As for the country it would not be audacious to say that India has moved forward as much as backward since the saffron party was voted in office astoundingly in 2014 general elections. Not to forget it was a vote against corruption, inflation, policy paralysis and social insecurity. Voting in every elections is affected more on the basis of contemporary issues as public memory is short. Health of economy, society, nation at large, security, employment etc decide who the voter will vote for. If India has acquired a reinvented reinvigorated status at the international forum we have moved two steps back on the social security matrix. At the end of the fourth year of BJP lead NDA, bank scams have grown larger by the day, agrarian crisis has taken threatening proportions, growth figures don’t seem to be optimistic, jobs are hard to find and the moral police ensures people live, eat, wear and pray as per their dictates.
Invincibility Factor
The saffron party shed the invincibility factor when it lost elections of Gorakhpur, Phulpur in UP, Araria in Bihar and by elections in Rajasthan and MP. With elections coming up in Karnataka, Rajasthan, MP and Chattisgarh the Amit Shah bandwagon will be up for some tests. Although with a difficult fight in Gujarat in 2018, Himachal, Tripura and Meghalaya were great gains. So the BJP now boosts of unprecedented presence in 23 states, more than what Indira Gandhi did.
On the other hand the opposition has just accelerated to the third gear with the energized Congress behind Rahul. The 84th Plenary session of the Congress failed to chalk out an effective strategy to counter the BJP which was the need of the hour. Instead it choose to take the attack mode. Congress President Rahul Gandhi would have done good by spelling out Congress’s road ahead to a corruption free India, how he will get jobs and uplift growth rate. Despite Rahul Gandhi trying to give a new face to the party by bringing the youth in its forefront, major latent flaws are more than apparent for the phoenix to rise. Also that the party is not drawing upon its capabilities and strengths for providing a better alternative in term of deliverance and bettering peoples’ lives in the runup to 2019 elections.
There’s a serious reason to think why BJP is here to stay unless something really goes wrong. The initially media hating Modi and Amit Shah are often seen on television channels exuding confidence of a much larger numerical win to the lower house of Parliament. Media has been tamed and government machinery is instructed to only sings peons of the dispensation’s achievements.
Rewind to 2004 when BJP was in power at the centre with their ‘India Shining’ campaign, the question in the masses that stayed was ‘What did the common man get’. So regardless of what BJP slogan in 2019 will be, Modi’s stand will be that a lot of work has been left, of continuing journey, delivering by 2022 what has been promised in 2014, 2019. Modi will yet have to answer a lot of questions not just from the media but the voter too. From soaring unemployment and job losses, stifling of mnegra forcing rural labour to migrate to cities, not raising the minimum support prices for farmers, the voter at the end of the day will ask what did I get. Conscious of this fact the govt and PM Modi keep actively publicizing projects like LPG scheme and bank accounts is to show that people are getting something tangible in their hand. Abstract notions (like black money being fought or India becoming cleaner) do not get votes.
Reasons for BJP success in 2014 had 4-5 strands to it. First was the prime minister’s image consciously reinvented in the past decade from a strong a hindu leader in 2002, to a ‘development man’ from 2007-14 promising jobs and development. A third image of the PM seen emerging since last 2 years is of ‘garibon ka neta’. His speeches now emphasizes on rural india, poor Indians, agriculture, poor farmers. Thats a conscious imagery development because in 2014 they lost Delhi and Bihar because of their image as a party of the well to do, the upper middle class, of corporates. Through demonetization and sharper welfare delivery Modi was able to carve out a multi class appeal and alliance.
Second strand to their success was Amit Shah’s organizational work. BJP today is the most formidable election apparatus that any political party has had in india at any point of time. Congress is a mass based party has never relied on organizational aspects what Rahul Gandhi is now looking at. India has had regional variance like Left in West Bengal, DMK in Tamil Nadu with strong organisations. BJP today is a party at the national level having many components like quantitative expansion of the membership base (claims to be the largest political party larger than the Chinese communist party), qualitative change in the relationship between the party high command and the party grassroots, emphasis on booth level management and activating booth level workers, frequent mass contact, propaganda blitzkrieg, resource mobilization in an unprecedented scale. Then the RSS provides the organizational support with a high degree of convergence between the sangh, a source of their world view and their personnel with its network of pracharaks and a lot of sympathisers to build its opinion for the BJP and mobilize voters on the final polling day.
