Rank and file let down, BJP keeps stony silence

What’s going on inside the BJP after the stinging electoral rebuke the party received in the just held Assembly polls in West Bengal and Kerala, and the less than enthusiastic response in other poll-bound states, may only be guessed at. Unlike other political parties, the BJP bars it doors to the world unless it has something to say. Dissent is monitored and tamped down hard. The party’s mentor, the RSS, is an even more of a bamboo curtain sort of outfit.

Therefore, the evaluation of the recent state elections by the leadership — if the propaganda component, of which enough can already be heard on television through worshipful anchors, is to be discounted — is likely to remain something of a state secret for now. At lower levels, however, disappointment — even bitterness toward the top leadership in Delhi — is writ large.

On Tuesday, this newspaper reported voices from below of the party faithful in West Bengal. The fingers are pointing at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah, and the loutish state BJP president, Dilip Ghosh. The trio didn’t fight a normal political battle in which the opponent’s handicaps are exploited within the bounds of normal debate and within culturally sanctioned levels of public decency. They descended to the level of the sewer.

The voter rejected this in a massive way. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee was defeated in Nandigram but her party won big in seats around that constituency. This is suggestive of fishy goingson. The ensuing public reaction is likely to further demoralise the local saffron cadres.

In Kerala, the BJP drew a blank and polled a lower percentage than last time. In Tami Nadu, in alliance with AIADMK, it won four seats. But these will be viewed as chimeric — here today, gone tomorrow. The party has no base to speak of in the state and commonly attracts hostility. In the UT of Puducherry it brought down the Congress government through defections, and then tied up with a regional party to form government. Like in TN, this too cannot be a moment to savour. In Assam, the BJP has indeed done well by resorting to its usual game of religious polarisation, and returned to power. But polling percentages of rivals suggest there is not that much to choose between the winning side and the Congress-led Opposition front.

For the past five years, the BJP rank-and-file took policy disasters such as demonetisation and botched GST in its stride, as indeed did the voter. The overarching communal motif of punishing “the other” has won the day for the most part. For the rest, the BJP was busy overturning electoral verdicts in states and forming governments anyway, as constitutional bodies and state institutions became accomplices or mute witnesses to political crime.

But all this was before the Chinese intrusion and continued occupation of traditionally Indian territory, and before the Covid crisis. Now, it is hard to do so much false propaganda, a speciality of the ruling party and its infamous IT cell, as to efface from the public mind images of flames leaping out of crematoriums in every part of India.

The just ended polls are not just a common story of a poll reverse. They constitute a testament framed within well-documented policy collapse — negatively affecting employment and growth, besides the monumental Covid failure — which has made this country an object of international pity and derision.

The leadership is uncharacteristically quiet. This is because much is at stake.

The just ended polls are not just a common story of a poll reverse. They constitute a

testament framed within well-documented

policy collapse