BJP may have lost the elections, But lets not be complacent!

Kashmir Times
June 1, 2009

End of the road for saffron politics?

The BJP loses its way

by Praful Bidwai

The Bharatiya Janata Party is a remarkably bad loser. Long after its convincing defeat in 2004, it behaved as if the election had been stolen from it. Some BJP leaders really believed that but for the over-pitched “India Shining” campaign, the party would have romped home. The BJP has since continued to claim it’s in the same league as the Congress as a sizeable party with a national presence, and hence the logical alternative to it.

After the severe beating the BJP has received, these claims lie in tatters. It trails the Congress by a hefty 90 seats. The Congress has crossed the 200-seat mark after 18 long years. The gap between their all-India vote-shares has bulged substantially to almost 10 percentage-points. This puts the BJP in a different, lesser, league. The Congress is in the ascendant, but hasn’t peaked. It has a lot of room to grow. The BJP peaked 10 years ago and is on a downswing.
In its seat tally, down from 138 to 116, the BJP resembles the Congress after the 1999 election (114 seats). But in vote size, the BJP has regressed further to its status between 1991 and 1989. From now on, it’ll find it harder to defend its position within a polity that, contrary to its claim, is getting more multi-polar. More than one-half the national vote is commanded by regional, sub-regional and caste-specific parties, and the Left
Ironically, the BJP may soon drive India’s transition to even lesser bipolarity—especially if, as argued below, it shrinks in size and influence. The truth is, the BJP no longer drives the national agenda. The rudder of the ship of state slipped out of its hands 5 years ago. Now, it may be losing all initiative too. It has slipped 3.4 percentage-points in its national vote over 5 years, and about 8 points from its peak of 25.6 percent. Usually, parties which decline at this rate don’t recoup their losses quickly.

Election Commission figures show the BJP has lost support in all states barring Karnataka and tiny Himachal. In major states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, it suffered a 4 to 5 percentage-point vote loss. The loss was 2 to 3 points in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. In Bihar, it was limited to under 1 percentage-point through piggybacking the Janata Dal (U). The downswing story holds even in Kerala, Assam, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Haryana,. More crucially, the BJP’s support has eroded in more than half the states where it rules, including MP, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand.

Two other sources of erosion of BJP support are noteworthy: cities and youth. The BJP was long a mainly urban party. At its peak, it was the choice of the upwardly mobile savarna (caste-Hindu) upper-class elite. But it hasn’t won a single seat from Mumbai or Delhi. Its vote fell considerably in many big cities like Hyderabad, Pune, Lucknow, Jaipur, Indore, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Raipur, even Ahmedabad West. This speaks to an erosion in the urban areas of the BJP’s trademark religion-based identity-appeal.

Several surveys point to the BJP’s receding attraction for young people, who have modernist secular aspirations and reject narrow identities. This is especially true of first-time voters. India has a demographic profile, in which 70 percent of the population is under 40 years-old, and the under-25s are growing. This works against the BJP. Its second-generation leaders, in their late 50s or early 60s, cannot easily connect to young voters. The BJP won’t find it easy to attract youth from a rapidly urbanising India in the coming years.
Granted, the BJP shows all the signs of being at home with the modern technologies the young relate to, including computers, websites, SMS-based communication and smart advertising. What it lacks is a commitment to the content of modernity, based on a decisive break with “the muck of the ages”, including obscurantist tradition, caste, male supremacism, patriarchy, rigid hierarchy in society and family, lack of respect for personal freedom, and an obsession with faith as the defining feature of personal, social and political life.

Modernity involves genuine respect for reason, openness and free debate, a scientific outlook, willingness to subject all ideas/beliefs to critical scrutiny, commitment to individual liberty, independence and human rights, and egalitarianism—the equal right of all human beings to opportunities to develop their basic potential, as well as substantive political and social equality—and above all, the imperative of social justice.

Being modern means you don’t fall back on the past, however glorious it may be. You reject political communities defined on the basis of religion and other parochial identities. You believe in pluralism, diversity and universal values like tolerance.

