Riding on the crest of a wave that catapulted the BJP to an
unprecedented win in the May Lok Sabha election, the party swept to power in
Haryana and came tantalisingly close to forming a government on its own in
Maharashtra — two states that had been ruled by the Congress (along with its
allies) for 10 and 15 years, respectively.
Although the BJP’s gamble of going it alone paid off (it won
an absolute majority in Haryana and emerged as the single largest party in
Maharashtra), it was not enough to push it over the finish line in Maharashtra.
By some BJP leaders’ own admission, the tally could have been higher if the
BJP-Shiv Sena Mahayuti (or grand
coalition) had not broken.
The fact that the Modi juggernaut stopped short of a simple
majority of 145 MLAs in the 288-member Legislative Assembly means that the BJP
could be forced to cohabit with its estranged ally, the Shiv Sena. Unless, of
course, as is being advocated by a section of the BJP’s unit in Maharashtra,
the party deems it politically expedient to form a minority government a la
Narasimha Rao in 1991 in the belief (hope?) that neither the Shiv Sena nor the
NCP would precipitate a crisis at the time of the government seeking a
confidence vote.
The option of forming a minority government is being seen
either as a BJP ploy to forestall hard bargaining by Shiv Sena or to avoid the
albatross of coalition compulsions, a phrase that Manmohan Singh in New Delhi
and Prithviraj Chavan in Mumbai conveniently cited to explain away their
inability to call the shots, but which is an anathema to some in the BJP.
However, how stable such a government would be is anybody’s guess as the index
of Opposition unity will determine how long it lasts.
At the time of writing, the BJP camp was sanguine about
forming a government, with or without the Shiv Sena. That Anant Geete of the
Shiv Sena attended a dinner that Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted on 20
October for his council of ministers and that the BJP’s support to the Sena
continued in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) suggested that the
doors were open for talks.
On balance, while the BJP achieved one of its objectives in
Maharashtra, that of maximising its tally of seats, it could well end up with
something it wanted to avoid — a coalition of compulsion. The Congress, on the
other hand, has been relegated to the third position in both states and it is
barely struggling to stay relevant in the national polity, losing more states than
it gains. Therefore, to that extent, the Maharashtra results are sobering for
the BJP just as they are sombre for the Congress.
In the midst of all the hectic political activity in
Maharashtra, Haryana is the lesser-known success story of the BJP where its
turnaround is nothing short of spectacular. In a state where the BJP bagged
only four seats in 2009, two in 2005 and six in 2000 and where it was fighting
on 74 seats for the first time, the party won a record 47 seats. However,
unlike Haryana, which contributes only 10 Lok Sabha seats and five Rajya Sabha
seats, Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha and 19 to the Rajya Sabha.
That should explain the disproportionate focus on Maharashtra as opposed to
Haryana.
As the results show, the BJP won 122 seats in Maharashtra as
compared to 46 in 2009; its vote share rose from 14 percent in 2009 to 28
percent in 2014. After 1990, this is the first time a party has won 100 or more
seats in the Maharashtra Assembly. In the 1990 Assembly polls, the Congress had
secured 141 seats. Not only has the BJP nearly trebled its tally but it has
also appreciably increased its strike rate (ratio or percentage of seats won
against contested) and its vote-share and swing. This, when the BJP had never
contested more than 119 seats (in 2009) in the state.
Not only did BJP president Amit Shah have to build the party
organisation from the ground up in 150-odd constituencies but he also had to
find suitable candidates on most of those seats. The BJP coopted some defectors
from rival parties, mainly from the NCP and the Congress. However, only about
20 out of the 50-odd turncoats managed to win on a BJP ticket. Compounding
matters for the BJP, only one of its allies, the Rashtriya Samaj Paksha, won a
lone seat.
Man of the match
A triumphant Shah says the BJP has created history in
Maharashtra and Haryana by not only positioning itself to form its own
government there but by ensuring that the Congress would not even get the post
of the Leader of Opposition in those Assemblies. “We have moved two more steps
towards a Congress-Mukt Bharat (Congress-free India),” he says.
Shah feels that the results establish beyond any doubt that
the programmes, policies and performance of the Modi government have found
universal acceptance among the voters of the two states. He blames
“circumstances” for the BJP going it alone in Haryana and Maharashtra.
