Going solo, the BJP scores again

The Bharatiya Janata Party has emerged as the single largest party in the Maharashtra and Haryana assemblies, reconfirming its status as the principal pole or central point of reference in Indian politics. Behind its latest success lie medium- and long-term factors which are likely to influence politics for some time to come.

India is likely to see an even more assertive, masculine BJP under an absolutist leadership which isn’t bound by internal constraints, leave alone external ones, in pursuing its old trade-mark Hindutva agendas, including a Ram temple at Ayodhya (of which the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has reminded it), as well as the new ‘love jihad’ campaign, which recently yielded it dividends.

The BJP won an outright majority in Haryana, with a 33 percent vote-share, despite a majority of the Jats voting against it, and its ally Akali Dal deserting it. But of even greater consequence is the BJP’s 122/288 seat victory in Maharashtra, India’s most-industrialised and second most-populous state. This is the first time that a non-Congress party has crossed the 100-seat mark there.

True, the BJP’s vote-share in Maharashtra is just under 28 percent. But the BJP risked going solo despite the assured victory of its 25-year-old alliance with the Sena, which led in 244 of 288 assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections. The risk paid off, changing the state-level relationship of forces, and more crucially, establishing the BJP’s pre-eminence nationally.

Three factors help explain the BJP’s performance, each more important than the so-called ‘Modi magic’. These are: state-level anti-incumbency, especially in Maharashtra; the BJP’s success in creating the elements of a new social coalition across different caste-community layers; and the sheer force of its surcharged campaign which overwhelmed its opponents’ lifeless, timid, often defeatist, canvassing.

According to a post-election survey, the Congress-National Congress Party (NCP) coalition was widely seen as ineffective and corrupt. For every voter who was “fully satisfied” with its performance (13 percent), at least two (28 percent) were “fully dissatisfied”. More than five times more respondents thought the government “very corrupt” than those who thought it “not all that corrupt”. In Haryana, 75 percent of those aware of the land controversy involving Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra thought the government was suppressing the facts.

The BJP succeeded in both states in winning support from what might be called a ‘coalition of the extremes’: the upper castes, on the one hand, and the Other Backward Classes, and to an extent, Dalits and Adivasis, on the other.

In Maharashtra, 52 percent of the upper castes voted for the BJP, only 16 percent for the Congress. The BJP also won the highest proportion (38 percent) of the OBC vote. It also won one-third of the Adivasi vote, followed by the NCP’s 16 percent. But it got only 13 percent of the Muslim vote, compared to 53 percent for the Congress.

Add to this the higher vote the BJP got from the rich (35 percent) than from other income-groups; and you see a much less inclusive variant of the original winning Congress coalition of the 1950s-1960s, based on the upper castes-Muslims-Dalits-Adivasis. This new social bloc, with strong Hindutva consolidation based on communal violence, won the BJP the Lok Sabha elections in the north.

In Haryana too, upper-caste and educated groups strongly favoured the BJP. Dalits and OBCs backed it under the influence of the Dera Sacha Sauda cult and khap (clan) panchayats. Another factor was Haryana’s intense social conservatism. A recent poll says 80 percent-plus of respondents oppose marriage within the same clan/village; 51 percent support khap panchayats (only 22 percent oppose them), and 70 percent object to women wearing jeans. The BJP plays along with, and gains from, this reactionary conservatism.

The BJP is likely to attempt to turn such coalition-building, combined with social reaction, into a national election strategy, especially if it can attract OBC and Dalit youth with the promise of ‘development’ after the ‘Gujarat model’.

This model isn’t about development, but unadulterated GDP growth – in which too Gujarat has been surpassed by many other states. It doesn’t lead to modernisation, or human capacity enhancement through healthcare, education and other amenities of a civilised life, leave alone equity. It basically means employment for aspirational subaltern groups which have invested all their family savings in low- or mediocre-quality education without much hope of landing a job.

Regrettably, no party has half-way coherent policies to generate jobs or gainful self-employment for these restive subaltern layers. The BJP will let them down. Its policies can at best deliver sweetheart deals, tax-breaks and super-profits to corporations, without creating jobs or even raising wages. This has distressing, indeed dangerous, implications for society.

Not to be underrated is the Modi-Amit Shah leadership’s ability to mobilise a high-powered election campaign, financed by Big Business and run by RSS foot-soldiers. Under its impact, an astounding 40 percent-plus of the voters decided to opt for the BJP close to election day – a record unmatched by any party regardless of political merit.

The Maharashtra-Haryana results will further feed Hindutva hubris, and increase insecurity among the minorities. Worrisome signs have already appeared through the debut of the Hyderabad-based Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen in Maharashtra, where it won two seats and became the runner-up in three others. This kind of reaction to Hindu-communalism ominously spells further social-political marginalisation and ghettoisation of Muslims.

The BJP’s victory run has put the Congress in a state of paralysis. Its response to the latest results has been supine, when not disingenuous. The party must accept that the Sonia-Rahul leadership – which temporarily stemmed its post-1984 long-term decline – has failed; it’s time to move on. But it lacks the courage to do so – and its dynastic leadership the decency to make way for others.

It’s hard to see how the Congress can recover unless it reinvents itself through a bold, imaginative, frankly left-of-centre programme, without ifs and buts, which reconnects it to the plebeian masses. Or else, it will go into the dustbin of history.

A strong presence of the Left parties, which could have helped shift the political centre of gravity in a pro-people direction, will be sorely missed here. Alas, they are themselves in a grave crisis, which they can barely diagnose, leave alone resolve.

What does the BJP’s growing dominance mean for the regional parties? Will they go the way of the Shiv Sena? The Shiv Sena was vulnerable and in long-term decline, which was masked to some extent by its electoral gains from allying with the BJP, but got accelerated by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena split and Bal Thackeray’s death.

However, this is unlikely to be true of the regional parties embedded in two-party systems, like Telugu Desam, Telangana Rashtra Samiti, AIDMK-DMK or Biju Janata Dal. But the Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal(United), Rashtriya Janata Dal, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, and especially the Bahujan Samaj Party, will face a tough challenge from the BJP.

Despite similarities in deviousness, venality and corruption, the BJP isn’t becoming another Congress. But whether a ‘BJP system’ of politics evolves, which rivals the ‘Congress system’ that political scientists once famously described, remains an open question. What’s beyond doubt is that India is in for yet more social turmoil and serious political trouble.

The writer, a former newspaper editor,is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi. Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in