BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Putting the Karnataka and bypoll setbacks behind them, the BJP focuses its energies on the larger battle of 2019
Despite the unbearable June summer, the national BJP headquarters at Delhi’s Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg is bustling with activity. The opposition victory in Karnataka and the BJP’s poor show in the subsequent bypolls in other states have failed to dampen the spirit of party workers. There is little time to be spent on introspection. The instruction from the top brass is clear—the party must prepare for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, keeping in mind the changed political scenario.
The united opposition has found chinks in the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh armour and trumped the saffron party in three constituencies in the state this year. The BJP, too, believes that the index of unity against it is high and productive in UP, the state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. “UP is certainly an area of worry,” says a party leader. “But in other states, opposition unity will create a positive emotional impact for Narendra Modi and may end up uniting people against those who are bent upon uprooting the honest prime minister.” Adds another leader: “We would be in danger if the CPI(M) joins hands with the TMC in West Bengal or the Congress joins hands with the BJD in Odisha or with KCR in Telangana. But that’s unlikely to happen. In UP we are only six per cent short of our target of getting 50 per cent of the vote to tackle the SPBSP challenge. With some course correction, that is not difficult.” The party does not consider Kairana, with 33 per cent Muslim population and 61 per cent voting this time as against 73 per cent in 2014, as a reliable barometer of the BJP’s standing in UP. The party also believes the nationallevel scenario— where the battle will be between Modi and Rahul Gandhi or between Modi and other leaders—will be different. As Amit Shah puts it, “The phenomenon ‘opposition unity index’ is being overplayed by the media. Our schemes for the common man have benefitted 22 crore people who with their families add up to more than 80 crore people. We are now gearing up to directly connect with the beneficiaries of these schemes through our party machinery.”
As per the party’s current calculation, the BJP expects its tally to go up from two to 22 in West Bengal, one to 15 in Odisha and eight to 21 in the northeastern states. It expects gains in Andhra Pradesh but is not really sure about Telangana because of the highly populist but administratively questionable route taken by chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao to win voters wherein he is spending Rs 8,000 per acre a year on each farmer. In UP, the party is optimistic about getting 65 seats.
There are signs of complacency: few in the party seem to acknowledge the challenge in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, which are going to polls this year. The BJP is not contemplating any major change in the leadership of these states though the state chief in Madhya Pradesh has been replaced. In Rajasthan, where the equations between ModiShah and Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje have remained stressed, the planned induction of the new party chief is still hanging fire. There is no consensus on who should be appointed as the new president in place of Raje’s nominee Ashok Parnami who reportedly exited under pressure from Modi and Shah in April.
The BJP expects its tally to go up from two to 22 in West Bengal, one to 15 in Odisha and eight to 21 in the northeastern states
The consensus among the party leadership seems to be that major change at this stage at the state or national level will not make any tangible difference to its electoral performance—rather it could make things worse. Shah has continued with the old team of Rajnath Singh in the national body, adding only a few new faces. Many in the party feel that he should have had his own full-fledged team and that this status quoist approach might be fraught with danger. Sources close to Shah say he has little choice, with the entire pre-2014 national team, including second-rung leaders, being drafted into Modi’s cabinet. But Shah is sanguine about the party’s prospects in both state and national polls. According to his aides, the party is in a reasonably good position to salvage the situation not only in MP and Chhattisgarh but even in Rajasthan. Its prospects in the latter are much better than they were in Gujarat last year, they say. The BJP managed to win in the state despite the Congress joining forces with Hardik Patel and Jignesh Mevani.
CHANGING TRACK
The BJP leadership has started taking stock of the states that are going to polls this year and the ones that matter for the 2019 general election. To this end, it has even drawn up a nationwide plan to enlist the support of the beneficiaries of its major pro-poor schemes. To give shape to this plan, Modi and Shah recently spent an entire day in Delhi with 1,000 office-bearers from the party’s seven morchas or frontal organisations for youth, women, Dalits, tribals, farmers, OBCs and minorities that had come together for the first time. Shah told workers: “Out of our 11 crore workers, you 1,000 are the core of the party and its future. You are the ones who will lead the party in the years to come. Now is the time to prove your mettle by bringing people close to the party on the strength of its work.” He invoked recent attacks on BJP workers by rivals in West Bengal and Kerala and asked the workers to give a befitting answer through the ballot. According to national BJP Mahila Morcha chief Vijaya Rahatkar, the speeches delivered by Modi and Shah on the occasion were very inspiring.
