IT’S NOT ABOUT MODI

But letting the likes of Yogi Adityanath go berserk can ruin the BJP’s dreams of reviving a hollow organisation and sustaining the magic of Modi on the stump

As the results of the bypolls to 32 assembly seats across nine states held last week emerged, revealing an embarrassing setback for the BJP, which lost 13 of the 23 seats it had held in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, a senior BJP leader noted ruefully, “You can’t talk ‘development’ in Delhi and ‘love jihad’ in Uttar Pradesh and still expect not to get the message clouded. In this age of 24×7 television news channels and effervescent social media, the bad-cop-good-cop strategy doesn’t wash.” He was referring to efforts by the ruling party headed by a man with tremendous reformist appeal, Narendra Modi, to pull in votes by polarising people along religious lines. “You are not the only party that can do it. And these results are lessons in humility, to say the least,” he warns.

Coming, as it does, some four months after a commanding triumph in the Modi-centric General Election, and after reverses in by-elections in Uttarakhand, Bihar, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh, the latest round of blows have fuelled talk of the Modi wave dissipating within a few months of its buffeting the country and shrinking the Congress party to its lowest tally in electoral history. While in Uttar Pradesh the BJP and ally Apna Dal lost eight of the 11 seats held by it to the ruling party in the state, Samajwadi Party, in Rajasthan, the Congress, which was down in the dumps after the Lok Sabha polls lost it all Parliamentary seats from the state, claimed back three of four Assembly seats. In Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where the Prime Minister didn’t campaign for the first time in 12 years, the BJP lost three of the nine seats it had held last time to the Congress, boosting the latter’s morale after a resounding General Election defeat.

Another senior BJP leader and former Union minister concedes that the ‘polarisation pitch’ in UP, where the BJP won 72 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats this year, was neutralised by the SP which also fielded ‘Hindu names’ to counter the BJP offensive. Political pundits are of the view that the BJP had managed to woo Hindu voters in the state in the Lok Sabha polls thanks to a polarisation in the state after the Muzaffarnagar riots that saw massive Dalit participation in such violence for the first time. As a result, the pro-Dalit Bahujan Samaj Party led by Mayawati drew a blank in the General Election.

“The SP was very much conscious of the BJP’s tactics this time around. And that realisation seems to have helped them in this election,” notes psephologist Devendra Kumar. In the face of inflammatory anti-Muslim statements by the likes of Yogi Adityanath, the BJP’s campaign spearhead in the state, the SP fielded more Hindu faces in this bypoll. Though its strategy didn’t work in Saharanpur, where the BJP’s Rajeev Gumbar won, the SP’s decision to withdraw the candidacy of a Dalit Muslim and field a Hindu from Balha, a reserved constituency, paid off.

“What our party did was hit back with a bit of Hindutva,” an SP leader tells Open, emphasising that the strategy should force the BJP to desist from “too much of religion mongering” like what was seen in UP. Gorakhpur MP Yogi Adityanath, a star campaigner for the BJP along with Kalraj Mishra and state BJP chief Laxmikant Bajpai, had said that ‘love jihad’, a term to describe a deliberate attempt by Muslim boys to woo non- Muslim women with the intention of coercing them to convert to Islam, would be a major issue in the bypolls held on 13 September. Various other parties in the state had said that ‘love jihad’ was a hoax perpetuated by the Hindu nationalist party to reap the gains of religious polarisation.

In a way, the poll setback was more of a rejection of the aggressive posturing by the state’s BJP leaders than of Modi’s leadership and promises of focusing on development, skilling, women’s empowerment and a raft of other zealous reformist moves and shock therapies to transform the country into a global economic powerhouse. “Each time Adityanath made a statement, Brand Modi, created and sold to India’s people frustrated with the slow pace of growth and breakdown of public delivery systems and a lack of avenues for entrepreneurs to flourish, among others, got diluted. Modi the doer was a far cry from the agents of hatred who sought votes this time in assembly elections,” says a person who has closely worked with Modi in designing his campaign strategy.

“The tit-for-tat by the SP doesn’t show that Modi magic is on the wane, but it shows that the kind of politics peddled by BJP leaders in UP has no takers,” says Kumar, cautioning against running into easy and premature conclusions of an erosion of support for Modi’s vision for India. True, assembly election results, unlike those of the General Election, are not exactly indicators of what people think of the central leadership. People typically vote on local factors in state and other local polls.

