The announcement of dates for Assembly polls in five States by the Election Commission found the BJP’s national headquarters in New Delhi filled with anticipation on Wednesday afternoon.
The results in these States — from the most densely populated and numerically important Uttar Pradesh to the crucial States of Manipur, Goa, Punjab and Uttarakhand — will not only be significant in the specific political contexts of these States, but will also project the impact of demonetisation and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attempts to transcend the segmentary vote bank that the party has depended on till now.
‘People trust PM’
The upper castes, especially trading communities, the traditional bedrock of support to the BJP, haven’t exactly heaped encomiums on the Prime Minister on the decision to demonetise ₹1,000 and old ₹500 notes, and difficulties in remonetisation persist. Despite all that, party leaders say, demonetisation has “worked” because there is “ Mukhia par bharosa [trust in the leader, Prime Minister Modi].”
Party general secretary Arun Singh, who has just returned from a 12-day tour of Uttar Pradesh, said there was widespread support for demonetisation.
“We have held over 1,800 public meetings, big and small, across the length and breadth of U.P., our parivartan yatras were on in Uttarakhand and public meetings were held in Goa, nowhere have we come across any criticism of demonetisation. Logon ko Mukhia pe bharosa hai [the people trust the leader],” he told The Hindu .
‘Not a referendum’
“This cannot be a referendum on demonetisation, we have already got the feel of the support it enjoys in the results of the Maharashtra, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Chandigarh local body polls, as well as bypolls to Assembly and Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh and Assam. Even in States like Tripura and West Bengal, our vote share has increased in the bypolls to the Assembly and the Lok Sabha,” he said.
The statement projects the party’s confidence of riding the wave of Mr. Modi’s popularity, and is precisely for those reasons it is problematic. For, in none of the States that the BJP is a serious contender for power, is there a local chief ministerial aspirant. Goa is an exception as the party is in power there.
Like Bihar and Delhi, therefore, the rhetoric of the elections will pit the Prime Minister against the regional satraps. It is a tactic that has not seen a high degree of electoral returns lately — it did erode the Prime Minister’s own rather formidable political capital for the length of 2015 — till Assam was won in 2016 by a more localised strategy.
“Our main issue in these polls will be development, good governance and to rid the polity of nepotism and dynasty-led politics,” said BJP’s Uttar Pradesh unit chief Keshav Prasad Maurya.
“You wait and watch, we will only gain from demonetisation,” he added. An invocation at the beginning of the toughest test of the decision yet.
