The most dangerous moment for any political formation that has built its edifice on moral superiority is not when it is proven wrong, but when it is seen to be hollow. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, have for decades operated from what can only be called a moral tower. From that height, they have surveyed the nation and found every other formation wanting or corrupt where they are projected themselves as clean, saw others as anti-national where they are nationalist, deemed some as decadent where they are disciplined, named still others as pseudo-secular where they are truly secular.
This posture has been immensely productive. It has allowed the BJP to convert every political debate into a moral trial. It has allowed it to dismiss criticism not as disagreement but as impurity. And it has allowed it to present its own leaders not as politicians who can err, but as leaders who can only be misunderstood.
It is precisely this tower that is now being tested by students. And it is precisely the refusal to climb down from it , symbolized most recently in the studied denial of a resignation that ordinary political decency would demand that reveals both the structure and the coming crisis of the BJP.
Students have a peculiar ability to detect moral hollowness. Unlike seasoned political opponents, they are not playing for a share of power. Unlike the media, they are not bound by access. They respond to what they perceive as an elemental contradiction between word and deed. When a party that speaks incessantly of character, of sanskar, of national integrity, is seen to protect its own in the face of serious charges, to obfuscate, to delay, to deploy the full machinery of whataboutery, the student senses not just a political failure but a moral fraud.
The BJP’s response to this perception has been textbook. Denial and deflection. Followed by counter-accusations. The refusal to allow a resignation is not an administrative decision; it is a theological one. To accept a resignation would be to admit that a flaw can exist within the sanctum sacrorum . And if a flaw can exist within, then the entire binary that the party has built , we are pure, they are impure – simply collapses and falls apart .
This is what Jacques Derrida meant by hauntology. It is not just about ghosts from the past, but about a future that is already present as a specter, haunting the present. The hauntology of the BJP is the specter of its own moral claim. It is haunted by the very standard it has set for itself and for everyone else. Every time it has demanded resignations from others on grounds of propriety, every time it has demanded that an entire party apologize for one leader’s remark, every time it has equated dissent with immorality, it has created a ghost. That ghost now sits in its own corridors.
To preserve its moral logic, the BJP must do what all self-righteous movements must do: it must double down. It cannot say, “We made a mistake.” It must say, “There was no mistake, and those who say there was one are conspirators.” It cannot say, “We will enquire and act.” It must say, “The very demand for an enquiry is an attack on the nation.” At the most it came to consider punishing the perpetrators who are others and not they through a fast track court. Again this position is also arise our of the logic of hauntology. They are still holy . It is nameless others who are culprits.
This is not strength. It is a trap. Because moral posturing has a diminishing return. In the early years, it inspires. In the middle years, it disciplines. In the later years, it suffocates. The cadre that once felt elevated by being told they were morally superior now feels exhausted by having to defend the indefensible. The voter who once believed in the promise of a different kind of politics begins to see that it is only the same politics with louder incense.
And this is why a student agitation, however localized it may appear today, has the potential to go national. Students are not demanding a policy tweak. They are demanding consistency. They are, in effect, saying: live by the moral code you have imposed on the rest of us. This is a profoundly conservative demand, in the philosophical sense. It does not ask the BJP to become the Congress or the Left. It asks the BJP to become what it says it is.
When such a demand goes national, it finds easy resonance. Every university has a story of administrative high-handedness justified in the name of discipline. Every young person who has been lectured about nationalism while watching cronyism flourish recognizes the pattern. Every citizen who has been told to sacrifice for the nation while watching the powerful evade accountability feels the contradiction viscerally.
The BJP’s method of handling dissent – branding it as anti-national, foreign-funded, or part of a toolkit works when the dissent can be othered. It works less when the dissenter looks like the ideal child the movement claims to produce: young, earnest, speaking the language of integrity and nation. You cannot easily call a student demanding ethical accountability anti-national without sounding like you are protecting immorality in the name of nationalism. And that is exactly the inversion that is beginning to happen.
The more the party protects its moral posture by denying legitimacy to the protest, the more it confirms the protest’s central thesis: that the posture is more important than the principle. This is the hauntological loop. The act of preserving the image of purity becomes the most visible proof of impurity. The tower built to look down upon others becomes a prison from which the occupant cannot descend without falling.
History offers a warning here. Movements that claim a monopoly on virtue never fall because their opponents prove them corrupt. They fall because their own followers begin to feel the weight of the hypocrisy. The Emergency was not defeated only by political opposition; it was defeated because the moral claim of discipline began to look like mere authoritarianism. Similarly, the moral capital of the early anti-corruption movements dissipated the moment they were seen to be selective in their outrage.
The BJP today stands at that inflection point. Its vast electoral machinery, its formidable organizational network, its dominance of the narrative space , unfortunately none of these can resolve a moral contradiction. In fact, they make it worse. The larger the machinery deployed to deny a simple act of accountability, the more glaring the denial becomes.
If the agitation spreads from one campus to another, from campuses to streets, from streets to living rooms where parents and children argue about what nationalism really means , it will not be because of any opposition strategy. It will be because the BJP has made itself vulnerable to its own standard.
In the end, the hauntology is simple: you are haunted by what you pretend not to be, but also by what you claim you always were. The BJP claimed it would be a party with a difference. It built its politics on that difference being moral, not merely managerial. To now be seen managing morality rather than embodying it is to invite the very ghosts it tried to exorcise from Indian politics.
And ghosts, as students know, do not need permission to enter. They enter when the house claims it has no ghosts at all. Remember, it was a child that cried that the Emperor was naked .