But then there are many lessons for the BJP to learn from these results. Most importantly, the overwhelming support for Modi in the General Election shouldn’t have been read wrongly as an endorsement of Adityanath’s brand of politics, which feeds on dividing people along religious lines. Besides, the gains that the party reaped when the opposition was a divided house and the BJP a cohesive unit under Modi’s leadership can’t be expected if the opposition essentially ends up being a united force. Though the BSP is said to have appealed to its cadres to vote against the SP, the ruling party in the state stood to gain as the sole non-BJP alternative. The SP took advantage by fielding Hindu candidates. “The result was that Muslims of the state resorted to strategic voting, just as they will continue to do in other state elections: the SP not only won a good chunk of anti-BJP votes, including Hindu votes, because most of its candidates were Hindu. The Mulayam Singh Yadav-led party also kept its most visible Muslim face, Azam Khan, away from the poll campaign. Finally, it managed to secure Muslim votes, too, because they knew only too well that Muslim candidates were not pitched from many constituencies with the aiming of cannibalising votes the BJP won last time,” says a Lucknow-based SP leader of the Muslim community.

“What’s key is that when you win an election, you shouldn’t infer too much from the victory,” says the first senior BJP leader. He avers that with opposition to the BJP gaining momentum across various states, the BJP can’t wait too long before “it pulls up its socks and acts”. In Bihar, in a major realignment of forces, bitter enemies Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal-United (JD-U) and Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) had, after Modi’s stunning win, joined hands to serve a major blow to the BJP at the recent bypolls necessitated by many legislators becoming MPs. In Uttar Pradesh, though the BSP didn’t contest polls, a sizeable chunk of Dalit votes that traditionally went to the BSP went to the SP. “Why it didn’t go to the BJP is a sign of things to come,” warns the former Union minister, adding that when Modi is away from the thick of a campaign, the BJP ends up losing its edge. “The truth is that religious polarisation will now end up benefiting the BJP’s rivals because they will also resort to pro-Hindu polarisation by fielding candidates based on caste and religious congruities and will also secure Muslim votes en bloc as Muslims will always vote to defeat the BJP. They are increasingly going to be masters at strategic voting,” he argues.

While party leaders hasten to state that the setback in Uttar Pradesh— where the BJP has improved its vote share compared with the last Assembly polls—could be attributed to organisational weakness, and in Rajasthan, to infighting within its ranks over seats, the saving grace for the ruling coalition leader was that it opened an account on its own for the first time in the West Bengal Assembly. The BJP won the Basirhat Dakshin seat in West Bengal, a CPM stronghold where Muslims account for 63 per cent of the electorate, and Silchar’s in Assam.

But then no celebrations were in sight with the BJP losing badly, especially from Rohaniya, which falls under the Varanasi Lok Sabha seat that sent Modi to Parliament with a huge victory margin. A few BJP leaders from UP argue unconvincingly that the lower voter turnout was a major reason for the dismal performance of the party. The BJP, meanwhile, managed to win the Vadodara Lok Sabha seat vacated by the Prime Minister; in two other Lok Sabha bypolls, Mainpuri in UP and Medak in Telangana, necessitated by the vacation of seats by SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and TRS leader K Chandrasekhar Rao, the ruling parties retained the seats.

The over-reliance of the party on the ‘Modi factor’ will definitely make the Prime Minister more powerful, but then the stakes are high for both him and his closest aide and BJP President Amit Shah in the upcoming Maharashtra and Haryana elections in October.

“See, the organisation is largely hollow, and the victory in the last Lok Sabha was made possible thanks to the hype built around Modi. Now Shah will have to mend the organisation if he has to ensure that the BJP wins state elections. Let’s not forget that this one is the third round of poll setbacks since the NDA was re-elected to power after a gap of 10 years. I am appalled by a lot of vanity on display,” the first BJP leader says.

The vanity on display that the BJP leader talks about was most visible in Maharashtra, where the BJP was locked in bitter seat-sharing wrangling with its recalcitrant ally, Shiv Sena, which had attacked the coalition leader with risqué comments. In July, emboldened by the landslide victory in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP unit in Maharashtra had suggested snapping ties with its long-time ally Shiv Sena and going it alone in the Assembly polls. Maharashtra BJP chief Devendra Fadnavis had gone to the extent of stating that the strike rate of his party was much better than his ally’s, resulting in major sabre-rattling and a hardening of stance by the BJP over the CM’s post and seat-sharing formula. Now, the Sena will drive a hard bargain. Worse, a Bihar-style consolidation of non-BJP parties is likely in the polls due in various states. Besides Maharashtra and Haryana, Jharkhand will also go to the polls this year, and the poll schedule for Jammu & Kashmir is likely to be postponed due to its devastating floods.

“In politics, we should never let ourselves be carried away by either a win or a loss,” offers the former Union minister. Which means Amit Shah, who had spent sleepless nights closely monitoring the 2014 General Election, will not be able to sleep easy yet. Mending the organisation is expected to be a tougher task than imagined. Shah’s office at 11 Kautilya Marg in Delhi—where Gujarat Bhawan is located—will see more action. After all, the poll losses have brought to the fore the fragility of his party’s organisational apparatus and also upped the ante by setting more complex challenges ahead. The campaign is not over yet.

BJPby-electionNarendra Modi