Why BJP can’t afford to take AAP lightly

TWO developments in quick succession have exposed a chink in the BJP’s armour. One was the Centre’s abrupt decision to postpone Delhi’s municipal elections just days after Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) swept the Punjab Assembly polls. The other was the violent attack on the Delhi Chief Minister’s residence by supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha headed by firebrand MP and saffron torch-bearer Tejasvi Surya. The mob was protesting Kejriwal’s comments on Vivek Agnihotri’s controversial film The Kashmir Files.

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Both showed the BJP in a poor light and handed Kejriwal and his cheerleaders an opportunity to crow that the Modi regime is running scared of AAP. Farfetched as it may sound, there seems to be a grain of truth in the claim. The reason for postponing the municipal election is spurious. While there’s scope to debate the merit of the move to reunify Delhi’s three corporations, the proposal was never in the public domain and seems to have been pulled like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat simply as an excuse to delay the polls. Yes, the BJP does seem to be spooked by AAP’s sweeping victory in Punjab and probably fears it will resonate in Delhi to Kejriwal’s advantage.

The hooliganism outside the CM’s residence was sheer overreaction. The AAP chief needled and provoked with his snarky comments on the film and the BJP fell headlong into his trap. Kejriwal ended up looking reasonable and the BJP became the villain. Notice that the bhakts have been more muted in their defence of the film since then.

The BJP’s clumsiness has put Kejriwal exactly where he wants to be: in the limelight as a victim of its high-handed politics, the David to Modi’s Goliath. It was a role he played with aplomb in a series of television interviews before setting off to try his hand at storming Modi’s citadel of Gujarat in preparation for the Assembly election at the end of the year.

Kejriwal is canny enough to know that challenging the BJP on Modi’s home turf is no mean task. He must recall the way Modi pulled back his party from the brink of defeat at the hands of the Congress five years ago with a high voltage campaign spun around an emotive son-of-the soil appeal. This time, the BJP is much more comfortably placed.

So what is Kejriwal hoping to achieve in Gujarat? And why is the BJP so anxious that it’s going after the AAP chief in such a ham-handed manner? The answer lies in Kejriwal’s carefully calibrated politics. He wants to first decimate the Congress and occupy its space in entirety. And then he will turn his attention to challenging the BJP.

The strategy must worry Modi and the BJP. There are almost 200 Lok Sabha seats spread across over a dozen states where the party goes head-to-head with the Congress. The foundation of Modi’s two successive victories in the Lok Sabha and the BJP’s steady march towards a majority in the Rajya Sabha lies in this geographical area. It is here that the BJP performs its best, having honed its election machinery to perfection to vanquish the Congress with ease.

There were a few hiccups along the way, like in 2018 when it was unable to win Karnataka and lost Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh to the Congress. But as the recent round of Assembly polls in Uttarakhand and Goa proved, it has corrected whatever deficiencies there were to beat back anti-incumbency and overpower the Congress with its superior election management techniques.

Over seven years, the BJP has established a comfort level with the Congress as its main opponent. It knows which buttons to press to get a rise out of the party and then corner it with all the epithets it has coined — anti-national, Khan Market gang, urban Naxals and so on. It has successfully caricatured Rahul Gandhi as a ‘Pappu’ and crippled him as a serious alternative to Modi. It has penetrated the organisation so deeply that at any given time of its choosing, it can pluck out a Jyotiraditya Scindia or an RPN Singh or a Jitin Prasada to buttress the image of a sinking ship. And it has studied and understood Congress weaknesses only too well to take full advantage at election time.

Kejriwal and his AAP are still an enigma for the BJP. Used to fighting an old decrepit decaying party like the Congress, the BJP finds itself unable to tackle AAP’s freshness and agility. Kejriwal’s party is young and fleet-footed. It has mastered the art of guerrilla warfare and constantly surprises the BJP with its disruptive tactics. It is as handy with social media as the BJP. And Kejriwal has shown that he can match Modi in the art of communication. It’s no mean feat because he connects as a diminutive, soft-spoken aam aadmi with a perpetual cough in sharp contrast to Modi’s muscularity.

There are two other things about AAP which must worry the BJP. One, Kejriwal is ideology-neutral. His politics is transactional: dollops of welfare in return for votes. It’s difficult for the BJP to trap him in secular versus communal binaries or national versus anti-national polarities.

Two, AAP has an inexplicable ability to win big. Both in Delhi and Punjab, it has managed to sweep the polls with stunning numbers and put the entire Opposition out of business. The Punjab victory could be attributed to the pathetic state of its opponents, the Congress and the Akali Dal. But even in Delhi, it swallowed the Congress vote share and has kept the BJP out of power for two consecutive terms after winning with a huge margin.

Kejriwal and his AAP have a mountain to climb before they can be the national alternative they aspire to be. But at the rate the Congress is crumbling, it may happen sooner than later. If the buzz in AAP is correct, restless, disgruntled Congress leaders in states from Gujarat to Himachal to Haryana and elsewhere are already knocking at Kejriwal’s doors.

If Kejriwal actually succeeds in his bid to take over Congress space, he could well queer the pitch for the BJP. The party will have to rework its famed election machinery to counter this innovative disruptor of traditional politics.