BJP kicks in two-pronged strategy for 2024

THE Congress is in a quandary about what it should do first: mobilise the masses on the ground or retool the party organisation. Its predicament is reflected in the twin exercises preoccupying the party: Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra and the impending election to seek a party president in October. However, on the other hand, the BJP has a catch-all strategy devised before the 2014 elections that seeks to optimise the amassing of voters and energise the organisation at every tier so that the two aspects work in tandem without contradictions.

The concept of micro-level booth management through the instruments of the “panna pramukh” (designated workers to scrutinise voter rolls) and the “labhartee sampark pramukh” (persons assigned to work with the recipients of the Centre’s welfare programmes), drawn from the RSS’ vast pool of “pracharaks”, best exemplifies this amalgam of the BJP.

It has set in motion the dual prongs in the prelude to the Lok Sabha battle. Typically, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high ratings (according to periodic polls) and an active killer instinct that has demoralised a frayed Opposition, the BJP has left nothing to chance.

There’s probably time to unveil that big idea which ignites voters weeks before the polls, as the Pulwama terror attack did before 2019.

But what is revealed by way of an early campaign has a tired ring to it, as demonstrated by Modi’s address to flag the celebration of the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence. The themes were combating corruption and ending dynastic politics and nepotism, subjects that stoked the electorate in 2014 through Modi’s masterly oratory and an ability to sound credible because 10 years of the UPA regime were deeply flawed by the very drawbacks that he spotlighted from the stump.

Modi regurgitated the “nationalist” plank, exhorting listeners to obliterate the last vestiges of a “colonial mindset” and not seek “certificates from the world” — the last an ironic statement from a person who, as Gujarat Chief Minister, strove hard to discard the hangover of the 2002 violence, which had provoked condemnation from the West, and earn the West’s approval. But it was the corruption charges implicating some principal opposition parties that expectedly drew the PM’s oratorical wrath. He called on people to treat the corrupt with “contempt” and “hatred”.

On Modi’s radar were the Aam Aadmi Party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Trinamool Congress, and, of course, the Congress. The first three regional entities have thwarted the BJP’s entry in their turf. While the party has registered gains in Telangana against the TRS, the AAP-ruled Delhi and the TMC-controlled West Bengal remain challenges.

However, the plethora of family patriarchs/matriarchs and their legatees crowding the Opposition’s stage has caused the BJP to believe that at least in the parliamentary election, people, especially the young, will vote with their “heads and not their hearts” and reject clannish politics because it choked the entrepreneurial spirit, counted as a gain of the changed demography.

Singly, it is probably tough for the regional players to take on the BJP effectively in a Lok Sabha poll. If they regroup into a front, with or without the Congress, that could potentially give a good fight on the presumed strengths of social equations, a countervailing narrative that focuses only on bread-butter issues impinging on price rise and complaints of unequal distribution of resources and aid from the government’s schemes. A combined front could reduce the BJP’s target of netting 350 seats to an air castle.

The BJP brass probably anticipated the possibility even though the Opposition remained scattered. At a recent meeting — significant because it laid the party’s emphasis — Amit Shah, Home Minister and key political resource person, identified 144 constituencies which the party lost in 2019, mainly in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and assigned charge of different clusters of seats to senior ministers, including Nirmala Sitharaman, Piyush Goyal and S Jaishankar.

The operative line in Shah’s address to the ministers was “there is no party if the organisation is weak”, a dictum which was ignored in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time when the BJP imagined that slogans such as “India Shining” and “Feel Good” could deliver the goodies with the wave of a wand.

Each of the states on the BJP’s browser has difficulties which Shah’s organisational savvy and skills have only partially answered or not done so at all.

Odisha and Andhra Pradesh are peculiar because their respective Chief Ministers Naveen Patnaik and YS Jagan Mohan Reddy have crafted a relationship with the Centre principally on their terms. The relationship involves an unstated quid pro quo wherein their parties, the Biju Janata Dal and the YSR Congress Party (incidentally, both CMs are dynasts, but the BJP is chary of calling them so), bail out the BJP on crucial legislations in crunch situations in the Rajya Sabha in return for an unstinted help from New Delhi and an understanding that the BJP will not get aggressive in their regions. The equation has hampered the BJP’s growth in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

In West Bengal, the BJP is up against a classic old-guard-versus-newbies syndrome. It is dependent on Suvendu Adhikari, an import from the Trinamool Congress Party and former Mamata Banerjee associate. It is convinced that Adhikari is enough to trounce the TMC, but in the process, he has alienated the BJP’s old veterans.

Telangana is the only bright spot on the southern and eastern landscape, but its Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, whose politics rests on doling freebies, is no pushover.

Before venturing into these territories, the BJP must think of the poll-bound states which it must retain. In Rajasthan, it has not cracked the leadership question on whether to retain Vasundhara Raje as the CM candidate or not and in Madhya Pradesh, former CM Uma Bharti has warned that ‘caste and regional imbalances’ might lead to conflicts.

Knowing the BJP, it is adept at making course correction.