Power, no matter how towering, must never displace service — that is the message Union Culture and Tourism Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat amplified on Thursday, 24 September 2026, sharing a sharp exhortation attributed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as part of the BJP's ongoing #SevaSankalpAbhiyan and #SevaYatra campaigns.

The message: service by conduct, not sermon

The quoted words — delivered in Hindi — strip the idea of service down to its most demanding form: 'सेवा ही हमारा मुख्य कार्य होना चाहिए' ('Service alone must be our primary work'). The passage explicitly rejects preaching: 'We will deliver the message of service through service itself — not through words. Our conduct alone should tell people that, however high power may rise in politics, our path will remain one of service.'

The closing invocation — 'सेवा परमो धर्म:', or 'Service is the supreme duty' — is not new political vocabulary for Modi. He has woven the Sanskrit phrase into party addresses and national platforms repeatedly since 2014, rooting it in the RSS-BJP tradition of karma yog: righteous action as its own reward, with political office recast as an obligation rather than a privilege.

Seva Sankalp Abhiyan and the organisational purpose behind the push

The dual hashtags signal a structured internal campaign, not a one-off social media moment. The Seva Sankalp Abhiyan and Seva Yatra are BJP-linked drives aimed at reinforcing service-oriented conduct among party workers — a periodic tool the organisation deploys to sharpen grassroots discipline and reset the rank-and-file's relationship with power after electoral cycles.

The timing and cadence of such messaging are deliberate. By circulating the Prime Minister's words, a senior minister like Shekhawat — himself a two-term Lok Sabha MP from Jodhpur, Rajasthan — signals organisational alignment from the top down: that the ethical compact between leadership and worker remains non-negotiable, regardless of the scale of power held.

A long-running ideological thread

The BJP's emphasis on seva as political virtue traces directly to RSS foundational thought, which positions the volunteer-worker (swayamsevak) as a servant of society first and a political actor second. For a party that has held national power since 2014 and governs a majority of Indian states, the challenge of keeping that ethos alive inside a vast, winning machinery is real — and the recurring nature of seva-themed campaigns reflects that institutional awareness.

The warning embedded in Modi's words — 'however high a peak we reach' — reads as an internal check: a reminder that electoral dominance is not an exemption from the founding discipline.

If the Seva Yatra rallies in the coming weeks match the ambition of the slogan, the test will be in the conduct of the millions of booth-level workers it is meant to reach — not in the words shared from a ministerial handle.