Modi’s reputation at stake as states go to polls
Uttar Pradesh is key as ruling party seeks control of state legislature
IN A staggered electoral process that began on February 4, more than 160 million people in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and four more provinces will vote to elect their respective governments. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reputation is at stake in these polls for many reasons.
Always in campaign mode, Modi has been bizarrely accused of demonetising the high-value currency notes last November due to elections. The ostensible reason was to fight black money that sustains an Indian democracy, but many believe it was meant to politically hit his party’s rivals in Uttar Pradesh elections by denying them funds to fight elections. The outcome could have an important bearing on Modi’s hold over his party and the government and his ability to push through reforms.
What these elections will prove is whether Modi and his party have gained by this extreme move or not.
Scores of opinion polls have come out in the past few weeks that do not make anyone following them any the wiser. The credibility of these pollsters has suffered after their predictions went awry in the past few elections.
In elections in the state of Bihar, a respected anchor of NDTV channel, Prannoy Roy, called the poll in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) when minuscule number of votes had been counted. The party was routed in them. Some of these pollsters/anchors were accused of being mixed up with the ruling party and cooking up statistics that were used for feeding social media campaigns to convert the fence sitters. In the 2014 parliament elections, there was evidence of social media influencing voting behaviour of fence-sitters. Number crunching of Facebook and Twitter posts data have yielded highly credible outcomes rather than the ones that are suggested by traditional opinion polls.
Ever since Modi announced the banning of 500 (R99) and 1 000 rupee notes, the government has been on overdrive to tell the harassed citizenry why such a drastic decision was necessary. Its narrative has strenuously travelled from fighting black money to prevent the spread of counterfeit currency in the country.
In recent weeks, the government spokesmen have talked of remonetising banks and pricking the real estate bubble to help the homeless middle class get a roof over their heads. These torturous explanations have endeavoured to make light of the suffering people had to go through to withdraw their own cash from banks, or due to loss of jobs in cash based enterprises. Large scale unemployment has been reported from small and medium companies, farm sector, etc. A few million who were employed in big cities and towns were compelled to return jobless to their villages once their firms shuttered down.
Media has been savaged. National dailies like Hindustan Times and The Telegraph have downsized massively, rendering hundreds of journalists unemployed.
Opposition parties have called the rupee note ban a monumental tragedy that has destroyed lives – for no rhyme or reason. After all, every explanation that was proffered by the government was found to be weak on facts. There were expectations from the government that in the annual budget it would provide some succour to those who suffered during this phase, but nothing much was offered. From this standpoint, the importance of these assembly elections has increased manifold. Many view it as a referendum on Modi and his policies.
In the northern state of Punjab, where the BJP is part of the ruling coalition led by a regional party, Akali Dal, there is plenty of evidence that their fortunes may have been deeply impacted by note ban. Voters were vociferous in their opposition to the ruling coalition and blamed the central government for deepening their misery by banning big notes. All indications suggest a defeat of this coalition and the victory of the new party, Aam Admi Party, or People’s Party.
It is in Uttar Pradesh that the stakes are highest. BJP swept most of the parliamentary seats from this state in 2014, and wants to control its state legislature, which has been under the control of a regional party, Samajvadi Party (SP), or Socialist Party. The state has a young chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, who ousted his father and uncle in a public spat that kept people enthralled for weeks. Yadav’s brawl endeared him to the masses who believed that much of the infamy that visited his government was due to his father’s and uncle’s conduct. The state decided on an alliance with the Congress Party, led by Rahul Gandhi, who has been struggling to re-establish the grand old party since he took over as its vice-president.
Gandhi earlier wanted Congress to go to the polls on its own, but later realised that it was too weak on the ground to attain such an unrealistic target. The SP has been big-hearted in accommodating the Congress and it hopes this alliance would become the first choice of the Muslims who are feeling under siege ever since Modi’s came to power in 2014.
A Muslim was lynched for consuming beef and many of them publicly violated for engaging in cattle trade. Even the lower castes, or dalits, that are part of this business were not spared. All these castes and communities feeling the heat of majority aggression want these forces to be tamed. This is the reason they want the BJP to lose.
Contrarily, BJP enjoys a strong appeal among upper-caste Hindus who feel the secular government’s appeasement of the minorities and the lower castes has hurt the society by weakening its resolve to fight Pakistan – an enemy country.
Predictably, the BJP is using the “surgical strike”it conducted against Pakistan to tell its supporters that the country has become stronger after Modi became prime minister, and more such courageous acts will follow once they win the state elections.
If Punjab voting is anything to go by, this narrative fails when people’s fortunes nosedive. Will UP confirm this trend? – Foreign Service