Revival of the NDA, on terms set by BJP
The party has been stitching up alliances to make sure that its goals — 370 seats for the BJP and 400 seats for the NDA — are realised
Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi has announced 370 Lok Sabha seats as the target for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the upcoming general elections. That is 67 seats more than the tally the party got in 2019. By all accounts, this is a formidable task, especially since the party nearly swept its strongholds in the Hindi heartland. In the west too, it swept Gujarat and did remarkably well in Maharashtra with its ally Shiv Sena.
The party, on the ascendance in the eastern states of Odisha and West Bengal as well as the Northeast, could make gains, of course. Southern India, barring Karnataka, refused to ride the Modi wave and preferred regional outfits — the Telangana Rashtra Samithi in Telangana, YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh, the DMK-front which included the Congress in Tamil Nadu and the Congressled United Democratic Front in Kerala. The Congress took Punjab, the only state in northern India where the party did well. It is against this backdrop that the prime minister, confident of a third successive term in office, has raised the bar for the BJP and set
Mission 400 for the NDA.
In a way both the targets — 400 for the NDA and the 370 seats for the BJP — are connected. The BJP needs to win in the South to pick more seats for which it needs strong regional allies. So, the NDA will be in focus in the southern states, where the BJP lacks the organisational might and ideological influence to dominate the electoral contest. It hopes to compensate for both with political nous, which is now visible. On Saturday, the party clinched a seat deal with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Jana Sena in Andhra Pradesh, while talks continue with the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha: Both the TDP and the BJD are former NDA members. It has allies in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, though these do not have the clout to swing elections. Add the manoeuvres in Maharashtra and Bihar, and it becomes clear that the NDA has acquired a geographical spread and gained a wider social base — making it more representative of the country, in fact, than the Opposition INDIA bloc.
First, the alliances in the South. Clearly, the BJP is in no mood to allow the INDIA bloc a free run in the 130 Lok Sabha constituencies in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Kerala, where the Opposition hopes to do well. Soon after the defeat in the Karnataka assembly elections, the BJP moved swiftly to tie up with the Deva Gowdaled Janata Dal-S, which has substantial influence in southern Karnataka. The deal with the TDP-Jana Sena combine in Andhra Pradesh may help the party find a foothold in a state with 25 Lok Sabha seats. The INDIA bloc is formidable in Tamil Nadu, but the BJP has been on an overdrive, led by PM Modi himself and a young energetic party chief, to crack the state that sends 39 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Tamil Nadu, with its lineage of Dravidian sub-nationalism, is both an organisational and ideological barrier to the BJP: The party would prefer to have all the AIADMK factions on its side to take on the DMK front — but it will not be averse to growing at the cost of its one-time ally.
Elsewhere, it has built a Mahayuti in Maharashtra by breaking the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party, which were the pillars of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (the local INDIA variant), crippled the Mahagathbandhan in Bihar by engineering the defection of Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) yet again, and successfully managed a rainbow coalition of Hindu upper castes, non-Yadav OBCs and, with the inclusion of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in the NDA, restive peasant castes such as the Jats, while preventing consolidation of the opposition parties. In fact, Mayawati’s politically inexplicable reluctance to join INDIA opens up further possibilities for the BJP to increase its seats from Uttar Pradesh — the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party-RLD alliance and the Congress together won 15 seats (out of 80 seats) in 2019. This leaves West Bengal as the only big state where the BJP will be battling a formidable regional player, the Trinamool Congress, on its own.
With over two dozen allies, the BJP has revived the NDA as a potent entity for the 2024 polls. This may well suggest a subtle turn in the party’s tactics, which since 2014 had focussed on the expansion of the party and its ideology even if that meant alienating long-term allies, for instance, the Shiv Sena and Shiromani Akali Dal, and trusted the leadership and record of PM Modi more than political alliances.
Historically, the BJP has been more accommodating of allies at the national level, more so perhaps because it lacked the Congress’s national footprint or hegemonic presence. However, the party’s majoritarian ideological instincts, which manifested in the Rath Yatra and the destruction of Babri Masjid in 1992, prevented many regional parties from allying with it until the late 1990s. In 1996, the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha and formed the government at the Centre.
However, the Vajpayee Cabinet was forced to resign 13 days after it took oath because no party would back the BJP government. In his resignation speech, Vajpayee criticised these parties for practising political untouchability. Later, the party had to promise prospective allies that it would put its core ideological agendas, Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, the Uniform Civil Code, and the repeal of Article 370, on the back burner in the name of coalition dharma.
Now, in the renewed NDA, the allies are dependent on the BJP and expected to follow the BJP’s playbook. This change in power equations between the BJP and the Congress reflects the distance Indian politics has travelled since the 1990s and the transformation of the BJP from the time it was led by Vajpayee and Advani to its present dominant position under Modi and Amit Shah.
Under Modi, the BJP won a straight majority in the 2014 elections and emerged in pole position in national politics. In office, the BJP unabashedly pursued its core Hindutva promises. Under Shah as party president, the BJP set itself the goal of emerging as the biggest political party in the world. The following statistical nugget is revealing: In 2014, the BJP’s membership stood at 35 million; a year later, it had risen to 100 million. If the party won 11.3 million votes in the 2012 assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh, it swept the 2017 elections with 34.4 million votes. In its pursuit of a national footprint, the party brought in popular leaders from rival parties and even offered them high office. For instance, former Congress leaders now head BJP governments in Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura. That seems a small price to pay as the BJP transformed from a cadre outfit to a mass organisation. This transformation seems to have had no impact on the party’s ideological orientations or goals. It is from this position of strength that the BJP is expanding the NDA.
With a popular communicator as the face of the party, a big pile of governance claims including delivery of public goods and welfare, State agencies at its command, unrelenting ambition to win office, and a muscular faith-centric nationalism powering its engines, the BJP has been successful in projecting its dominance over the polity. Emaciated regional parties, under weather due to corruption charges, dwindling war chests and a public mood that favours strong leaders, prefer to join the BJP juggernaut, on the ruling party’s terms, as it seeks to achieve Target 370 (for the party) and Mission 400 (for the NDA).
KRISHNAN SRINIVASAN OR KRIS, AS I KNOW HIM, HAS BEEN A FRIEND FOR 40 YEARS... I KNEW KRIS ENJOYED WRITING, BUT IT WOULD NEVER HAVE OCCURRED TO ME THAT DETECTIVE MYSTERIES WOULD BE HIS FORTE