LOSING THE PLOT
Its desperate moves to engineer defections have exposed the BJP’s tall claims to being a principled party. The RSS too is unhappy with ‘the moral drift’ but has kept a tactical silence
The formation of the second Devendra Fadnavis government had led to jubilation in the BJP camp. Even its embarrassing failure, the arrival and exit of Ajit Pawar, didn’t cause much disappointment. There was a sense of self-righteousness—the rank and file felt the Shiv Sena had betrayed the mandate of the people by joining hands with the NCP-Congress. So any skullduggery on the BJP’s part was par for the course.
What did rankle, though, was the clumsiness of the operation. A section of party workers have started to question the political acumen of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah and ex-chief minister Devendra Fadnavis. While Fadnavis, in his statement on November 26, took the blame on his shoulders, the responsibility for the fiasco stops at the door of Modi. That the prime minister invoked special provisions—Rule 12 of the GoI (Transaction of Business) Rules, 1961—to end President’s rule in Maharashtra and clear the way for the Fadnavis-Ajit Pawar tieup raises questions on the misuse of special provisions to capture power. That the BJP failed to carry it through compounds matters.
It’s certain that the Maharashtra episode has dented the ModiShah duo’s political credibility. Worse, it has sullied the BJP’s claims to the high moral ground and of ushering in probity in public life. Especially since Maharashtra is only the latest in a series of attempts at government formation through defections and horse-trading. In the past five years, the BJP has tried the same tactics in Uttarakhand, Goa, Karnataka, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya.
The BJP’s return to the ‘Aaya Ram, gaya Ram’ era (which marked Haryana’s murky politics in the 1970s and ’80s) has worried the party’s ideological parent, the RSS. But it can’t make a fuss, because the party has also delivered on two key Sangh planks—abrogating Article 370 in J&K and facilitating the building of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. “There is a clear dichotomy between the BJP’s talk of clean governance and the defection politics it has been playing,” says a senior RSS leader. “But the way Modi and Shah have implemented the RSS national agenda makes it difficult for us to express our displeasure openly. Our lips are sealed.”
The disconnect between the BJP and RSS can be gleaned from the fact that top RSS leaders (including, reportedly, sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat) were clueless about the early morning swearing-in of Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar, and that too in a state where the RSS is headquartered.
The missteps and the fading lustre of the BJP are also visible on the ground—the loss of several states is graphically represented in a recent cartographic meme showing how the saffron territory has shrunk from 71 to 40 per cent of the map of India since 2017. What has jolted the party even more is the realisation that even
EVEN THE RSS BRASS WAS REPORTEDLY CLUELESS ABOUT THE SWEARING-IN OF FADNAVIS AND AJIT PAWAR
emotive national security and social issues like Article 370 and the triple talaq bill can’t win state elections when powerful local issues and economic distress come into play.
Interestingly, the Modi-Shah duo’s tactics are not new. Even as Gujarat chief minister, Modi liked to launch a ‘surgical strike’ before an election, enticing one or two key opposition leaders into the BJP. In Delhi, though, forming state governments through defections, allegedly diluting CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED) cases against such leaders and other such measures have become a regular feature.
Sources close to the Modi-Shah duo justify the strategy of denying power to the opposition, saying an ‘unhindered path’ is essential to implementing the BJP’s nationalist agenda, including good governance. Plus, they want to starve the opposition, particularly the Congress, of funds. Keeping the other side out of power is key to this.
A party source close to Shah says, “This is part of our long-term plan for the nation. We want to implement the nationalist agenda in the shortest possible time, and for that we cannot have bottlenecks. This is Chanakya niti, pure and simple...it might not click sometimes, like in Maharashtra.”
THE DEFECTIONS GAME
Many veteran partymen, though, disagree. Says one such BJP leader: “Even Chanakya would have been rattled by the way in which tainted leaders have been admitted into the party in the name of expanding our base.” A prime example of this is in Jharkhand, where one of the main accused in the Rs 131 crore health department scam in the Madhu Koda government (2006-08), then minister Bhanu Pratap Shahi, was inducted into the party in October. Shahi has over four dozen cases against him and has been to jail in the health scam. After the last assembly election in Jharkhand, the BJP had got six opposition MLAs to defect in February 2015 in a bid to have a stable government.
The same script played out in West Bengal where ex
TMC leaders like Mukul Roy who have switched sides have seen a go-slow in corruption cases against them after shifting to the BJP. In Telangana, two tainted Rajya Sabha MPs of the TDP who defected played an important role in managing the floor in the passage of the triple talaq and J&K bills.
