Spring in the BJP’s step after air strike

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior journalist

AFTER the Balakot air strike, the BJP foregrounded the retaliation to the Pulwama attack as a dominant theme in its pre-election discourse, even as the Opposition withdrew into a shell. Undeterred by concerns over contextualising an ongoing military strife, whose denouement was uncertain, in a political backdrop, it appeared that the BJP’s sights were sharply focused on the Lok Sabha elections.

While the principal Opposition party put off the Congress Working Committee meet at Ahmedabad and the Aam Aadmi Party called off a hunger strike that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was to start to demand full statehood for the Capital, it was business as usual for the BJP. It positioned the showdown with Pakistan at the head of the Centre’s list of ‘achievements’. Concerns over propriety appeared needless; the party’s election preparations never paused. Alliances were cemented, public meetings were addressed, media conclaves were attended and party chief Amit Shah’s fabled booth committees were revved up. It was as though there was no time to waste. The BJP dispensation has inculcated a measure of professionalism in politics that is new to conventional approaches that were underpinned on the adage that ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Everything is fast-tracked in the new BJP.

Would the BJP continue to be as gung-ho in employing Pulwama and its aftermath in the impending elections, regardless of the political fallout? Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly shared with some of his colleagues that ‘emotions’ must be infused in large doses into an election for the bread-and-butter issues to resonate, otherwise the emphasis on development and populism would fall flat. In other words, vikas had to go hand in hand or be subjugated to jan bhavna.

It could be ‘emotion’ packaged as nationalism or religion, but churning the gut reaction is vital to motivate the voters. It was a tactic that Modi used successfully in every election he fought in Gujarat. In 2002, shortly before the Assembly polls, Gandhinagar’s Akshardham temple was besieged by terrorists and 30 pilgrims were killed. The BJP was already coursing to victory after the communal violence that year had cleaved the polity. The Akshardham tragedy buttressed its line that if a party other than the BJP was voted to power, the terrorists would have a field day. Likewise, in 2007, there was little doubt that the BJP would return because Gujarat’s emotions ran high on the sentiment of asmita (self-pride invoked in the symbol of the Sardar Sarovar dam) that Modi kindled. The icing on the cake was the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s accusation at a public rally that Modi was a ‘merchant of death’. That remark sealed the Congress’ fate.

The examples cited above were Gujarat-related. The most recent reference to a cross-border conflict and its electoral ramifications lay in Kargil and how the Indian forces pushed out and thwarted the incursions by terrorists from Pakistan, bolstered by its military. It was 1999 and a mid-term parliamentary election was forced upon India when on April 17, 1999, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government flunked the confidence test in the Lok Sabha after an NDA constituent, the AIADMK, withdrew support. The elections were deferred until October that year as the Centre launched Operation Vijay on May 26. The battle officially concluded on July 26.

In the ensuing elections, in absolute terms, the BJP’s tally remained the same as in 1998. It won 182 out of 543 seats and formed a coalition government, principally with the help of the Telugu Desam Party and the Dravida Munetra Kazhagam. Relatively speaking, it incrementally improved on its output. In 1998, it contested 388 seats and won 182; a year later, it fought on 339 and bagged 182. On the back of the Kargil showdown, the BJP’s most impressive showings were in Bihar (23, and 18 to its ally, the Janata Dal-United), Madhya Pradesh (29 out of the 40 seats that existed before Chhattisgarh was carved out) and Rajasthan (16). Surprisingly, Uttar Pradesh was a dampener. From 57 in 1998, the BJP was down to 29 seats.

During the elections in UP, the issues that weighed on the people’s minds were the large number of body bags coming from Kashmir and the spiralling price of diammonium phosphate, indispensable to agricultural growth. The BJP’s demonstration in the heartland indicated that the war mongering the campaigners drummed up did not have a uniform impact. Emotions didn’t always trump economic concerns. In UP, the emotions set off a negative reaction. 

The Hindi heartland did not hold good prospects for the BJP before the recent developments. There was no way it could have optimised its tally in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh, not after losing the 2018 Assembly elections. In Bihar, the UPA was getting its act together under the leadership of Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Tejashwi Yadav. In UP, the Samajwadi Party-Bahujan Samaj Party-Rashtriya Lok Dal coalition, shored up by the presence of smaller parties with spheres of strong, local influence, emerged as more than a challenger to the BJP that was weighed down with a double whammy. Apart from the formidable caste arithmetic that the alliance represented, the BJP was battling anti-incumbency against the Yogi Adityanath government.

Is the scenario about to change? Somewhat, maybe. In Bihar, the word is that voters have stopped raising questions over five years of the Modi government and contesting its well-publicised ‘achievements’. In UP, the BJP cadre, that was looking demoralised when confronted with the gathbandhan, has got a big boost and reactivated itself on the ground, more or less in direct proportion to an unnerved Opposition, seemingly in retreat. 

On other fronts, the news for the Modi government does not bode well.  India’s economic growth slumped to a five-quarter low of 6.6 per cent in October-December this fiscal from 7 per cent a year ago, according to data released by the Central Statistics Office. India’s farm sector output may have grown by just 2.7 per cent year-on-year in October-December 2018, the lowest in 11 quarters. The effect of the fiscal de-escalation might take time to unravel in its entirety. The Opposition will have to muster all its political skills to put up some kind of a fight against an increasingly aggressive BJP and Modi or yield valuable space to the NDA again.