At a celebration marking 75 years of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, BJP national president Nitin Nabin on Wednesday sought to turn an anniversary event into a warning to the party’s present generation that the BJP’s organisational strength and electoral success could not become a substitute for the struggle, ideological commitment and grass-roots work that built the party.Speaking at the historic venue in Delhi where the Jana Sangh was founded on October 21, 1951, Nabin repeatedly contrasted the scarcity faced by the organisation’s founders with the abundance available to today’s BJP.The Jana Sangh’s early workers, he said, did not have money even to print receipts, offices to work from or adequate means of transport. What they had was the determination to take their political idea to “each and every person”.The contrast was deliberate. The BJP today has a presence across the country, an established organisational machinery and its political message reaching virtually every part of the country. Nabin’s argument was that these advantages should make workers more responsible, not less committed.Jana Sangh to Jan-JanNabin endorsed the Delhi BJP’s description of the 75-year journey as “Jana Sangh se Jan-jan ki yatra”, but sought to give the phrase a contemporary meaning.The challenge before the BJP, he said, was now to ensure that the next generation remained connected not only with the party’s political ideology but also with the cultural and organisational roots from which the Jana Sangh emerged.This assumes greater significance as the BJP seeks to consolidate its political footprint among younger voters, many of whom have no personal memory of the party’s early decades or the struggles of the Jana Sangh period.Nabin said the new generation was growing up in an era of technology and changing global circumstances. The party therefore needed to ensure that technological advancement did not come at the cost of historical memory.“Learning from history” was one of the recurring themes of his address. He urged workers to study not merely the ideas of the party’s founding generation but also their simplicity, personal sacrifice, extensive travel and willingness to work at the lowest organisational levels.‘We started with three; today we have reached the third term’Nabin also used the party’s electoral journey to underline how dramatically the organisation has changed.The political movement that began with a tiny parliamentary presence has since grown into the BJP, which has formed the Union Government for a third consecutive term under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.But Nabin argued that electoral success should not create complacency.The same commitment and struggle that took the organisation from “three” to national dominance would be required, he said, to build what the BJP describes as a developed and globally influential India.His message effectively shifted the focus from the BJP’s past achievement to its next organisational test: how to sustain a cadre-based political organisation when the party itself has become an established force rather than an outsider challenging the political establishment.Mukherjee, Deendayal, Vajpayee and Advani invoked as organisational lineageNabin traced the BJP’s present strength to the organisational work of leaders associated with the Jana Sangh and its later evolution, particularly Syama Prasad Mukherjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani.He presented Mukherjee’s resignation from the government and subsequent role in establishing the Jana Sangh as an example of a leader choosing a longer political struggle over immediate political power.The organisational expansion that followed, he said, was driven by leaders who travelled across states and districts to build units when the organisation had neither the resources nor the reach that the BJP possesses today.For Nabin, that history is not merely commemorative. It is a template for how the BJP should operate in its next phase.Message on ideology and younger votersOne of the more consequential parts of the speech was Nabin’s emphasis on cultural nationalism and ideological continuity among younger generations.He argued that the BJP’s future workers would have to be connected with the party’s ideological roots while also navigating a rapidly changing global environment.Without naming specific countries or political movements, he warned that democracies across the world were facing new challenges and that instability and competing ideological narratives were being used to challenge established political systems.Against that backdrop, he positioned the Jana Sangh’s ideological legacy as a unifying framework for the BJP.The political implication was clear: the BJP cannot rely solely on its electoral machinery to reproduce its current dominance; it wants the next generation of voters and workers to inherit the ideological framework that has shaped the party’s rise.Delhi becomes the backdrop for a national messageThe choice of venue gave the event additional political symbolism. Nabin said a larger 75th-anniversary programme had initially been planned in Mumbai, but the decision was changed after the significance of the Delhi venue, where the Jana Sangh’s journey began, was discussed.Delhi BJP president Harsh Malhotra, Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and several senior party leaders and veterans attended the programme.Nabin specifically acknowledged the presence of veterans who had been associated with different phases of the organisation’s journey, using their recollections to connect the BJP’s current leadership with its organisational past.He ended by assuring the veterans that the BJP of the future would remain on the path on which the Jana Sangh had been built and would work towards the “developed India” vision articulated by Modi.The most important takeaway from the speech, however, was not the celebration of what the BJP has become. It was Nabin’s insistence that the party’s next 25 years cannot be built simply on the achievements of its first 75.For a BJP that has moved from political marginality to national dominance, the challenge he placed before its workers was therefore unusually inward-looking, preserve the organisational culture that produced the rise, take that culture to a new generation and continue working at the grassroots even when electoral success makes such work less immediately necessary.