Third component, that the BJP which used to be an upper caste party today, is a somewhat more inclusive party, has made a conscious effort to attract the subaltern into the hindu fold and carve out this multi caste coalition by including sub castes and backward castes.
Finally there is a strong element of communal polarization. BJP is a party that stokes hatred on the ground, uses lies, deception, propaganda to make the hindu voter angry, bitter, resentful of the muslims and all other parties and portray them as sympathetic to only muslim interests which helps them construct a majority vote. The reason they succeed is because secularism is dead on the ground particularly in the hindi heartland ie north, west and central India.
Will this last.
The invincibility factor is rising by the day as the realization of slowdown in growth has sunk in the masses. Whether it will have electoral consequence will have to be seen but it has made them vulnerable. Modi’s multiclass alliance rests on growth, on jobs and welfare and as the government has not able to deliver on any of these 3 they are going to face challenges.
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says India’s growth story could be derailed by lack of jobs. The economist says India has made rapid progress but economic inequality in the country remains elusive. He has compared India’s corruption to neighboring China. ‘You cannot become Denmark with Chinese levels of corruption’ he says.
There has been a drop in the narrative from the government in the past few months. Nirav Modi and related Bank scams have dented the government’s image beyond repair as much as the GDP data, demonetization and its adverse economic effects manifested over unhappiness over GST. Although it is too early to suggest that the moment of dominance is over, the BJP still remains India’s hegemonic party, waiting for a sweep in other 4 election bound states at the year end. The economic narrative will hurt the party.
Congress which is the main opposition has not been able to make an impact in its criticism of the government. Moreover the Indian media has largely become the mouth piece of the govt. Also partly unlike congress, BJP knows how to use words and write an oped that makes an impact. They know how to use media, give interviews which Rahul Gandhi is yet to master. But its also seen that when BJP meets a strong challenger like the earlier Nitish Kumar in Bihar and Arvind Kejriwal in 2015 in Delhi, it does not appear invincible. As Nitish has committed political suicide and AK in Delhi is struggling hard to save his flock, RG and Congress don’t look so bad with their consolidation of all opposition parties to face the BJP giant in 2019. Gujarat elections has turned RG into a politician, although the vacuum of strong qualitative opposition is more than palpable.
Projecting the inevitability of victory is half the battle won in Indian elections. Indian voter does not want to be seen as voting for the losing side, which is seen as a wasted vote and BJP has successfully projected that. For BJP, winning elections is like an automatic process, depends on managing people, on manipulation, on keeping the opposition weak, more about innovative social engineering and party organization.
Agrarian factor
The biggest impact of the economy has perhaps been on the agriculture policy including not raising the MSP for the farmers leading to farmers distress. Rural distress is a greater challenge to this government than demonetization or GST. The rural voter is also unhappy with the government’s economic policies. In 2004-05 when for issues like farmers suicide, rural distress, lot of farm loan wavers happened and mnrega came to alleviate it. The recent farmers agitation spoke all about the deep angst in them. The government now is into dole mode with the eye on 2019 elections.
What will BJP go to 2019 with?
PM Modi is a deft hand at politics. Man Friday Amit Shah has proved his mettle in UP, Tripura, Himachal, Nagaland, Meghalaya. Political pandits identify four issues. One nationalism, strong India, for which they will use surgical strike example, India’s strong image internationally. Second hindu consolidation that encompasses issue of cow protection which has descended into outright crime, then Ayodhya temple issue depending on the SC verdict, all of it in the heartland, third will be a clean government where people are willing to wait for Modi to deliver. The fourth is welfare, where the tangible things delivered will be bank accts, LPG’s, toilets as part of Swatch Bharat. Power is what they will talk about next. Earlier they had promised that they will electrify 18000 villages now we see that Modi say that all households will be electrified by 2020.
Integrity platform was a major point with Modi with which he always thrashed UPA 2. In 2011 Kejriwal did him great service by launching a movement making them aware of cleanliness in politics. With a cynical Congress, BJP and Modi had the machine to take advantage of it. Even now there is a lot of faith in the integrity and the intent of the PM which he will play with and package all that he has done from demonetization to GST to efforts to formalize the economy as a part of this anti corruption movement.
Shivam Vij of Washington Post says ‘Inflation and inflation is the only thing that matters in elections. An interesting survey says that inflation is generally seen going up in the last 2 yrs of every govt. Modi’s economic policy has been to control inflation, the reason why GST was implemented in a hurry in the middle of the financial year was to give it time because GST is known to drive away inflation a bit and historic changes were made for controlling inflation. Demonetization brought down inflation because there was no economic activity to raise inflation.’ Although its intuitive to speak of GST and demonetization in the same breath, but rightly put, ‘Demo was bad economics, good politics but GST is good politics bad economics.’
