In the long and winding road to BJP’s historic win in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand lies a decisive turn taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to disrupt the straitjacket of vote-bank politics that the BJP had been historically shackled with.
“I do not crave a kingdom, heaven or a second life, all I want is to serve the poor,” he had said at the BJP’s national executive meeting in New Delhi this January. There had been agitation among party MPs on the effects of demonetisation and its possible fallout among traders, the party’s core support base. Mr. Modi’s speech was aimed at convincing his hesitant party that he had been able to persuade the poor to look at the BJP and his own government in a new light.
In Uttar Pradesh, the party has got support from almost all quarters of voters. The only time any party got more seats than the BJP in U.P. was in 1952 and in 1977, when the State was still undivided and sent 85 MPs to the Lok Sabha. The transcendence of the traditional “Bania-Brahmin” label of the BJP, it appears, has happened in these polls.
While the party had won, or was leading in, 182 out of the 225 seats where the upper castes had a significant presence, what was astounding was that it was leading in 75 out of the 90 Dalit-dominated seats. The party even won in seats dominated by the Muslim community. The aspirational politics of the neo-middle class that Mr. Modi had tapped into in 2014, has been broadened in scope in U.P. in 2017 to include the poor.
Prime pole
The breaking of the caste barrier by the BJP and the appropriation of the pro-poor plank by it has left the door open for India to possibly revert to another round of unipolarity in politics after the coalition-era governments and bipolar polity of the past 30 years — where there is one dominant national party, taking on regional outfits. For the party, it is a new world. Prime Minister Modi and party president Amit Shah, by delivering stunning electoral victories, have tightened their grip on the party. The old collegial way of running party affairs, already over since 2014, is now not to be revived, at least till Mr. Modi is at the helm of affairs.
Is the BJP on its way to be the new Congress? The verdict in U.P. points to an answer to that question.
