THE WAKE-UP CALL
Disappointing results in the assembly polls raise questions about the BJP’s overdependence on Brand Modi
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is reeling from the shock of the West Bengal assembly poll results, where despite its vaulting ambitions, the party has managed a far more modest 77 legislators to its name in a 294-member house. The BJP had turned the state election into a prestige issue, deploying its poll management specialists from across the country, and using Amit Shah’s ‘shock and awe’ tactics to shake up things. The party, and Shah especially, had trumpeted its predictions of winning more than 200 seats. Now it’s left to review the failure to maintain the 40.7 per cent vote share it had in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll.
In the northeast, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured a second term in Assam, but the victory was dimmed by the happenings next door. The BJP’s expedition into Bengal was crucial to the party’s plan, but it has exposed frailties, particularly the lack of a middle-level leadership to mobilise booth-level workers. The BJP tried to draft party leaders from other state units to fill this gap, but it was a flawed strategy in retrospect. It appears playing the ‘Bengali Pride’ card worked to Mamata’s advantage, after all—her dig at pravasi karyakartas put the BJP on the backfoot. While in Assam, the party had local leaders like Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma, in Bengal many of the candidates fielded were ‘imported’ from the TMC, Congress and left parties. Leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ‘ideological parent’ of the BJP, say it had to pay for the sins of
“commission [in importing leaders] and omission [ignoring their own partymen’s claims]”.
Several RSS leaders say the party might have done much better had their own cadre got a chance to contest polls. Yet, in Puducherry, the very same strategy seems to have worked. Here, turncoats from the Congress won on the BJP ticket, while in Kerala, the combined effort of party and RSS workers failed to retain Nemom, the lone seat they had won last time.
The Bengal verdict will have an impact on the morale of the BJP cadre when it returns to the electoral battlefield in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa in February 2022. With the exception of Punjab, the BJP is in power in all these states. And retaining them will be crucial if the party is to remain the fulcrum of Indian politics. The cadre in these states will be recalibrating just how much polarisation will work, and how much prominence the local leadership should get to complement the Modi-(J.P.) NaddaShah troika. The weaknesses in the state leadership put extra pressure on the BJP to rely on PM Modi’s brand value. The party succeeded with it in Bihar, failed to use it effectively in Delhi and has now tasted defeat despite unleashing it in Bengal. That said, in the past seven years, the BJP has undoubtedly benefited from Modi’s ability to connect with voters, swaying electoral fortunes in several assembly polls, especially in Bihar and Haryana where anti-incumbency was a factor. In Bengal, due to the surge in Covid numbers across the country, Modi was forced to abandon campaigning when the sixth phase of the election was on. But then, how effective was the prime minister when he did campaign? Well, in the first six phases, the TMC won 158 seats and the BJP just 64 when the Modi-Shah campaign was in full swing.
Meanwhile, the RSS maintains that it is against the propagation of a cult of personality, and is unhappy that every election campaign becomes a Modi vs others battle. That the BJP will have to strengthen its pool of state leaders is a given. Some work is already on, as in Uttarakhand, where the party changed the chief minister with just a year to go for election. On the other hand, there is Karnataka where there is no succession plan for B.S. Yediyurappa, who will be 80-plus when the state goes to polls in 2023. Similarly, there is considerable opposition within the party towards Himachal Pradesh chief minister Jairam Thakur, Tripura’s Biplab Deb and Goa’s Pramod Sawant. With the exception of Yediyurappa, all the chief ministers are dependent on ‘Brand Modi’ to lend some shine to their re-election campaigns.
Simultaneously, the opposition is also sharpening its knives. The Opposition-ruled states have already locked horns with the Centre on vaccine distribution, the states’ share of GST, as well as the Modi government’s push for sweeping changes in critical sectors such as electricity, farming, labour and the privatisation of public sector enterprises. This is besides the growing protests among the people for its handling of the Covid situation. These are issues on which Prime Minister Modi is finding it hard to get the support even of RSS affiliates.
“Our critics say we didn’t win West Bengal. Yes, we didn’t. But we did manage to grow our strength in the assembly along with vote share. We also defeated a sitting chief minister (Mamata Banerjee),” says Union cabinet minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who was in charge of East Midnapore district in the Bengal campaign. The minister heralded the fact that their national rival, the Congress, and ideological opponents, the Communists, had been wiped out of West Bengal’s political map. The Congress also lost in Assam, Puducherry, Kerala and could only piggyback on the DMK in Tamil Nadu. “This is also not bad news for us,” he says.
From the 2024 perspective, Pradhan says the BJP and its allies have strengthened their position. The BJP has consciously positioned itself as a pan-India party, shaking off the image of a “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” agenda to dominate the national political narrative as only the Congress has done in the past. Since 2015, the party has pursued its ‘Mission Coromandel’ goal (named after the coast connecting the south with the country’s east) in a bid to expand into new territories. But there’s still a long way to go here. Other than taking Puducherry, it had little to show in Kerala and Tamil Nadu even after the high-decibel campaigns. ■