ALL OUT IN THE NORTHEAST
The defection game started in right earnest in the Northeast with Arunachal Pradesh in 2016 where the party first broke the Congress, and then its own ally, the People’s Party of Arunachal (PPA), to form the government. The same leader, Pema Khandu, continues, but as a BJP chief minister. The same tactic continues, and the party now rules alone or is part of the governing coalition in all seven Northeast states.
In the Manipur assembly election in 2017, the Congress emerged the single largest party with 28 seats in the 60-member house. The BJP won 21 seats, yet the governor invited it. It cobbled support from the smaller regional parties to form the government. Later, the BJP got six Congress MLAs and a lone TMC MLA to defect to cross the majority mark comfortably. In 2018 in Meghalaya, after the elections, the Congress emerged as the single largest party with 21 seats in the 60-member House. But the BJP, with just two MLAs, worked to get together the National People’s Party (19 seats) and other smaller regional parties and formed the government.
In the Northeast, the common link in all the negotiations has been Assam finance minister and North-East Democratic Alliance convenor Himanta Biswa Sarma, a former Congressman who is now Shah’s most trusted lieutenant. Sarma, thanks to his wide personal network in the hill states, reached out to opposition
MLAs personally and was key in getting them to cross over.
A COUNTRYWIDE STRATEGY
Meanwhile, back in the mainland, it was the Uttarakhand crisis in 2016 that was creating ripples. The BJP pulled down the Harish Rawat government by engineering defections from the Congress and imposed President’s rule before the courts restored the government. In the 2017 election, the BJP finally won but with 11 turncoat Congress leaders in its ranks.
Goa was next on the list. After the 2017 election, the BJP with 13 seats stole a march on the Congress, which had 17 seats, by luring opposition MLAs and formed the government with a thin majority in the 40-member house. This year, in July, the party got 10 Congress MLAs to defect, raising the BJP tally to 27 in the house just when it seemed like the government was on thin ice following the death of chief minister Manohar Parrikar.
Coincidentally, even as it was luring the Congress MLAs in Goa, it was also pulling the rug from under the CongressJD(S) government in Karnataka. In July 2019, the government collapsed as 17 MLAs (14 Congress and 3 JD-S) resigned in one week. Subsequently, all the 17 MLAs were disqualified by then Karnataka assembly speaker Ramesh Kumar and barred from contesting bypolls. The matter reached the Supreme Court, which eventually allowed the 17 MLAs to contest the bypolls. Of them, 16 are now BJP members; 13 are contesting the December 5 byelections. Among them are Ballari mine owner Anand Singh, who is returning to the saffron fold after a stint in the Congress; he has 15 criminal cases against him, including for illegal mining. Another candidate, Byrathi Basavaraj, is being investigated by the Lokayukta in land-grab and corruption cases. Several BJP leaders have opposed the candidature of K. Gopalaiah as they suspect his brother’s involvement in a murder case. While in the Opposition, the BJP had targeted all these leaders, but has conveniently forgotten those issues now.
Attempts had been made to lure opposition MLAs from the time the CongressJD(S) government was formed. In February 2019, then CM H.D. Kumaraswamy of the JD(S) had even released an audio tape in which BJP leader B.S. Yediyurappa is allegedly heard luring JD(S) MLAs with money. The tape caused major embarrassment to the BJP, with the state ordering an SIT probe into it. But even with all the developments of the past two years, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli says it’s all about who plays the defection politics game better: “The rules of this game were not invented by the BJP. What the party has shown is that it is adept at playing by these rules. It’s a case of a diamond cutting a diamond.”
Interestingly, in a lighter vein, Union MoS for consumer affairs, food and public distribution Raosaheb Danve made a comment on the ‘defections’ issue a few months ago while delivering a speech in Jalna, Maharashtra. “The BJP,” he said, “has a washing machine. Before taking anyone into the party, we wash them in the machine. We use the Nirma powder of Gujarat, it cleans them.” The last line perhaps alluded to Modi and Shah. But the issue now is that the politics of defection has crossed all limits in the BJP. Both the machine and powder could be ineffective soon. ■
THE MODI-SHAH DUO JUSTIFY THEIR METHODS, ARGUING THAT AN ‘UNHINDERED PATH’ IS NECESSARY TO IMPLEMENT THE PARTY’S NATIONALIST AGENDA