BJP BENDS OVER BACKWARDS
The party mobilises backward castes by stitching together a new alliance, playing on Narendra Modi’s OBC origins and fielding caste stalwarts from other parties
Narendra Modi, smiling beatifically from a largerthan-life portrait, looks down from the wall of the BJP’s campaign control room in Patna’s New Dak Bungalow Road locality. Inside the building, an all-male team of headset-wearing executives sit in a matrix of cubicles and feverishly speak into their microphones. One of them, gangly 20-yearold Ashish Kumar, dressed in blue jeans and a grey shirt, is collecting a ground report from the operator of a BJP video van in Gaya district. “How many people came when you played Modiji’s recorded speech? What was their response? How many stickers and Modi masks were distributed? Are the generators and the LED screens working properly?” he asks, pausing after each question for answers. His colleagues in the BJP’s video ‘raths’ have a mobile phone app that transfers pictures and attendance data to the call centre within minutes. This data is then cross-checked with the vehicle’s video tracking device so that the control room can map the physical footprint of the Modi campaign in real-time.
BJP has launched its election blitzkrieg for Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats. As Nitish Kumar’s junior partner five years ago, the party was given only 15 seats, of which it had won 12. In 2014, BJP is contesting 30 seats in Bihar, this time as the front-runners. “Electoral contests in Bihar since 1995 have firmly remained Lalu versus Nitish battles. Only when we ramp up our 2009 vote share of 13.93 per cent to 30 per cent can we deliver 20 or more of the 40 Lok Sabha seats. It needed a Herculean effort,” says a senior party leader.
BJP’s campaign for Bihar follows a two-pronged approach. First, the party’s Bihar in-charge Dharmendra Pradhan and leader of the legislative party Sushil Kumar Modi have worked towards creating a new social constituency. They have mobilised the backward castes by keeping out religious symbolism and focusing on caste equations. Second, the party has put in place an exhaustive election manage-
ment system through its central control room in Patna, which is run by Rajya Sabha MP R.K. Sinha and his son Rituraj, a business major from Leeds University. Pradhan is the link between the politicians and the backroom boys. The combination of these two strategies is starting to make a visible impact on the ground.
The party’s smart network of allies, including Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), is the fulcrum of the strategy for cultivating a new social constituency. Traditionally seen as a party of traders, urban middle classes and upper castes, the deals struck with LJP leader Ram Vilas Paswan and OBC leader Upendra Kushwaha of the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party, will eat into the Dalit and backward vote that Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) (JD-U) has been picking up. Kushwaha, a former Nitish loyalist, enjoys considerable following among his significant Koiri caste. Koiris, along with the Kurmis, both of whom belong to the Other Backward Classes (OBC), formed the backbone of Nitish’s support base after he parted ways with Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) Lalu Prasad Yadav to launch the Samata Party in 1994. Paswan and Kushwaha also help BJP complete its political expansion in Bihar from a party Nitish considered a political untouchable under Modi to one that is now acceptable to parties across the ideological spectrum. BJP has left seven Lok Sabha seats for Paswan and
BJP IS USING TACTICAL SOCIAL ENGINEERING AGAINST NITISH THROUGH ITS ALLIES.
three for Kushwaha.
BJP’s plan of social expansion is not new in Bihar but the party was least expected to dump Hindu majoritarianism and further fragment Bihar’s caste-ridden society. Veteran socialist leader Karpoori Thakur initiated the concept in the 1970s by introducing quota within quota to create the Extremely Backward Classes (EBC) category. Lalu Yadav used it to his advantage through the ’90s, and Nitish further fine-tuned it by reserving 20 per cent panchayat seats for EBCs.
Nitish launched targeted welfare programmes to wean away marginalised groups among EBCs from Lalu’s backward caste-Muslim-Yadav vote bank and Ram Vilas Paswan’s consolidated Dalit vote bank. Before his rivals could react, Nitish, once dubbed the leader of only 3.8 per cent Kurmis, was invincible, also enjoying the support of BJP’s upper-caste vote bank.
CASTE, NOT NATION FIRST Now, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, former alliance partner BJP is using tactical social engineering against Nitish through its network of allies. “In Bihar’s caste-ridden society, the concept of ‘nation first’ won’t fetch you votes. We had to match Nitish and Lalu’s caste politics and that’s what we are doing,” explains a senior party strategist. The game plan is clear: Create a new bloc of various castes from across social strata, use it to secure an electoral majority, and consolidate it into a stable support base.
