If the positives of PM Modi’s image coupled with a brilliant poll strategy crafted by Amit Shah ensured the BJP’s victory in the MCD elections, the negatives contributed by the Opposition lent a helping hand as well, explains RAJESH SINGH

The fortress has been breached and overrun. The enemy is on the retreat. It took less than three years for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to avenge its humiliating defeat in the Delhi Assembly Election at the hands of a juvenile Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Now the child has been shown its place. With more than 180 seats out of 270 in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi elections, the BJP is poised to contest the Assembly poll from a superior position. Winning the MCD battle was an achievement for the BJP, but a greater triumph would be to govern the civic bodies efficiently. They had become a den of corruption and a case of classic mismanagement over the past few years.

Ironically, while the BJP ran the municipal corporations during this bleak period, it has escaped the people’s fury. The single and simple reason is this: The voters believed in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership and the credibility of the party he leads. They felt that the civic organisations would revamp their ways of functioning under his overarching supervision. It can thus be said without fear of exaggeration that the people of Delhi chose the Prime Minister over their Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

The credibility of the Prime Minister, now three years into his term, is not a result of smart packaging as his opponents would term it — though packaging has been an important element, and in itself is not abhorrent. A well-packaged product may catch the consumer’s attention but the product alone on its merit sells in the long term. If Modi represented hollow promises burnished by catchy one-liners, three years is a long enough time for the electorate to have understood the chicanery and busted the game in the MCD case. This perception would have been fatal for the BJP, combined with the anti-incumbency factor.

To the contrary, the Prime Minister’s image completely offset anti-incumbency and allowed the party to cruise to a crushing win over its rivals. An image, like a product, can be pleasingly packaged, but shorn of contents, it would collapse sooner than later. In Prime Minister Modi’s case, the Government he leads at the Centre has over the years taken a slew of measures that has won the people’s hearts and minds, and more importantly, the hearts and minds of the middle class and the lower middle class.

It was not too long ago that the Modi regime had faced the barb of a “suit boot ki sarkar” from its principal opponent at the national level, the Congress. The response was swift in coming. The Government strengthened the MGNREGA, which was meant to provide rural employment; unleashed a host of steps to boost agriculture; expanded the scope of social services; fortified direct benefit transfers of subsidies for the needy through the opening of Jan Dhan accounts and by effective use of the Aadhaar regime; took significant and sincere steps to enhance the quality and reach of healthcare and educational services directed at the marginalised sections of society; launched a scheme to ensure that cooking gas was available for near-free to all homes that lived on the periphery of the economy; and executed plans to provide greater hours of electricity to rural India.

These were not philosophical fulminations targeted to impress the intelligentsia but they led to tangible gains. Because the results were there to see — although one can always argue with some element of truth that the gains have not fully reached the beneficiaries for a variety of reasons — it became difficult for the Opposition to contest them, or became hard for the people to accept the Opposition’s claim. In fact, the more the Opposition parties tried to discredit the Modi regime, the more they themselves lost credibility.

The MCD victory is another feather in the BJP’s cap, which is already brimming with feathers. Only recently, the party crushed its rivals in the Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand Assembly elections and formed Governments in Manipur and Goa. Earlier, it had snatched Assam from the Congress and wriggled its way to power in Arunachal Pradesh. It finished second to the Trinamool Congress in a West Bengal Assembly byelection, pushing aside the Congress and the left Front. A little earlier, it posted remarkable results in the local body elections in Odisha against the formidable Biju Janata Dal. This year-end, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh vote for a new Assembly, and the BJP is widely expected to win the two States.

There are those who had confidently predicted Modi would never be chosen as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013. Once he was, they prophesied he would never become the Prime Minister. When he did, they foresaw doom for the idea of a secular India and the rise of a brazen capitalist class. The left-liberals were in the forefront of scare-mongering. And now, with that apprehension too going awry, the opponents are left with nothing but to condemn electronic voting machines (EVMs) for playing favourites!

This, of course, does not mean that we should become supplicants and refuse to hear anything of value that cautions us against errors the Modi regime could commit. There is a school of thought, for instance, which wonders whether the Prime Minister will be able to balance the cap, now heavy with so many feathers that there is a real fear of its titling and falling to the ground. Such instances have happened in the past — Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, and VP Singh are good examples of leaders placed on lofty pedestals and then toppled to the ground.

Modi is nothing if not a political animal, and a shrewd one at that. He learns from the past and tweaks his approach to suit the moment, all the time not allowing the core of his party’s ideology to be dented. He became Prime Minister with a pro-industry image and assiduously worked to recast that image. In the process, industry was not made secondary but agriculture and social welfarism became equally primary. The demonetisation decision was a master stroke. Industry welcomed it by and large, and the middle class and the poor saw into the move the Prime Minister’s resolve to punish the corrupt rich. Had he not been on the right course, the Opposition would not have already conceded defeat in the lok Sabha Election to be held in 2019.