Apparently, one of those circumstances was the BJP’s urge to
capitalise on its performance in the Lok Sabha election by contesting more
seats on its own in both the states, which was resisted by the Haryana Janhit
Congress (HJC) in Haryana and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. Doing so would not
only have given BJP a better chance at increasing its tally, it would also have
helped to strengthen its organisation in those states. An added incentive was
to increase its footprint nationally.
While Shah was quick to rebuff the HJC’s suggestion of a
50:50 division of the seats (90 in all), the seat-sharing talks in Maharashtra
went down to the wire although a week before the nominations closed on 27
September, it was already being talked about that the two parties can be
expected to go their separate ways.
The Shraadh period
(8-23 September), which is considered inauspicious for starting anything new,
added to the anxieties as four days were lost to it. (The nominations opened on
20 September.) Yet, ironically, the BJP-Shiv Sena split was announced on a day
when, as per the Hindu calendar, the Navratris began.
Shah, for one, was confident of a creditable performance by
the BJP but chose to play along as he did not want to be seen as a
deal-breaker; instead, he waited for the Shiv Sena to make a false move before
making the split official. He insists that the decision to go it alone was the
Shiv Sena’s, not the BJP’s.
“Neither did we try to break our relations with the Shiv
Sena nor did we break it,” he told a news conference at the party headquarters
in New Delhi. At the same time, Shah, whom Modi called the man of the match for
the BJP’s win in the Lok Sabha election, maintains that the alliance could not
have been saved at the expense of, or by sacrificing, the BJP karyakarta (worker.)
Ekla Cholo strategy
As a TEHELKA report (Will Modi’s Big Gamble Pay Off? 18
October) pointed out, a creditable performance by the BJP in Maharashtra and
Haryana would come as a shot in the arm for the Modi-Shah duo and re-establish
their pre-eminence in the party and beyond.
In Modi and Shah, the BJP has a formidable duo that can lead
the party into unchartered territories based on a combination of the former’s
administrative skills and the latter’s organisational acumen. It is Shah who
devised the party’s strategy of consolidating the non-Maratha and the non-Jat
votes in Maharashtra and Haryana, respectively, while projecting Modi’s
development agenda to beat the caste and regional arithmetic.
Shah is the perfect foil to a Modi who thrives on challenges
and the results have disproved some sceptics who had begun to wonder whether
the results of the bypolls 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 came to
power on 26 May were indicative of the waning of the Modi magic. (The BJP and
its NDA allies had held 36 of those 54 seats but they managed to retain only 20
of them.)
Predictably, Shah could hardly conceal a chuckle when he
told the news conference, “Some people rejected the Modi wave after the bypoll
results but I want to tell them that the Modi wave is intact and the tsunami is
still capable of vanquishing all opponents.” (However, an editorial in the Shiv
Sena’s mouthpiece Saamana dismissed the wave as “nothing more than froth that
receded before it reached the shores”.)
Shah asserts that “people have accepted Prime Minister
Narendra Modi as the undisputed leader”. Modi had addressed 27 rallies in
Maharashtra and 11 in Haryana while Shah had addressed 17 rallies in
Maharashtra and 22 in Haryana. (In comparison, Congress president Sonia Gandhi
addressed only four rallies in Maharashtra and three in Haryana while her son
and vice-president of the party Rahul Gandhi addressed six rallies in
Maharashtra and four in Haryana.)
It was anticipated that a BJP win in Maharashtra and Haryana
would impart a greater momentum to the government’s promise of a fast-track
development agenda in general and economic reforms and foreign and security
policies, in particular. It could also nudge Modi to effect a reshuffle of his
council of ministers.
Therefore, it did not come as a surprise when Finance
Minister Arun Jaitley acknowledged on 20 October that the BJP forming
governments in Haryana and Maharashtra will be a big plus for the Centre’s
reforms push. Jaitley addressed a press conference in which he announced coal
sector reforms; on the same day, Union Minister of State for Commerce and
Industry Nirmala Sitharaman said in Bengaluru that the government is closer to
finding a solution to approve a legislative scheme that enables the
introduction of Goods and Services Tax (GST). On 18 October, the government
announced oil sector reforms, including deregulating diesel prices.
While the results of the Assembly elections may not have an
immediate bearing on the composition of the Rajya Sabha (where the BJP has 43
members and the Congress 68), but going forward, it could impact the elections
to fill up the vacancies that will arise in the upper House of Parliament. The
Rajya Sabha would become even more important when the government seeks to push
through legislations.
