Eyeing monopoly, BJP juggernaut rolls on
AT the end of a year that brought many people and the economy to its knees, the BJP reinforced its position and intent of becoming a virtual monopoly in national politics. This has happened in spite of the ongoing farmers’ agitation that has challenged both the regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the biggest corporates in the land. For, an organic people’s protest is one matter, but the BJP faces no strong competition in the arena of national politics. Regional parties, however, still hold their ground and between April and May next year, three state elections will take place that could reinforce this disconnect between the national and the regional.
In West Bengal, the BJP will fight a tough battle against the ruling Mamata Banerjee-led TMC, in Tamil Nadu, the BJP will be seeking to mark its presence and be in opposition to the DMK-led front, while in Assam, the ruling BJP appears well placed against a floundering Congress.
Meanwhile, it must be stated that in terms of actual vote share, the BJP has not, by any stretch, matched the performance of the 2019 national result in subsequent state elections. Take the fact that the BJP lost the Delhi Assembly polls in February this year to AAP, although it had swept each Lok Sabha seat months earlier. Similarly, in late 2019, the BJP lost Jharkhand to the JMM-led alliance; the mighty national party needed a regional party, the JJP, to form the government in Haryana and were kept out by shifting coalitions in Maharashtra, now led by the Shiv Sena, a former NDA ally that chose to dump them. In the recent Bihar Assembly elections, the BJP had 19 per cent of the votes and managed to reduce the strength of its own partner, the JD(U), led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. They formed the government but the result was a comedown from the 2019 General Election when the NDA had 39 of the state’s 40 seats. (In Bihar, too, it was a regional party, the RJD that had a larger vote share, gave a spirited fight, but was let down by the Congress performance).
It must also be noted that the current BJP is fighting for every bit of space even in the Opposition sphere. It recently exerted itself and went full throttle to make a mark in the municipal elections in Hyderabad and to a lesser extent in Kerala. The party is committed to the idea of One Nation, One Poll, and even though the possibility of having such a system is some distance away, the BJP is putting itself in positions where it can leverage regional parties into doing its bidding. It is quite determined to spread its reach to the unlikeliest places and can also play a round of smash and grab as it has done with Kashmir, where it now claims to have made an entry.
The model in place now operates at several levels. First, much of broadcast media is more pliant than before in the face of economic reverses and continues with the drumbeat of projecting the leadership of the BJP day in and out. Second, in the age of post-truth, the BJP knows the power of narratives even if they are based on false information. It is to that end that the party has chosen its controversial IT cell chief Amit Malviya as co-incharge for West Bengal. On at least 16 occasions, Malviya has been called out for spreading fake news through social media by the fact-checking site Altnews. On December 2, Twitter itself flagged a tweet by Malviya on the ongoing farmers’ protest as ‘manipulated media’. But all of this may actually be propelling his rise.
One can actually point to the four Ms that work for the BJP as it tries to create a monopoly: It has the media, manpower (the cadre of the RSS), Modi (a leader with no national rival) and money. The last is perhaps the most crucial as the BJP today is the richest party in the history of India, not just in terms of how much money it has but also in the manner in which the coffers of other political parties can be threatened through ED and income tax raids (note the silence these days from the two state parties of Uttar Pradesh, the BSP and SP). Money and the fear of losing it is now an invisible force determining Indian politics.
By 2016-17, according to audit reports filed with the Election Commission of India, BJP receipts were more than that of all the other national parties combined. In 2017, the BJP also promoted the controversial electoral bonds and subsequently got most of the donations through the scheme that keeps donors anonymous. Opaqueness over political funding can be said to even extend to the PM Cares scheme about which questions have been raised in recent times. As parliamentary oversight has also been steamrollered in 2020, few questions are really asked, except in some newspapers and on online platforms.
‘Follow the money’ is a catchy line from the 1976 Hollywood film All the President’s Men that suggests political corruption can be brought to light by examining money transfers. The catch is that, from the Congress to the BJP, Indian political parties have chosen to keep financial transactions opaque and away from public scrutiny. But what we can follow are the defections into the BJP. In 2020, the Congress lost power in Madhya Pradesh when a section of the party defected to the BJP; in the preceding year, members of the Congress and JD(S) had defected to the BJP in Karnataka.
Currently, some members of the TMC have joined the BJP, and this process of luring members from other parties is an ongoing process in states such as Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The offer to join the BJP is now always on the table and when it cannot win an election, the party is always ready with a Plan B. Like a corporation seeking to become a monopoly, the BJP is indeed marketing itself but is also ready to acquire assets of other brands that help it spread across the length and breadth of the country. The only thing spoiling the New Year’s Eve party of the BJP are not political rivals, but the protesting farmers on the borders of the national capital.
