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| Rude awakening: Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have their task cut out for them and there is neither room for complacency nor scope for hubris |
What do the bypoll results mean for the BJP and Narendra
Modi? Ramesh Ramachandran and Virendra Nath Bhatt try to find some answers
It may be too early to conclude that the results of the
recently concluded bypolls in nine states, particularly Uttar Pradesh and
Rajasthan and to a lesser extent Gujarat, are a referendum of sorts on Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s 100-odd-day-old government or, conversely, signal a
Congress recovery after its humiliating loss in the recent General Election.
At best, they could and probably should be seen as an early
warning for the BJP and its affiliates whose impulse has been to pick the
low-hanging fruit in the form of, say, appealing to the baser instincts of man
a la ‘love jihad’ than to making a concerted effort to build on attempts by BJP
patriarchs Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani to make the BJP the natural party
of governance.
Bypolls have now been held in 54 Assembly constituencies
across 14 states (Uttarakhand in July; Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and
Karnataka in August; and Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Assam, West Bengal, Tripura and Sikkim in September) since the
BJP-led NDA government came to power on 26 May. The BJP and its alliance
partners had held 36 of those Assembly seats but they have managed to retain
only 20 of them.
Whither Modi wave?
The BJP rode on Modi’s popularity to an unprecedented win in
the General Election when it won 71 out of 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh, all 25
seats in Rajasthan and all 26 seats in Gujarat. Amit Shah, who has since taken
over as BJP chief, was largely seen as the architect of the party’s strategy in
Uttar Pradesh. Cut to September and the party suffers a setback in varying
degrees in each of those states, which is why the contrast is that much
starker.
In Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat, which together
account for 24 Assembly seats where bypolls were held, the BJP retained only 10
seats (it had 23 seats going in to the bypolls) while its ally, Apna Dal, lost
the Rohaniya seat — which falls in the Varanasi parliamentary constituency held
by Modi — to the Samajwadi Party (SP).
Apna Dal national president Krishna Patel only managed to
garner 61,672 votes, whereas in the Lok Sabha election, Modi had polled 1.19
lakh votes from this Assembly segment alone. (Krishna Patel’s daughter Anupriya
was the sitting MLA from Rohaniya when she was elected as the MP from
Mirzapur.)
In Rajasthan, the Congress wrested the Nasirabad, Weir and
Surajgarh seats from BJP, leaving the latter with only one win in Kota.
Similarly, in Gujarat, the Congress won three seats and the BJP six.
The only consolation for the BJP was that it made its debut
in the West Bengal Assembly by winning the Basirhat Dakshin seat.
Predictably, BJP spokespersons maintain that the bypolls
results are not a reflection on Narendra Modi’s government or governance. They
are quick to point out that bypolls in Assembly constituencies, as opposed to
Lok Sabha seats, are generally fought on local issues and therefore too much
should not be read into the results.
The Congress, on the other hand, claims that the verdict is
a clear indication that voters have rejected the divisive politics practised by
the BJP. Although some Congress office-bearers went overboard in their
assessments of the party’s performance in the Rajasthan and Gujarat bypolls,
the only sobering voice was that of Shakeel Ahmad, a general secretary and a
spokesman of the party, who sought to suggest that although the verdict is more
against the BJP than for a particular party, it would be incorrect to write it
off or to say that the BJP has been rendered inconsequential. What Ahmad leaves
unsaid is that the Congress was in a similar situation 10 years ago when it
performed badly in the bypolls that were held immediately after the UPA came to
power in 2004.
History bears it out, too. The party that wins a Lok Sabha
election tends to perform below par in the Assembly bypolls immediately
afterwards, especially if the Centre and the state(s) concerned are ruled by
different parties or coalitions. That may, therefore, explain the BJP’s
less-than-impressive performance in Rajasthan and Gujarat, where it is in power,
and also its particularly disappointing tally in Uttar Pradesh, which is ruled
by the SP. It is not to say that there are no other factors, or a combination
thereof, that could be at play here: complacency, a lack of motivation, local
issues holding sway over regional or pan-national concerns or even the choice
of candidates are also known to have affected the outcome of a bypoll.
For the BJP in particular, Modi’s absence would have
affected its political fortunes in the recent bypolls, too, which sends out
another equally worrisome message to the party rank and file: that Modi is
still the BJP’s (only?) best bet; that the BJP’s organisation and leadership in
certain states are not as strong as it would like them to be; and that going
forward, the services of Modi and a battery of other leaders would be required
if the party wants to come good in the Assembly elections in Maharashtra,
Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir this year, Bihar in 2015 and Uttar
Pradesh in 2017, among others. (In the bypolls held in Bihar in August, the
alliance between and among Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal and the
Congress won six out of 10 seats.)
BJP campaign backfires in UP
So what went wrong for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh? At the
outset, the BJP’s campaign in the run-up to the bypolls in the state saw the
party employ some of the same rhetoric or tactics that one saw in the Lok Sabha
election. That gambit may have worked for it then but not this time; on the
contrary, it benefited the SP as the minorities voted en bloc for it even as
the Dalits remained indifferent towards the BJP.
For a party that was voted to
power at the Centre on a hugely popular poll plank of development, the BJP
chose to whip up communal passions. For instance, Sakshi Maharaj, the sitting BJP MP from Unnao,
described madrasas as a breeding ground of terrorists while Yogi Adityanath,
the BJP MP from Gorakhpur, was accused of making inflammatory statements. Union
minister Maneka Gandhi, in turn, claimed that money from meat trade was being
used to fund terror activities. The BJP had also staged a month-long drama at
Kaanth town in Moradabad after the district administration removed a
loudspeaker from a temple frequented by the Dalits living in a predominantly
Muslim village during Ramzan in the month of July.