His anti-Muslim image — created by his rivals from the time he was Chief Minister of Gujarat and primarily after the 2002 incident in the State — too has gone for a toss. He hasn’t said one word or done one thing that can remotely be seen as anti-minority. The sabka saath sabka vikas slogan has served the party well. Although the BJP is yet to gain substantial votes of the Muslim community in elections, and all the Muslim candidates it put up in the MCD elections lost, the party is determined to pursue the path of non-appeasement of any section of society. Of course, this helps consolidation of majority votes, as was seen in the Uttar Pradesh election, but it does not deliberately exclude minority welfare.

The BJP’s success in the MCD elections has to be seen, thus, from such a larger perspective. If the positives of the Modi image coupled with a brilliant poll strategy crafted by party president Amit Shah ensured the victory, the negatives contributed by the Opposition gave a helping hand too. The ruling AAP in Delhi received valuable lessons in politics from the electorate — though it is uncertain if Kejriwal and his cohorts have learnt it. The first is to never abuse your opponents and fling unsubstantiated allegations against them in the belief that some of the muck will stick. Calling the Prime Minister a psychopath and terming senior Union Cabinet Ministers corrupt without a shred of evidence angered the people.

The second lesson is to understand your weaknesses and not spread yourself too thin. The AAP, instead of concentrating on governing Delhi, grew over-ambitious and sought to cast its wings in Punjab and Goa. In the first State, it managed just a few more seats that the Akali Dal-BJP combine, but was far behind the eventual winner, the Congress. In Goa, its candidates lost deposits in nearly all the constituencies they contested.

The strategy of going beyond Delhi had nothing to do with the party’s strength but with Kejriwal’s ego. He imagines himself as some sort of a national leader on par with the Prime Minister. In the 2014 lok Sabha Election, he contested against Modi in Varanasi and lost miserably. Just the fact that he stood against the then would-be Prime Minister was enough for him to bask in reflected glory. He needs to trim down his megalomania and get rid of those around him who feed him such nonsense. There is urgency to do so because the party may soon be staring at another crisis if the petition seeking the disqualification of 21 AAP legislators, now before the Election Commission of India, is accepted.

The Congress’s negativity too worked in the BJP’s favour. The entire MCD election strategy was mismanaged by the party high command — effectively Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi. Neither the Delhi unit chief Ajay Maken nor the party in-charge PC Chacko could understand the simmering discontent over ticket distribution; or if they did, they received no direction from the high command to rectify the situation. The departure of senior leaders, such as Arvinder Singh lovely, and the discontentment among those like AK Walia and Sheila Dikshit reflected the mess that the State unit has slipped into. Dikshit, easily the tallest leader the Congress has in Delhi, was not even asked to campaign. She had earlier too been dealt with unfairly when after being made the chief ministerial face in Uttar Pradesh, she was dumped after her party allied with the Samajwadi Party and settled for Akhilesh Yadav as the choice.

Now, of course, there is a spate of resignations or offers of resignation from those who managed the Congress’s affairs in Delhi, but that is bolting the stable after the horses have fled. Even so, the Congress did manage 30 seats and ensured the AAP’s failure on many seats. In the 2015 Assembly Election, Congress workers, having seen the writing on the wall, were reported to have gone around in their strongholds exhorting their voters to vote for the AAP and ensure the BJP’s defeat. This time, the Modi wave and the overwhelming resentment on the ground against Kejriwal’s Government and his party pre-empted a similar strategy. But look at where the Congress has landed: It is reduced to taking solace from getting at least a few seats in a State which it had governed uninterruptedly only a few years ago for three terms.

The results of the MCD elections have shown a consolidation of votes from all sections of society in the BJP’s favour, and this bodes well for the party in the next Assembly poll. East Delhi had been its weak spot. Coincidentally, it’s also the region which had been the AAP’s stronghold, and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia is an MlA from one the constituencies in the area. It has a large concentration of Poorvanchali votes — of people who have settled from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It does appear that the charm of Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari has worked.

In sum, it can be said that the verdict of the MCD polls reflects change with continuity — continuity with the BJP at the helm but change in the style of governance. The BJP gained by fielding fresh faces. Only 12 sitting councillors from across the political spectrum managed to retain their seats. The newcomers will have fresh ideas and novel ways of implementing those ideas and they need to be given adequate space and opportunity to do so.

Meanwhile, the results have led to a fresh spurt of calls for “Opposition unity”. The realisation has finally dawned on the Opposition parties that they cannot take on Prime Minister Modi individually but perhaps as a combine. The confidence and the arrogance at least on this count has dissipated. But can mere coming together without a credible narrative serve the purposeIJ And who will lead the coalitionIJ A discredited Congress or the mercurial regional parties that have no pan-India baseIJ Those who are flustered by the diminishing space for the Opposition must take their advice to the Congress — the only other national party besides the BJP. For now, it appears that the Congress leadership is lending more than a helping hand to realise the BJP’s “Congress mukt Bharat” resolve.