The Hindu, March 14, 2009
The curious case of BJP and its partners
Vidya Subrahmaniam
The BJP-led alliance is losing out to other formations in this election despite the Hindutva party’s impressive electoral record because more and more parties are refusing to be tainted by association.
There is a curious paradox in the upcoming general election which seems to have escaped most analysts. The party with the best electoral performance over the past five years has the least buzz around it. This despite a huge propaganda drive by its prime ministerial candidate. The party is the Bharatiya Janata Party.javascript:void(0)
The clue to this mystery lies in an SMS message journalists on the political beat received soon after Orissa Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik abruptly ended his long-standing relationship with the BJP. The message read “Pappu (the name by which Mr. Patnaik’s inner circle knows him) for PM.” The message may have been the work of a prankster but it drew attention to an undeniable fact of present-day politics: Every State leader is today a potential Prime Minister.
The connection between the prime ministerial ambitions of State satraps and the severed BJP-Biju Janata Dal relationship might seem baffling. But it is a straightforward connection. Most politicians know that there are two minimum preconditions for reaching the top executive office. One, a Lok Sabha seat tally large enough to count in government formation. Two, a nationally acceptable image deriving from the candidate’s secular credentials. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had this quality but not any of the others in the BJP.
Whether or not Mr. Patnaik emerges as a factor in the post-election reckoning, he has fulfilled both conditions by breaking with the BJP on the eve of the 15th general election. The BJP’s exit unlocks the seven seats given over to the party, opening up the possibility of the BJD improving on its 2004 tally of 12 seats — provided of course that the Chief Minister is correct in his assessment that the BJD can pull it off on its own in Orissa.
As for image, until Kandhamal happened, this was never a problem area for the urbane, western-educated Mr. Patnaik, though these very qualities put him at a disadvantage when he founded the BJD. But the political novice displayed a grasp of grass-roots politics so astute that it won him two consecutive terms in office. That he remained his genial, understated self through this time added immensely to his popularity, which also meant that he would somehow escape the opprobrium reserved for those found in the company of the BJP. Even Mr. Patnaik’s worst critics conceded that he was a secular liberal who remained above the sectarian politics of his Hindutva ally.
Kandhamal violence
All this changed when Kandhamal erupted in an orgy of anti-Christian violence. The flames that charred Christian homes across the district singed Mr. Patnaik also, severely damaging his reputation as an able, impartial administrator. The Chief Minister’s friends and well-wishers were horrified that he stood a mute witness to the rape, loot and killings that devastated Orissa, driving its tribal-Christian population to refugee camps. The sangh parivar’s communal polarisation agenda was hardly hidden from the public but there seemed no explanation for the abdication of duty by a Chief Minister whose best selling point was his supposedly progressive vision. Did he succumb to the calculation that anti-Christian violence would consolidate Hindu votes?
Though Mr. Patnaik is likely to be judged harshly by history for not visibly standing up to the saffron mobs, we now have it on the authority of the BJP that he was deeply troubled by the anti-Christian attacks. Chandan Mitra, whom the BJP despatched to Bhubaneswar to bring the seat-sharing talks to fruition, admitted at a press conference that the violence had contributed to the BJP-BJD rift and that Mr. Patnaik had asked Lal Krishna Advani to restrain the saffron cadre.
To regain his credibility, Mr. Patnaik needed to do something dramatic. And that he did by publicly throwing off the Hindutva connection. Thanks to that one decisive act, Mr. Patnaik’s stock has risen to a level where, incredible as it might seem, he is seen as a serious prime ministerial contender (there is a view that his affability could become an asset in a situation of too many egoistical aspirants).
But it is not just Mr. Patnaik who wants to be out of the NDA. The BJP-BJD break-up has set off furious speculation on other BJP allies following in his footsteps. The biggest candidate for desertion is thought to be Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, another long-time partner of the BJP who has been straining at the Hindutva leash. Mr. Patnaik set impossible terms for seat-sharing knowing that the BJP could not accept them. Mr. Kumar has hardened his position on seat-sharing knowing the BJP’s extreme vulnerability. Whether he will carry the brinkmanship to a point where he calls off the alliance is a matter of conjecture because the Janata Dal (U) shares a government with the BJP which completes its term in November 2010.
Whatever the eventual fate of the BJP-JD(U) alliance, one thing is clear. The BJP’s reputation as a coalition builder is in tatters. In these exasperatingly foggy pre-election times, if there is a consensus view on one clear trend, it is on the decline of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The slide began in 2003 with the exit of the National Conference. Over the next five years, the NDA was bled thin by desertions: between 2003 and 2009, it lost seven allies — the National Conference, the Lok Jan Shakti Party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, the Pattali Makkal Katchi, the Trinamool Congress and, most recently, the BJD. The Telugu Desam Party, which extended outside support to the NDA, ended the relationship in 2005. The BJP recently won back the Indian National Lok Dal, the Asom Gana Parishad and the Rashtriya Lok Dal but these minuscule additions can by no means salvage an alliance that at its peak boasted 23 constituents.
A paradox
Paradoxically, the downturn in the principal Opposition party’s fortunes defies evidence on the ground. In the five years since its catastrophic Lok Sabha defeat in 2004, the BJP and its allies have wrested or retained power in as many as nine States — Orissa, Bihar, Gujarat, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Late last year, the BJP served up another surprise, bagging 10 Assembly seats from Jammu.
This is not all. Statistics show that the BJP has contributed handsomely to its State alliances. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, the party won seven of the eight seats it contested from Andhra Pradesh for a vote share of 10 per cent. Five years later, it won no seat though polling 8.4 per cent of the popular vote. The BJP’s alliance partner, the TDP, suffered a far greater erosion of its vote share, which plunged from 40 per cent in 1999 (29 of 34 contested seats) to 33 per cent in 2004.
In the 1999 Lok Sabha election in Bihar, the BJP won 23 of 29 seats for a vote share of 23 per cent. By contrast, the JD(U) won 18 of 23 contested seats for a smaller vote share of 20.77 per cent. The birth of Jharkhand in 2000 reduced the BJP to a smaller partner in Bihar. Yet its 2004 Lok Sabha performance was not much worse off than that of its partner. In an election that saw the NDA routed, the BJP won five of 16 contested seats for a vote share of 15 per cent. The JD(U) won six of 24 seats for a vote share of 22.36 per cent.
The BJP’s contribution to making Mr. Kumar Chief Minister cannot be discounted either. In the October 2005 election to the Assembly, the party won 55 of the 102 contested seats for a vote share of 15.65 per cent. The corresponding scores for the JD(U) were 88 of 139 contested seats for a vote share of 20. 46 per cent.
It is a similar story in Orissa. In the 2004 Assembly election, the BJP won 32 of 63 contested seats for a vote share of 17 per cent. In the Lok Sabha election, it won seven of nine contested seats for a vote share of 19 per cent. The corresponding scores for the BJD: 61 of 84 contested seats for a vote share of 27 per cent in the Assembly and 11 of 12 seats for a vote share of 30.02 per cent in the Lok Sabha.
No wonder, the BJP feels betrayed. Soon after receiving the sack from Mr. Patnaik, an anguished spokesperson gave vent to his feelings: “He has overlooked our 17 per cent vote for a relationship with the Left parties which have hardly any presence in Orissa. Why?” To know the answer, the Hindutva party must turn the mirror inward. Even in politics some times respectability matters more than votes. Kandhamal — and earlier Gujarat — might have enthused the BJP’s base but it had the opposite effect on the party’s partners.
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