BJP opts for easier option, Hindutva
NEW DELHI: It was widely presumed that in a rapidly modernising India with 100 million young voters, sickening old-style politics along caste and religious lines wouldn’t work for the 2004 polls. That assumption has come unstuck.
Analysts say Thursday’s significant voter surge during the polling in 11 states, especially in UP and Bihar, could be primarily the fall-out of “religious polarisation”, although better electoral practices have helped take up voter participation.
In the run-up to the 2014 polls, it
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT DEVELOPMENT POLITICS ALONE, AS BEING EPITOMISED BY MODI, WOULDN’T BE ENOUGH FOR THE PARTY TO WIN
increasingly began to appear that the polls would be fought on issues of a weakening economy, stubbornly high prices and a series of high-profile graft scandals. Not religion. What then has changed?
It is possible that politics of development alone, as being epitomised by BJP mascot Narendra Modi, wouldn’t be enough to bring the party to power in 2014. Therefore, easier option is to play one community off against other.
In the 1980s, the BJP had created a huge votebank around the Ayodhya dispute, which saw the party expand rapidly, from just eight Lok Sabha seats and 7.58% vote share in 1989 to 51 seats and 32.82% of the votes in 1991.
However, with two successive defeats – 2004 and 2009 – it began to appear that Hindutva was more a short-term asset and a long-term liability.
Now, as the fight goes down to the wire, most parties, including the BJP, have made polarising appeals. While the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi has focused on “development” at a broader level, in UP, his aide Amit Shah called Jats to vote for “revenge”. Similarly Samajwadi Party’s Azam Khan gave on Muslim soldiers the credit for winning the 1999 Kargil war. Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s meeting with a leading cleric has also been criticised.
“Secular parties too often tend to play a double game. First you create a sense of insecurity for minority and then seek to address them,” said Mohd Sanjeer Alam of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, India’s best-known political think-tank.