In many states its seen that BJP polarizes not only the muslim votes and the dominant upper caste but in Haryana they impossibly won by polarizing everyone against jats. Contrary to popular expectation Haryana voted a non jat CM, Khattar. Perhaps its not a coincidence that the President of India is a koli. In Gujarat they succeeded despite Patels. The whole caste thing boiled down to be a jobs issue the other way round. Political analyst Prashant Jha says, ‘Jobs really won’t be a major issue unless Modi does something that provokes people. Jobs do affect voter behavior and lack of creation of private jobs has been a failure of the government which got reflected in the widespread violence for the reservation policy across India, from Haryana to Karnataka. In Gujarat the whole Patel issue was basically a jobs issue, articulating itself as a reservation issue.’
The problem that this government is facing is that there have been job losses. Its not a failure of generating jobs but the failure of a policy that has triggered job losses across industries which has affected not just the upper middle class and the middle class professionals in the job market but the labor too. But it is more likely that they will try to take away the narrative from jobs and talk more about social engineering and some other issues. Its only if the opposition rakes it up properly in 2019. But nothing can trump how much money does one get at the end of the day in his pocket. If suddenly we have an inflation in 2019, nothing can save BJP.
Hindu consolidation factor
Electorally BJP will sharpen the rhetoric with new narratives that this is a hindu country with a pretence of victimhood, that hindus have not got their fair share and others have only pandered to the minority which is seen through Babri masjid, love jihad, through claiming that electricity was distributed during Eid and not Diwali, by alleging that laptops were distributed on the basis of religion, by suggesting that muslims were thrown out by hindu villagers, by talking of forced migration from western UP or suggesting the image of a muslim as a cow slaughterers, the larger objective being constructing that vote for unifying hindu society through caste lines.
However 2009 elections were very interesting. 6 months before the election 26/11 happened. Advani fought the election on the issue of national security, face of the election was Afzal guru, the muslim that the congress was not hanging because of its muslim leanings and yet the BJP lost very badly. So even though hindutva matters to a lot of hindu voters, with its appeal and charisma, nationalism equally touches the chord.
Congress is not able to exploit the situation election after election even with a lot of anger against BJP. The grand old party has an anti hindu image which they are trying to change but however Rahul Gandhi may visit temples he does not have the body language of Modi as a hindu.
Modi strategy
Unprecedentedly Modi is expanding his base. BJP is out to appeal the larger demographics of poor voter of India. In demonetization Modi has totally copied the ‘Garibi hatao’ of Congress. It’s a proven fact that schemes have never resulted in votes. Bajpai’s golden quadrilateral, Akhilesh’s Agra Expressway did not translate in votes and Modi really understands this. As he said in Gujarat elections in 2014, ‘justice should not only be done but should be seen to be done’. So development in politics should essentially be seems to be done and to show that Modi has planned to make 400 railway stations of India look dazzling new making development visible.
As for Ayodhya Modi is not really doing anything. There’s just symbolism around it. The courts verdict by 2019 and bringing Modi in elections will polarize the electorate (like in UP elections 2012). So it will be naive to underestimate the ability of Modi to come up with something new tomorrow morning by 2019.
Also they have burdened the country with schemes. Every ministry has 3 new schemes or reinvention of old schemes so now they will just be narrowing down to 4-5 big ticket items which will resonate with the electorate like Ujjwala did in UP, which is what Power will do. They will focus on them, on social engineering of OBC’s to win all the 4 big elections by the year end in MP, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Chattisgarh.
What BJP will do nobody knows but political pandits say what they will surely do is put lot of opposition leaders in jail on corruption charges which has seen Lalu Yadav behind bars, 2018 should see some big arrests like Robert Vadra, lots of litigations, cases, for the purpose of scaring them down or making them sit down highlighting the contrast with raids, corruption cases and the arrests that will follow. This for the larger consumption that even though Modi was not able to deliver at least he was not corrupt.
Modi’s plan A was economy which has bombed for reasons of demonetization and GST shocks so plan B is going to be hindutva which we are already seeing in Karnataka and will see in other poll bound states. It was not coincidental that yogi Adityanath was appointed after the failure of demonetization.