Looking back, the law of diminishing returns appears to have
put paid to the shrill campaign orchestrated by the likes of Yogi Adityanath
and Sakshi Maharaj as it clearly failed to enthuse even the BJP's own supporters.
Drafting Adityanath as a star campaigner proved to be another fatal flaw as the
SP conveniently exploited it to its advantage. Fearing communal polarisation,
the SP and the Congress fielded few Muslim candidates; the Congress fielded two
Muslims and SP one. As it turns out, the SP’s lone Muslim candidate won from
Thakurdwara, defeating the BJP candidate by more than 27,000 votes.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the BJP
singularly failed to capitalise on the strong anti-incumbency against the
Akhilesh Yadav government, whose tenure has been marked by an unprecedented
power crisis; a record number of incidents of communal tension and riots,
including, but not limited to, Muzaffarnagar; and a steep rise in crimes against
women.
Pramod Kumar, a professor at Lucknow University, says that
the BJP probably misattributed its performance in the Lok Sabha elections in
the state to communal polarisation when it was actually the development plank,
strongly marketed by Modi in his inimitable style of communication, which
influenced the voters.
On balance, if a political obituary for Modi and the BJP is
premature, so are the assertions by a section of the political parties ranged
against the NDA, particularly the SP, that the results of the bypolls indicate
a strong voter preference for their respective leaderships or programmes. The
SP wrested seven out of the 10 seats held by BJP (and one seat held by Apna
Dal). It won the Charkhari Assembly seat, in Bundelkhand region, vacated by
Union minister Uma Bharti, with a comfortable margin of more than 50,000 votes;
the Congress came second and the BJP third. Incidentally, the bypolls were
necessitated in the state because the BJP MLAs from all 11 seats have since
been elected to Parliament.
Akhilesh Yadav, who completed 30 months in office on 15
September, says that the voters have reposed their faith in the SP in spite of
the criticism heaped on the party and the government by its political rivals
and media alike.
“Communal forces should draw a clear lesson from the poll
verdict… the voters have rejected them and endorsed the development agenda of
the Samajwadi Party government,” says Yadav.
A senior SP leader, in turn, says, “It is the end of the
so-called Modi magic or wave… For the BJP, the party is over.”
However, AK Verma, who teaches political science at Christ
Church College in Kanpur, counters by saying that the results of the bypolls to
11 seats can neither be interpreted as an indictment of the Modi government nor
an endorsement of the Akhilesh Yadav government.
An analysis of the SP’s performance would also not be
complete without first understanding the consequences of the BSP’s decision to
keep away from the bypolls. In the March 2012 Assembly election, the BSP had
finished second in six out of the 11 Assembly constituencies where the bypolls
were held. This time, the SP managed to get some Dalit votes, particularly in
the Bundelkhand region (Hamirpur and Charkhari seats) and eastern Uttar Pradesh
(Sirathu seat in Kaushambi and Balha in Bahraich).
In Bundelkhand, the victory margins of the SP candidates —
with more than 66,000 votes — gives a clear indication that this would not be
possible without a chunk of the Dalit votes voting for the SP. Also, the
Congress did not have winnable candidates in the bypolls. That meant that the
BJP was in a direct contest with the SP as compared to the four-cornered
contest in the parliamentary election. Therefore, the victory of the SP, whose
record of governance has been uninspiring from the word go, needs to be seen in
its proper context.
Verma explains that the SP’s vote share fell by only 1
percent, from 22 percent in the 2009 parliamentary election to 21 percent in
the 2014 parliamentary election, but its tally of seats plummeted from 21 seats
in 2009 to a mere five seats in 2014.
“The SP was wiped out by a Modi wave as it was Modi versus
the rest,” says Verma. “Also, the people of Uttar Pradesh had overwhelmingly
voted for Modi’s development plank and not as much for the BJP. However, Modi
was missing in the bypolls and the BJP did not enthuse the voters that much.
Moreover, the BSP was not in the race and the Congress’ candidates were too
weak to pose any challenge to anyone. Therefore, it became a straight contest
between the SP and BJP. The voters were left with not many options, so they
voted for SP; it not only won by default but it almost got a walkover in eight
of the 11 seats.”
The road ahead
The message from the results of the bypolls is clear: the
BJP and Modi (not necessarily in that order) were elected to power by the
development- and good governance-starved voter who hopes to have more of the
two over the next five years. Veer away from the straight and narrow and the
Modi-Shah duopoly runs the risk of committing the same mistakes first made by Manmohan
Singh and the Congress and then by Arvind Kejriwal and the Aam Aadmi Party
(AAP).
If the slew of scams in UPA-2 came as a disappointment to a
section of the middle classes that swore by Manmohan’s Teflon image, those who
voted Kejriwal and AAP to power in Delhi in the hope of getting for themselves
an efficient administration felt let down when he quit within 49 days.
Modi and BJP have their task cut out for them and there is
neither room for complacency nor scope for hubris. As one who excels in micromanagement
and pays attention to detail, Modi knows only too well that he cannot take the
voter for granted or insult their intelligence. Belie their hopes and
expectations and the unforgiving voter will strike back.
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