When the BJP was readying itself for a long gruelling campaign for the Bihar Assembly poll, senior leaders, including party president Amit Shah, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ascertain his availability for the campaign.
The Prime Minister agreed to give as much time as was required by the party, as he remained its most popular leader, and in the absence of a chief ministerial candidate, the party’s mainstay in the poll.
In the process, he was over-exposed, the contest between him and Nitish Kumar becoming a referendum on Mr. Modi’s record as Prime Minister rather than on Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister.
Undiminished popularity Has this diluted Brand Modi? Senior BJP office-bearers who spoke to The Hindu on condition of anonymity said that while the Prime Minister’s personal popularity remained undiminished, “it was not right to over-expose him in this way.”
“Prime Minister Modi is a political person, therefore unlike Dr. Manmohan Singh he does campaign extensively in the State polls, but it is now time to move away from the ‘big Modi rallies and nothing else’ strategy,” said the source.
In all, Mr. Modi addressed over 31 big rallies, 17 in the space of a week, in the last three phases of the elections.
A new point Coupled with how many times the Prime Minister spoke in Bihar was what he spoke.
For every rally he addressed, there was a new point he made, and that was countered very effectively by the Nitish Kumar campaign team.
In Gaya, on August 9, he spoke of the DNA of the Mahagathbandhan (the grand alliance). This gave the Opposition the Bahari vs. Bihari plank, that, looking at the heavy deployment of BJP central leaders in these polls, proved disastrous for the party.
On August 18, Mr. Modi announced the Rs.1.25-lakh special package for Bihar, only to have the Nitish Kumar camp spike the offer with the slogan jhaanse main na aayengey Nitish ko jitaaenge [We won’t be fooled by big promises, We will support Nitish].
The BJP’s team, on the other hand, had no counter to this depiction of the Prime Minister as a hyperbolic jhaansa dene waala [trickster] and could not cash in on the package.
In the later parts of the campaign, Mr. Modi spoke of beef and alleged a conspiracy on the part of Mahagathbandhan leaders to dilute the reservation for the Extremely Backward Class and the Other Backward Class in order to favour “one community.”
Coupled with Mr. Shah’s assertion that if the Mahagathbandhan won, crackers would be burst in Pakistan, this went over the Lakshman Rekha of fringe and mainstream utterances.
Will Brand Modi be able to recover from the battering it has received? That entirely depends on whether he manages to reconcile his pugnacious and combative style of politics with the need to be above the fray as Prime Minister, especially in Assembly elections.
Brand Nitish Kumar has gained immeasurably in these elections, to a point where he is being seen as the fulcrum of opposition to Mr. Modi. As the BJP is set to come up against Amarinder Singh in Punjab and Tarun Gogoi in Assam, the Bihar poll will be a salutary lesson for the BJP on how not to diminish your best asset in fights where other tactics could have well been deployed.