Apart from Shah and Modi, the party’s national general secretaries too addressed two sessions with each morcha, dwelling on ground level issues. The workers were given information pertaining to the major programmes of the Modi government, be it the Jan Dhan Yojana, the Mudra or the Ujjwala LPG cooking gas kit scheme, health insurance or housing for all. Estimating the number of beneficiaries of these schemes to be 220 million, they were asked to reach out to all of them in a planned manner.
The campaign by the workers will start from July and continue for six months. As part of the plan, a worker will go to a beneficiary with flowers, a dupatta with the party symbol on it and a photograph of Narendra Modi and ask him how the schemes have worked for him and his family and if he has any further requirement.
Shah will personally monitor the implementation of this massive outreach programme from the high-tech control
room at the party’s national headquarters in New Delhi.
This is in keeping with their image of being great monitors of their grand schemes. Shah has acquired the digital data pertaining to the 220 million beneficiaries and fed it in his party data bank. A BJP worker who visits a beneficiary will ask him or her to give a missed call on the dedicated toll-free party number connected to the BJP’s control room. This will lead to two things—the names of beneficiaries will get updated in the party’s data system and it will ensure that there’s no fudging by the worker at the ground level. Sourav Sikdar, secretary of the BJP’s national Yuva Morcha, says, “It is part of a well thought-out exercise and a foolproof plan.”
The BJP strategy will also rely heavily on the Ayushman Bharat scheme the Modi government announced in this year’s budget. The ambitious health protection mission, which is expected to cover 100 million families or 500 million people, is expected to be completed by November this year. This, it hopes, will translate into significant political gains for the BJP in 2019.
UTTAR PRADESH: DOWN BUT NOT OUT
Despite the party’s confidence, it is treading cautiously in UP where it faced successive defeats in bypolls. Some blame it on Yogi Adityanath’s lack of chemistry with party leaders while a section of workers are angry about his overreliance—some describe it as complete surrender to—on bureaucracy. Besides, all the three key leaders of UP—deputy chief minister Keshav Maurya, state organisation secretary Sunil Bansal and state BJP chief Mahendranath Pandey—don’t get along with Yogi for various reasons.
Yogi’s administrative abilities have also come into question in the face of his inability to address the glut in the sugarcane market. The less-than-satisfactory results of the Centre’s crop insurance scheme in UP as well as other states is being seen as one of the reasons for a section of the rural constituency being estranged from the party. What does work for Yogi and the BJP is his clean image and his claim of having ended goonda raj in the state.
Says a party leader, “Some effort on Yogi’s part to mend fences with fellow leaders and improve his administrative acumen will bring the situation around for us in UP.” Anil Jain, BJP national general secretary, observes: “We need to add six per cent votes during the Lok Sabha polls to meet the combined challenge of Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav which won’t be difficult with Modiji as the face of the party in the Lok Sabha polls.”
WHERE THE BJP MIGHT BE LOSING GROUND
First, the party is in danger of losing a part of its traditional following among the middle class and small traders due to economic policies which have hurt them. The rise in oil prices is a sore point for this constituency as also a sense of betrayal that after coming to power on the strength of the middle class vote, the BJP has forgotten them and is concentrating only on pro-poor schemes. An income tax exemption of up to Rs 5 lakh per year may have gone a long way in addressing the grievances of a section of the middle class. The farmers’ schemes, so ambitiously framed by the government, have only partially succeeded, particularly because of the failure to address the problem of excess production of onion and sugarcane which have gone waste and resulted in huge losses for farmers.
The other major problem is the non-consultative Modi-Shah style of functioning in the name of discipline which keeps a section of the BJP leadership sullen. However, those who disagree with the duo also know that Modi and Shah are the prime movers in the party and Modi’s public appeal as someone who fights corruption with missionary zeal will be the party’s biggest draw in 2019. However, prior to that, the party will have to pass an acid test in the three assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.