A Take on Electoral Losses of The BJP, a Political Party of India's Far Right

Daily Times
30 October 2009

HUM HINDUSTANI: Paratha, pizza, politics

by J Sri Raman

The BJP is not going to appear more democratic to the masses just by becoming less “desi” or indigenous in the apparel and language of its leaders. The Far Right cannot hope to transform itself by adopting the techniques of a fast-food restaurant

This is about a current political debate in India, featuring two popular dishes in the headline but dominated by the typically hypocritical flavour of the Far Right, especially the hidden variety.

The debate began on October 22, the day votes cast in the three State Assembly elections held nine days earlier were counted and the verdicts announced. There was no mistaking the main feature of the results of the elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh. The final seat tally showed a spectacular failure of the Bharatiya Janata Party. It proved wrong the prophets of false hope who had presumed that the law of probability protected from further laceration a party still reeling from the reverses of the general election of April-May 2009.

In Maharashtra, where the BJP had the biggest stakes and the highest hopes, it ended up with 45 seats out of 288. The BJP and ally Shiv Sena together fell far short of even the 100-seat mark. Sena chief Bal Thackeray, hailed as “Hindu Hriday Samarat” (Emperor of Hindu Hearts), failed to become a ruler of the State by “remote control” as the people were promised.

The BJP managed a mere four out of 90 seats in Haryana and a sorry three out of 60 in Arunachal Pradesh, The party’s grand total in the three States came to a glorious 12.5 percent of the mandate.

The announcement threw the apologists of the party, official or otherwise, into a twin attempt — at damage control by a devious reading of the results; and at decrying them as a voter disservice to “democracy”. The glib propagandists are still at their game.

One of the instant reactions to the ignominious defeat from the party was to damn the elections themselves. Going beyond his brief as a minority face of the BJP, its vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi blamed it all on the electronic voting machines (EVMs), which he berated as “electronic victory machines” for the Congress party. With the BJP soon realising that the charge could boomerang (with the same machines having given the party winning mandates elsewhere in the past), he was silenced.

The argument was then trotted out about the adverse vote as a matter of mere arithmetic. In Maharashtra, it was argued, the defeat was only because of a division in the Shiv Sena vote by splinter Maharashtra Navnirman Sena of Bal Thackeray’s rebel nephew Raj. The argument did not wash. The MNS, after all, had cut into the Congress vote, too, and the Far Right alliance flopped in the rural areas as well where Raj Thackeray was no factor.

Local factors did play their limited poll-time role, but this did not alter the larger picture. It was a popular rejection of the BJP that brought back the Congress-led alliance to power in Maharshtra for the third time, and made it possible for the Congress to return in Haryana despite the state’s tradition denying even a second term in office to any party or alliance.

The popular rejection was more than party-political. The BJP retains some of its bases, but it can barely wish away the people’s steadily increasing alienation from it across most of the country over recent years. The Maharashtra vote, in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist strike, provides a measure of the manner in which even the party’s earlier trump cards cannot win tricks any more.

The inescapable verdict is what is driving pro-BJP intellectuals (to use too conspicuous a contradiction in terms) to raise a democracy-in-danger bogey. The BJP’s defeat, they plead, is bad for democracy for two reasons.

In the first place, they feign patriotic concern over the political fate of the country, where regional and regionalist forces replace a “national” and nationalist” party like the BJP. This is doubly disingenuous. The BJP has revealed no reservations whatsoever about the regional or regionalist concerns of parties with which it has sought and found rewarding relations. Besides the Sena, its oldest ally, the BJP has done profitable business with the Telugu Desam Party of Andhra Pradesh and the Dravidian parties of Tamilnadu. In any case, not many will accept the “nationalist” claims and credentials of a party that seeks votes on the nation-breaking plank of a vicious anti-minority-ism.

The second reason why these permanent invitees to debates in BJP-friendly television studios pretend to mourn the BJP’s predicament is what such decimation of the main opposition party can mean for India’s democracy. How can any parliamentary democracy, in particular, they ask, survive let alone remain strong, without a healthy opposition?

If the people are rejecting the BJP, however, it is not because they want no healthy opposition. It is because they want no unhealthy opposition. The party may enjoy the formal status of the main opposition in parliament but, in fact, it represents opposition to democracy — unless the system is supposed to stand for and serve the majority as defined in religious terms.

It is doubtless true, all the same that a steamroller majority for the ruling dispensation does not serve democracy well, either. So, what is the solution?

The funniest of answers came from a section of the above-mentioned “intellectuals” who claim to be unhappy with the party’s sinking fortunes. The BJP, according to this brainwave, should stop trying to sell today’s voters the ideological-political equivalent of a traditional “paratha dripping with oil”. Instead, the BJP should serve them the same basic stuff, but with pizza-like properties to suit “modern-day tastes”.

The party, however, is not going to appear more democratic to the masses just by becoming less “desi” or indigenous in the apparel and language of its leaders. The Far Right cannot hope to transform itself by adopting the techniques of a fast-food restaurant.

There is barely any chance of the present-day BJP spawning a brand-new splinter in better tune with the times. That was the expectation of some from the BJP itself, projected as a modern avatar of its parent, the Jan Sangh. The post-election debate shows what an idle dream or an attempt at deception that was.

History and the people of India, it must be hoped, will find an alternative occupant for the main opposition space, an alternative that India’s democracy needs so desperately.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled At Gunpoint