Deliver or perish

POLL 2022 has thrown up two new political stars — Yogi Adityanath and Arvind Kejriwal — who have found a new acceptance among the people. Neither is an unknown entity. Yogi is the CM of Uttar Pradesh and Kejriwal of Delhi. One of them is from the ruling BJP and the other from the Opposition side. Both are likely to influence the future course of politics.

Both Yogi and Kejriwal, the new faces of performance, have emerged as leaders in their own right.

With Yogi’s phenomenal success, another mass leader has been born inside the BJP, apart from Narendra Modi. It is hardly a secret that Yogi will be a claimant for the country’s top job in the post Modi era.

With AAP’s victory in Punjab (and two states under its belt now, unlike most regional leaders), Kejriwal is also eyeing the ‘Dilli gaddi’, though for him it could be a longer haul, for the simple reason that he is building an organisation from scratch. Yogi, on the other hand, would have a massive, well-oiled, resource-driven and cadre-backed machinery — probably the largest in the world — behind him. The RSS has supported him all along and is already viewing him in a ‘futuristic’ role. Of course, given the way it functions, the RSS would be keeping in mind several leaders at the same time. But Yogi is more of a Hindu icon than are other leaders.

Yogi has been helped by brand Modi, which remains intact and was the common factor that influenced voter choices in the four states — UP, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa — where the BJP has retained power. If anything, the 2022 victory has made Modi even more invincible. True to character, and without losing any time after the victory, he took off to Gujarat, where polls are due later this year, spending three days there, meeting his mother, enthusing BJP karyakartas and doing a roadshow for a popular outreach.

Yogi has emerged as a leader in his own right. So far he was seen as someone who had compelled the BJP leadership to make him CM in 2017 because of his following among a group of MLAs. Though there was dissatisfaction with the UP Government, it wasn’t a sentiment of aakrosh. Despite their unhappiness, people were prepared to give him another term. The upper castes, including the disaffected Brahmins, consolidated even more firmly behind the BJP than in 2017. It was clear that when the chips are down, the BJP remains a ‘Hindu rakshak’ party.

The BJP has also pitched itself as a party which is garib rakshak, with its free rations and direct benefits in cash and kind (what is called labharthi venture) — Rs 6,000 to kisans, help during the lockdowns, package of grain, oil, salt reaching people’s hands, pension, insurance, money in women’s bank accounts, houses being built for them. Social welfarism has now come to stay and has become an integral part of the BJP’s recipe for success.

This has brought the poorer sections — in caste terms, the lower (non-Yadav) OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits — in the BJP fold even more firmly. Akhilesh Yadav wanted to dent this support base of the BJP but could not make enough headway. The BJP has made some forays even into the Jatav votebank — so has the SP — with the virtual collapse of the BSP, and the Dalit vote is now up for grabs. The four-point formula the BJP has gone for, and will increasingly go for also in other states, is strong leadership (Modi and Yogi have no families in tow), Hindutva nationalism-national security, social welfarism, and a huge organisational machinery. It poses a formidable challenge to the Opposition.

The victory of Yogi in UP and Kejriwal in Punjab has been stunning. Punjab did not turn to the BJP, as did the other four states. If anything it was the opposite. Punjab’s per capita income is double that of UP; it did not sway the labharthis in the border state. The farmers’ angst had much more of an impact in Punjab than in UP. Punjab was looking for new faces, new narrative, away from the tried-and-tested politicians who had been found wanting. What went for Kejriwal was his credibility in delivering what he had promised in Delhi — bijli, paani, school reform and medical care. There is a ‘Congress’ space in the country today, which is getting occupied by other forces, with the party unable to get its act together election after election. It is this space which ‘AK’ will try and capture.

Within hours of Punjab victory, AAP leaders were talking about focusing their energies immediately on four states — Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, where polls are due and the party is already active; Haryana, a state, which, like Punjab, could look at new chehre with anti-incumbency building up against the Khattar government and fatigue with the Congress and Chautalas’ politics (it is Kejriwal’s state); and Karnataka, which too is a battle between the BJP and the Congress, though the JD(S) also has a presence there.

If Kejriwal concentrates on Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and can manage a strike rate of 60%, and picks up a few seats in other states, he could be (at least theoretically) as weighty a player in 2024 as any of the other regional satraps who rule larger, but single states of India. As things stand, he would not be in a hurry but would concentrate on increasing his footprints and becoming an alternative to Congress leaders in parts of India (He may also look at Rajasthan, where the Congress will be on the back foot, and Madhya Pradesh).

Unlike the Congress, and sensing the popular mood, he has positioned his party as a pro-Hindu entity, without being seen as anti-Muslim, without being caught in the Hindu-Muslim conundrum that the BJP would like to entrap Opposition groups into. Kejriwal is also selling his Delhi model of governance to other states.

India is changing rapidly and politics is throwing up new faces. Otherwise, unknown AAP candidates would not have been able to rout the stalwarts of Punjab, some of them with decades of public work behind them — including Parkash Singh Badal, his son Sukhbir, Capt Amarinder Singh, Charanjit Channi and Navjot Sidhu. Therein lies the message that the voter has delivered in 2022 — and this goes also for Kejriwal and Yogi — deliver or perish.