So strongly does caste matter in Bihar politics that Narendra Modi, touted as the “development man” in the rest of the country, is unabashedly playing his backward caste card in all his speeches to reach out to OBCs, including Yadavs. The party has even embraced candidates who were fiercely opposed to it in the past such as Ram Kripal Yadav, a sitting RJD MP in the Rajya Sabha who has been fielded against Lalu’s daughter Misa from Pataliputra. As a BJP leader puts it, “Winnability is the sole criterion.”
Lalu and Nitish are now trying to counter Modi by touting their own humble origins. While Lalu reminds voters how he, too, used to sell tea and goat’s milk, Nitish describes himself as “bahut mamuli aadmi” (very ordinary man) and the “son of a village Ayurveda practitioner”. Despite BJP’s inroads, Nitish may yet get a decent share of the EBC vote. Lalu, too, can retain much of his Yadav base though RJD may find it difficult to transfer these votes to ally Congress. BJP also expects its core supporters, the upper class Bhumihars and Brahmins, to remain loyal.
MESSAGE GOES MOBILE Back in the call centre, Ashish Kumar chuckles when he’s told how villagers forced the crew to replay the recorded speech over and over again. The thirdyear BSc student is among 100 executives hired for a 100-day assignment to monitor BJP’s Bihar campaign. His team works eight hours a day in two shifts, primarily monitoring video vans and the network of volunteers that the party has been activating in different stages since last December.
The video vans—one in each of the 243 Assembly constituencies—make seven stops every day in the dusty streets of Bihar’s outback, where a 25minute Modi speech is played on giant LED screens fitted in the vans. The crux of the message is his intention to take Bihar up the development ladder and ‘exposing’ how the government has let the state down. He talks about Bihar’s extensive water resources but questions why it still has to import fish from Andhra Pradesh. These vans are targeting a total of 70,000 campaign meetings, thereby delivering Modi’s message to 10 million voters over a 70-day period. The vans have already distributed over 2.5 million Modi masks.
Long before the Modi message started travelling from constituency to constituency, BJP’s election management arm had gathered more than 4.8 million mobile numbers of potential supporters by tapping anyone who had engaged with the party on the Web, through SMS, or in on-ground donation drives. This number alone is 1.5 million higher than the 3.37 million votes that BJP bagged in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls.
These 4.8 million people have now been categorised as “active BJP supporters”.
From being an invincible CM until last year, Nitish is now feeling isolated. As a senior JD(U) leader points out, “His biggest worry is not the Lok Sabha election, but the ominous portent it has for his government in the state.” JD(U) has only 115 MLAs in the 243-member Assembly. The Chief Minister has fielded BJP MLAs Santosh Kumar and Avnish Kumar Singh in the Lok Sabha polls, making them quit their Assembly seats, bringing down their strength in the Assembly. Two other BJP MLAs, Amarnath Gami and Vijay Mishra, are unlikely to vote against Nitish, as also Zakir Hussain Khan, the lone LJP legislator who joined JD(U) in February. Apart from that, four of the 13 RJD MLAs who were identified as a separate group in the Assembly in February have not returned to Lalu’s party—a questionable move that has provided the minority government a much-needed cushion. With the House’s total strength currently at 237, the government is propped up by four Congress MLAs,
four Independents and a CPI MLA.
Nitish has now pinned his hopes on his traditional EBC-Mahadalit-backward Muslim vote bank to neutralise Modi’s momentum. His biggest challenge is to convince voters of his relevance in the national elections. His sudden advertising of “better qualification” to become prime minister than someone “who has not spent a single day in Parliament” is a ploy to position himself on equal footing with Modi.
Convicted in the fodder scam, Lalu has fielded wife Rabri Devi from Saran, a seat he won in 2009. Out on bail, he has addressed more meetings than Nitish and Paswan. He is desperate to win over Muslims, who seem to be vacillating between the Congress-RJD-Nationalist Congress Party alliance and Nitish. The RJD-led alliance has fielded eight Muslim and 10 Yadav candidates in the hope of reviving Lalu’s famed Muslim-Yadav vote matrix. “It is important to know which groups will not vote for you. There is no point wasting time on such groups,” a senior RJD leader explains the party strategy.
Be it Paswan, Lalu or Nitish, the pressure of Narendra Modi’s connect with the masses and the resultant threat to their support bases is obvious. They are fighting with their backs to the wall, some jumping on the bandwagon and some trying to put up a last stand, as the BJP juggernaut rapidly rolls towards them.