attributed exclusively to the Congress era has found enthusiastic new practitioners.
There are three instances that convince me that the congressization of BJP is no longer a work in progress. It is a completed project. Two concern men whose names are widely known — Arvind Kejriwal and Sonam Wangchuk. The third is the lived experience of this author: a permanently disabled citizen since childhood who, after surviving what he should not have survived inside Delhi’s law enforcement machinery, wrote to seven senior government officials and received, in return, complete silence.
The irony cuts deepest when you notice who is doing this. The people at the receiving end of Congress-style institutional design — those who were once targeted, jailed, and politically finished off by a government that knew how to use its agencies — appear to be the ones perpetrating the same system today.
Victims Learning Wrong Lessons
Congress deployed the Ishrat Jahan case not primarily as a pursuit of truth, but as a tool of political destruction. Every agency at its disposal was turned toward mounting a case against the BJP-led Gujarat government and finishing off its leadership. The intention was not justice — it was submission. The lesson that BJP drew from this experience, one might have hoped, was revulsion. The lesson it appears to have drawn is technique.
The playbook is identical: use central investigative agencies with selectively applied law, time the action for maximum political damage, make the legal process the punishment, and let the case quietly unravel long after the damage is done. What was once called a caged parrot — the Supreme Court’s own description of the CBI under Congress — now has a successor in the Enforcement Directorate, whose PMLA powers offer harsher bail conditions and a lower evidentiary burden. The instrument changed. The instinct did not.
The Kejriwal Case
Whatever one thinks of the Delhi liquor policy — and there is legitimate debate to be had — the trajectory of the case against Arvind Kejriwal tells its own story. Almost his entire cabinet went to jail. So did the Chief Minister himself, for five months, weeks before a general election, at a moment when democratic logic would have him canvassing votes, not sitting in a cell.
Then the case collapsed. A Delhi court discharged Kejriwal earlier this year, finding insufficient grounds to even frame charges — the lowest possible threshold for a prosecution to clear. This is not an acquittal after trial; it is a court saying the case should not have reached trial at all. The money trail central to the ED’s case was never proven. Co-accused were granted bail; witnesses retracted. The Supreme Court, in granting Kejriwal bail during his custody, had already made pointed observations about the danger of treating pre-trial detention as a substitute for conviction.
The discharge does not settle whether wrongdoing occurred in the framing of the liquor policy. What it settles is something the government would prefer left unsettled: that a Chief Minister was removed from a good part of an election campaign by a case that could not survive its first serious judicial scrutiny. The process was the punishment. The discharge is the proof.
The Wangchuk Case
Sonam Wangchuk’s case is less nationally prominent than Kejriwal’s but equally instructive — and in one respect, more revealing. He spent close to six months in custody, facing charges whose gravity was asserted loudly and whose factual foundation remained, on examination, dubious. The law is strict, the courts are slow, and the gap between the two has become a governable space.
Then the Ministry of Home Affairs ordered his release. Not bail. Not the collapse of charges. An executive order from the same ministry that oversees the agencies that detained him — issued just as the Supreme Court was hearing the matter and appeared likely to grant bail within weeks. The timing was not coincidental. A Supreme Court bail order would have put on record the court’s assessment of the detention’s legality. The MHA release ensured that record never came into existence. Wangchuk entered custody by the state’s decision and left by the state’s decision. The judiciary was decorative throughout — and the state ensured it stayed that way.
This is not incarceration as justice. It is incarceration as management — and the preemptive MHA release is its confession. The democratic cover was genuine in form: charges were filed, courts were functioning, the Supreme Court itself was engaged. But the architecture beneath it is the same architecture Congress used against anyone it perceived as inconvenient: weaponise the slowness of the system on the way in, and reserve the exit for when it suits the state, not when the law compels it.
The Author’s Experience
The third instance is closer and smaller, but structurally identical. This author — a person with polio since birth, educated at an RSS institution, whose voting pattern was shaped by faith and the appeal of genuine change — ran into trouble with Delhi Police. After four separate enquiries across two police stations over three years, each returning a clean chit, an FIR was registered and an arrest made without notice. A civil matter became criminal. Twelve days inside Delhi Police custody and Tihar Jail rendered a partially disabled man near-totally so.
After this, letters were sent to the top echelons including seven secretaries and head of three ministries of the central government as Delhi Police and Tihar Jail both came under central government. Each letter was detailed, structured, and legally grounded, invoking moral and legal duty of government towards justice. Not one replied. Not an acknowledgment. Not a template response.
A constitutional writ petition — W.P.(C) 11495/2025 — now stands admitted before the Delhi High Court. Notices issued to the concerned ministries months ago remain unanswered on the record, despite a court-stipulated timeline. The silence continues.
This silence is not bureaucratic inertia. It is policy. Strategic silence — the kind that suspends a complainant between acknowledged and dismissed, neither validated nor confronted — was a Congress-era innovation, used against activists and journalists who climbed too high in the grievance hierarchy without the right affiliations. BJP governments denounced it for years. They have now perfected it.
What Congressization Actually Means
The Congressization of BJP is complete not when the party loses an election, but when its own natural constituency — the Hindu conservative voter, the middle-class professional who believed in accountability, finds themselves filing a writ petition against a government they once trusted, or watching their Chief Minister imprisoned before a verdict, or seeing a grassroots leader neutralised through judicial slowness.
Congressization is complete when its own natural constituency finds itself inside the system it voted to change.
Our country has no shortage of laws. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act exists. The constitutional guarantees of due process are written in precise, enforceable language. PMLA has legitimate anti-money laundering purposes. None of this matters when the machinery of the state decides, at its discretion, whom to protect and whom to wear down. Legislation without executive intent is performance without meaning.
The distinction BJP once drew between itself and Congress was not merely ideological. It was moral. The claim was that this party understood what institutional abuse felt like from the inside and would therefore refuse to perpetrate it. Kejriwal knew what it was to be targeted. Wangchuk knew what it was to be inconvenient to power. And millions of ordinary citizens — including this author — voted on the faith that knowing these things would translate into doing things differently.
The mirror does not lie. What we are watching is not governance shaped by a different ideology. It is the same reflex — the reflex of a state that has stopped distinguishing between serving its citizens and controlling them. The system did not change hands. It changed letterhead.
[The writer, Vikas Gupta, is a writer and self-represented petitioner before the Delhi High Court. His constitutional writ petition (W.P.(C) 11495/2025) concerns disability rights and institutional accountability. He writes in a personal capacity. X: @guptavrv]
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