A post-mortem is never pretty, especially of a humiliating poll debacle. It can sink very quickly into a blame game, and it takes a lot of effort and a healthy dose of honest introspection to redeem the exercise into one that offers correctives. The statement by four veteran leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and Shanta Kumar — that there needs to be an honest introspection of the >reasons for the party’s rout in Bihar points to this fear that no correctives may emerge from the party’s internal exercise to apportion blame.
Nistula Hebbar On November 8, after the results came in, the murmurs that began at the Ashoka Road head office of the BJP were hardly encouraging. All the effort of the last eight months, including a highly centralised operation involving Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an extremely >communally polarised campaign narrative , were being set aside to imply that caste had won over development.
Missing the message At a meeting of the party’s strategists for the polls — party president Amit Shah, general secretary Bhupendra Yadav and Union Ministers Rajnath Singh, Nitin Gadkari and Dharmendra Pradhan — the dominant reason put forth to explain the loss seemed to be that the voter had chosen a more formidable social coalition and voted on caste lines than for the brand of development that the National Democratic Alliance seemed to be offering.
The speciousness of this argument was revealed when, at a post-result press conference in Patna, it was pointed out to former Deputy Chief Minister and senior BJP leader, Sushil Kumar Modi, that the NDA too had tried to play the caste card in ticket distribution. Mr. Modi retorted, “Have you ever seen an election in any State in India where caste does not have a role?” It meant that while both sides played to caste identities, one side played it better. The moral posturing that a developmental narrative shorn of primordial identity was rejected in favour of the Mandal narrative does not stand when one goes through the campaign rhetoric.
From a Union Minister drawing equivalence between the victim of the >lynching at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh and the perpetrators of the crime, to another Minister likening the >death of two Dalit children to the random stoning of dogs, it was an unedifying list of statements that exposed the moral centre of the government. These also created a feeling among the electorate that a lot of the rhetoric on social justice spouted by the newly minted backward class allies of the BJP was just lip service and the party was not sincere in adhering to the principles of equitable distribution of resources.
One of these new allies, former Chief Minister and Dalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi, who formed the Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) after his expulsion from the Janata Dal (United), had expressed this concern in the middle of the elections. He won only one of the two seats he contested to become the only MLA elected from his party.
In the last phase of the elections in Muslim-dominated Seemanchal areas, an appeal on communal lines was made by the BJP to counter the opposition’s caste arithmetic. The statements were made not by a fringe player like Sadhvi Prachi, or the routinely hawkish MP Mahanth Yogi Adityanath, or even the controversial Union Minister Giriraj Singh, but by party president Amit Shah and even Prime Minister Modi.
That particular strategy sent out two messages. One, that the party had run out of ideas on how to combat political rivals on the field; and two, that the Prime Minister was no longer shy about saying openly that which had earlier been said by fringe elements in the party. This, added to the fact that no action has been taken against those in the party and government making objectionable statements, has led to a situation where the separation between the fringe and mainstream has been blurred.
Arithmetic versus chemistry The BJP has always maintained that while some elections are won through pure arithmetic, that is, the stacking up of vote banks and a simple addition process, others are won through chemistry — an inexplicable connect that occurs between a politician and his voter that transcends primordial loyalties and other considerations. The election of Mr. Modi is put in the latter category by the party — a singular achievement in the party’s history. However, the election in Bihar has been put in the category of a purely arithmetical triumph.
This template would have held water had >Nitish Kumar’s triumph been a conventional one of a simple majority with a dignified number of MLAs in the opposition camp. But that is not the case. He and Lalu Prasad, along with the Congress, have roundly trounced the BJP and won a mandate that is more than its parts, in the process almost decimating even traditional strongholds of the BJP.
The dissipation of the chemistry between the Prime Minister and the Bihari voter can be directly traced to the atmosphere created by these unseemly comments. It has suddenly catapulted the Prime Minister into the fray from being above it.
He needs to reclaim that higher ground — not just to gather electoral triumphs, but because, in the words of American playwright Maxwell Anderson, “there are some men who lift the Age they live in, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime.”
nistula.hebbar@thehindu.co.in
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