It’s good for the Bharatiya Janata Party that it has suffered major setbacks in the recent round of Assembly elections. The spate of victories it had registered in the last five years had made it complacent, even arrogant at some level. Electoral wins had been taken for granted, and the talk of ‘Congress-free’ India had begun to be taken far more literally by the BJP than it should have. After all, one is more propelled to success when there is a rival snapping at one’s heels. When there is no robust opposition, the ruler tends to slacken.
This is what happened over the last few years. The Congress, after its massive loss in the 2014 election, seemed to have lost the will to fight. Election after election thereafter, it turned in pathetic performances, losing the battle for States. Indeed, barring in Punjab, the party fared miserably in all other polls. The more the Modi juggernaut became unstoppable the greater became the BJP’s cockiness. The side effect was that party leaders refused to acknowledge the gravity of issues that threatened to derail the winning trend. Thus neglected, these issues gained momentum once the Congress latched on to them. There is no doubt that the Congress hyped the grievances, but there is also no doubting that those grievances existed and were not being adequately addressed by BJP leaders on the ground.
As the results of the Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan demonstrate, the BJP lost the confidence of nearly every section of society — from women to youth to farmers to businessmen to even the first-time voters. Not just that, the party for various reasons suffered losses across castes and communities. Something had seriously gone wrong at the grassroots level, and the party had either downplayed it or had not grasped the situation well enough in the run-up to the polls.
Now that the BJP has come crashing to the ground, it will perhaps be in a better frame of mind to revisit its earlier strategies and tactics. All is, after all, not lost for the party. Except for Chhattisgarh, the party did not perform that badly. In Madhya Pradesh, its vote-share was actually marginally more than that of the Congress; in Rajasthan it was only slightly lower than that of the eventual winner — the Congress. This, then, can be its launchpad in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.
Indian politics offers many instances of parties that bounced back after being comprehensively beaten. After the Congress suffered reverses in 1967 in many parts of the country, Indira Gandhi lost no time in course-correcting. Among other things, she strengthened her hold over the party and placed a premium on loyalty. Over the years she launched a slew of populist programmes to win over the voters. Although the impact of these schemes on the life of people remained questionable, she did manage to project for herself and for her party an image of being pro-poor, and derived electoral benefits out of it.
In the post-Emergency general election in 1977, she and her party were routed. But she sensed an opportunity in defeat and stepped up her mass contact programmes. This helped her exploit the many blunders of and the inherent fault lines in the Janata Party. Within three years of being unceremoniously ousted, the Congress was back in the saddle.
More recently, the BJP too went through similar trials. Soon after the 2014 triumph, the party was trounced in the Delhi Assembly election. Months later, it faced another humiliating defeat in the Bihar poll. Its opponents had then prophesied the beginning of the end of its hegemony. But the party was quick to learn lessons, and it stormed back into the reckoning by sweeping the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election and later ousting the well-entrenched Left in Tripura. Besides, with its allies, it mopped up various States of the North-East and emerged the single largest party in Karnataka.
What does the BJP need to do at this stage to ensure a return in 2019? To put it simplistically, it must project its twin strengths: Development agenda and core beliefs. The Modi Government has initiated a large number of projects that seek to change the face of India — from infrastructure to rural welfare to medical care to economic reforms to social empowerment. The party must make them the main talking points, because it is here that the Congress’s Achilles’ heel lies. In the core beliefs, we have the Ram temple issue in Ayodhya. Whether construction of the temple during the Modi tenure will benefit the BJP electorally, can be debated. What is certain is that it will at least lend credibility to the party since it has repeatedly promised in its election manifestos such a construction.
Prime Minister Modi continues to enjoy a high level of credibility and popularity across the country, while party president Amit Shah is considered a master at electoral strategising. These are value-additions. The real work has to be done by foot soldiers. But the latter’s task becomes difficult when perceptions about rising unemployment, farmer distress and caste discrimination, don’t get effectively challenged. The BJP has the organisation, the leadership, and the support of the RSS cadre, to use the present setback as a pad to launch a fresh round of victory. But time is an issue. It’ll be election season four months from now.
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