The BJP fails the modernity test. It remains wedded to the social, cultural and political primacy of the Hindus in India by virtue of being an 80 percent majority. It’s the only party (barring the half-lumpen Shiv Sena), which rejects India’s fundamental essence as a diverse, multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious society.

The BJP’s latest debacle is only partly explained by tactical mistakes or campaign strategy flaws. It treated the election as an aggregate of 28 state elections, to be fought on local issues. But it also presented itself as a party with national aspirations under the “strong and resolute” LK Advani. It even appealed to crass Hindutva through Mr Varun Gandhi’s despicable hate-speeches and fielded Mr Narendra Modi as its star campaigner.

Adverse reactions to Mr Gandhi’s hate-speech cost the BJP a loss of 6 to 10 seats in UP. Mr Modi’s empty boast about Gujarat’s development record cut no ice. People associated him with state brutality towards the minorities, and the absence of justice and rule of law. His enthusiastic endorsement by industrial magnates as India’s next Prime Minister stamped him with elitism and craven dependence on predatory corporate capital.

The BJP couldn’t take exploit its opponents’ weaknesses because it offered no imaginative policies or governance agendas. It claimed a special ability to tackle terrorism, through Mr Advani, the “Iron Man”, and contrasted him to Dr Manmohan Singh, “the weakest Prime Minister-ever”. It also made noises about “Muslim appeasement” through the Sachar Committee. But people haven’t forgotten the Kandahar hijacking or the high incidence of terrorism under NDA rule. The ugly Arun Jaitley-Rajnath spat dented Mr Advani’s “decisive” image. Dr Singh’s reply to Mr Advani put him on the mat in a dignified way.

Ultimately, the BJP came across as a negative, querulous, whining party without constructive agendas. It seriously underrated the Congress’s growing appeal, the popularity of its young leaders, the relatively dignified image of Ms Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh, and the perceived absence of major scandals (barring telecom and highways) under UPA rule.

Behind this failure lies a larger problem. The BJP can no longer gain much by trying to consolidate the “Hindu vote” through communal polarisation. The conditions of the 1980s and 1990s, which allowed it to do so no longer exist—including the Shah Bano case, which made “pseudo-secularism” stick, the Ramjanambhoomi movement, the Congress’s steep decline, the rise of a small insecure middle class ready to buy into its narrative of “Hindu grievance” against “history’s wrongs” and of recreating “Hindu India’s” past glory.
Social conditions have considerably changed. The burgeoning middle class has come into its own and lost some of its inferiority complex. It isn’t swayed by the “getting-even-with-history” narrative or the idea of demolishing mosques to recover “self-respect”. Like most Indians, it looks to the future, not the past. A good hypothesis is that the BJP’s ascendancy was a product of a very specific conjuncture, which may have passed.

The BJP today is gripped by an ideological crisis, a crisis of strategy, an organisational crisis, and a leadership crisis. It is schizophrenic about Hindutva and hasn’t reinvented itself as a Right-of-centre party free of a religion-based identity. It remains subservient to the RSS, its mentor, political master and organisational gate-keeper.

The BJP has no strategy to translate its core politics into popular appeal—and votes. Besides the Mandir issue, its earlier appeal came from its anti-Mandal platform. The Mandir issue greatly broadened the Jana Sangh-BJP’s traditional base and drew in OBC, even Dalit, support, in the Hindi belt. The anti-Mandal platform brought the BJP support from the upper castes, which resented affirmative action for the underprivileged. The BJP could once simultaneously juggle two balls: Mandal and Kamandal (Hindutva). But no longer.

The BJP’s organisational crisis is worsening. Its relations with the RSS and other sangh parivar organisations have become tense. The BJP is highly faction-ridden—perhaps more so than today’s Congress. This is so even in Gujarat where it has long been in power unchallenged. The parivar has lost cohesion. The shrinking RSS no longer has the authority it long enjoyed as the parivar’s ultimate arbiter. The BJP’s leadership crisis is aggravated by intense, growing rivalry within the post-Vajpayee-Advani generation.

Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see how the BJP can revitalise itself. It won’t be a surprise if it goes into long-term, historic, even terminal, decline.