Marathi Manoos and
Asmita
Uddhav Thackeray, who led the Shiv Sena into the first
electoral battle after the demise of his father Bal Thackeray in November 2012,
acquitted himself better than his cousin Raj Thackeray, chief of the
Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. While Shiv Sena increased its tally from 44 seats
in 2009 to 63 this year (the highest number of seats it won was 73 in 1995),
the MNS could win only one seat, down from the 13 it won in 2009.
The MNS’ rout has taken the sheen off its slogan of Marathi
asmita (pride) just as the BJP’s development agenda has posed a challenge to
the Shiv Sena’s and the MNS’ Marathi ‘manoos’ ideology. In contrast, the
Hyderabad-based Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) won two seats in the
Marathwada region.
Where Uddhav erred was in not reconciling to the new ground
realities and insisting on a 151-119 seatsharing arrangement with the BJP,
which the latter could accept only at its own peril. Unlike the relationship
that existed between the late Thackeray, the late Pramod Mahajan and the late
Gopinath Munde, the new men at the helm of the BJP today, Modi and Shah, do not
have any affinity towards Uddhav.
Shah was clear from the word go that the BJP, having tasted
blood in the Lok Sabha election, would go for broke in Maharashtra. That meant
contesting on more seats than the BJP ever has but the Shiv Sena’s reluctance
to accommodate what it saw as a junior partner’s excessive demands coupled with
Uddhav’s claim to the post of chief minister should the Mahayuti win,
unravelled the negotiations.
As the Maharashtra election results poured in, Shah had the
last laugh. The BJP had not only won more seats than the Shiv Sena was willing
to offer it, the hitherto junior partner in the Mahayuti had become the single
largest party in the Assembly. “The results have proved who was correct,” Shah
was heard telling reporters afterwards. “The BJP will be forming the government
in Maharashtra.”
After an initial burst of bravado, when he asked the BJP to
make the first move (“I am sitting at my home peacefully, if somebody thinks
our support is needed, they can approach us”), a chastised Uddhav called up
Shah and Modi to break the ice. A Saamana editorial sought to strike a
conciliatory tone by indicating its willingness to let bygones be bygones.
However, the BJP seems to be in no hurry to reciprocate
although the RSS and veteran BJP leader LK Advani made it known that they would
like the BJP and Shiv Sena to come together again. A section of the BJP, which
feels that Uddhav has earned his spurs in this election, sees it as an
ideological necessity to align with the Shiv Sena.
Even before Rajnath Singh and JP Nadda were to fly to
Mumbai, the BJP led by Nitin Gadkari had opened informal talks with the Shiv
Sena on the possibility of a rapprochement and what it will entail. For one,
the Shiv Sena favours a united Maharashtra; it is opposed to the carving out of
a separate Vidarbha state. Meatier portfolios in Maharashtra and at the Centre
are another bone of contention. For its part, the BJP will have its way on its
choice for the post of chief minister.
The BJP win in Haryana can be attributed to the BJP strategy
of consolidating the non-Jat vote while at the same time ensuring that the Jat
vote split between the INLD and the Congress. The fact that an overwhelming
majority of the BJP’s MLAs are non-Jats explains the party’s decision to
project Manohar Lal Khattar as its chief minister-designate.
The Haryana results are particularly significant for the
Janata Parivar as the Janata Dal (United), Rashtriya Janata Dal, Samajwadi
Party, Rashtriya Lok Dal and the Janata Dal (Secular) had sought to come
together on a common platform with the INLD to take on the BJP. However, the
BJP did one better than them at social engineering and weaned the BJP and Dalit
votes away from them, as the election results bear out.
Going forward, an assertive BJP not only poses a threat to
regional parties in the states where elections are due in the next year or two
but also runs the risk of cannibalising some of its own allies, existing and
potential. (Elections are soon due in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand. Bihar in
2015, West Bengal in 2016 and Uttar Pradesh and Punjab in 2017 would be a few
of the elections to watch out for.) For its part, the BJP wants to position
itself as the default ruling party in key states.
The results of the Maharashtra and Haryana elections have
come as an advance warning for the Congress and some regional parties. From a
BJP standpoint, they seem to herald a unipolar moment in the Indian political
landscape, which its rivals can ignore at their own peril.
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