Modi fatigue in UP

Hasan Suroor

SHORTLY after the dates for the ongoing Assembly elections were announced, a relatively sober TV channel conducted an opinion poll predicting a majority for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh. As representatives of other parties on the panel accused the pollsters of a pro-BJP bias, the BJP spokesman protested that, on the contrary, they had underestimated his party’s prospects. A simple majority? What nonsense! Nothing short of a landslide would do. Remember “our” performance in UP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections?

Since then the battle has moved out from the cosy studio chats into the real world. And the reality, it seems, is not quite in sync with that gentleman’s cocky claims. Although it’s still early days and only the very brave or the very foolish will dare to make any prediction, one thing is clear: the BJP is in for a much tougher ride than it might have reckoned with. There’s no Modi/BJP “hawa” even in its strongholds. Party president Amit Shah has boasted that this time the BJP wave is “bigger than in 2014”. If so, it’s such a closely guarded secret that nobody apart from him seems to have noticed it. If anything, the Modi “magic” appears to have given way to a Modi fatigue, including in Varanasi — Narendra Modi’s own Lok Sabha seat. The law of diminishing returns has clearly kicked in. Apparently a joke going round the city is that “Mahadev BJP se naraaz ho gaye hain” (Lord Shiva has become angry with the BJP). Has UP had enough of its self-styled “adopted son”?

During my own travels through western UP, I was surprised by the level of anti-BJP sentiment in many places. I met people who described themselves as life-long BJP supporters but said this time they were not going to vote for it. The party is battling a backlash on several fronts — from the demonetisation chaos and the government’s attempt to lie its way through it, to dissatisfaction with the performance of local sitting BJP MLAs, and candidate selection which is said to have provoked a mini revolt. It has also been seriously hit by a flight of Jat voters to Ajit Singh’s RLD.

And the nervousness  in the party, despite its brave public rhetoric, is showing in the way it has fallen back on its default strategy of dog-whistle politics to polarise Hindu-Muslim relations and consolidate the Hindu vote. So, midway it has drafted hate-spewing Yogi Avaidyanath into the campaign; raised the pitch on the Uniform Civil Code controversy; revived its notorious “love jihad” campaign under another label; and threatened to shut down slaughter houses. Central minister KirenRijiju, meanwhile, suddenly decides to raise the old bogey of Muslim population growth. And then there is the PM himself busy flogging his polarising agenda — touching a new low with his “kabristan” and “shamshaan ghat” remark. 

After the hype over demonetisation and claims of solid public support one would have thought it would top the BJP’s campaign plank. Yet, it has been barely mentioned; in fact, the party is studiously avoiding the issue. Its deafening silence on supposedly the government’s most proud “achievement” speaks for itself; more revealing is the party’s and Modi’s own defensive — and mostly intemperate — reaction when rival parties raise the issue. This is because it’s discovering the depth of the repressed public fury over demonetisation whose entire edifice — its shifting rationales, the spin around its “success”, and claims of people’s backing — was built on fiction. A fiction that is now unravelling.

Initially, people were indeed taken in by the yarn, but the mood changed after Modi’s much-touted 50-day deadline to sort out the currency crisis passed leaving people still having to spend hours standing outside cashless ATMs and shuttered banks. The penny then dropped: the government had been winging it. And, what hurt them more was that the Prime Minister himself had been misleading them. That’s when they realised they had been used as pawns in an elaborate political con, and started to question the government’s, and the PM’s, credibility. People feel betrayed and say they have lost trust in this government. If “pradhan mantri’s” word has no sanctity, who else can they trust?

A particularly bad news for the BJP is that the trading community — the party’s traditional “vote bank”, to borrow its favourite term — has been hit the hardest by demonetisation and it’s determined to punish it. “My business has been ruined, I’ve suffered, my family has suffered... we’re still suffering. Why should I vote for them (BJP)?” one restaurant owner told me, echoing a widespread sentiment in the business community.

Amit Shah’s contemptuous retort in a TV interview that the BJP was no longer solely dependent on the “Baniya” vote, suggesting that it had become dispensable and that its old loyalists were free to stew in their own juice, smacks of the sort of hubris that the party has paid for in the past — and looks set to pay for it again. But it’s not the “Baniyas” alone who are dumping the BJP. As noted earlier, Jats in western UP have drifted away. And to quote one Muzaffarnagar Jat farmer, “without the Jats, the BJP is nothing in this belt”. In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, they had voted for the BJP in massive numbers, but feel let down that it has not kept its promises. They describe it as “a party of liars”.

The problem is that, contrary to Shah’s claim, the BJP has failed to win enough new converts to fill the vacuum created by the loss of “Baniya” and Jat voters. Many of the floating voters who turned up for it in 2014 on the back of a Modi wave are likely to “float” away elsewhere this time as is the nature of floating voters. This leaves the BJP pinning its hopes entirely on anti-incumbency going against the SP. Meanwhile, the BJP is also rattled by the SP-Congress alliance which seems to be doing well, if the mood I picked up on my admittedly limited outing is any guide. If they pull it off, it could queer the pitch for the BJP in the 2019 general election. But the biggest threat to it would appear to be from within, if reports that RSS workers, angry over candidate selection, are staying away from the campaign or not pulling their full weight are true. The RSS has always been central to mobilisation of BJP voters, and historically whenever it has held back, the party has suffered. Is the history set to repeat itself?