With the Congress regaining control and the BJP having a brush with trouble, there are lessons for all national parties. It’s time to focus more on policies and less on hollow sloganeering
The Assembly election results of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh have not only set the template for the Lok Sabha election, which is expected to be announced in the first week of March next year, but has also clearly drawn the battle lines for what is expected to be one of the fiercest elections ever. For the Congress, the biggest takeaway from the polls is, undoubtedly, the emergence of Rahul Gandhi as an unassuming leader who has shed his past baggage of indifference, political immaturity and dynasty to come on his own. For the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the biggest setback has been the demolition of the myth and hype built around the invincibility of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah.
Till these elections took place, the BJP had become one big electoral juggernaut, very convincingly demolishing one political opponent after the other. The routine rout of the Opposition in the elections had built an aura of invincibility around the Modi-Shah duo — the mass connect of Modi and the Chanakya-like strategy of Shah had become a part of political punditry and was also instilled as an ideal combination in some of the BJP-RSS workers.
On the contrary, repeated defeats had affected even the body language of the Congress leaders, who went into a defeatist mode, occasionally without putting up any fight, like in Goa. Rahul Gandhi and pappu had almost become synonymous, popularised as it was by WhatsApp groups of the BJP’s IT cell. So much so that there was a time when even die-hard Congress workers started believing the falsehoods doing the rounds on how ineffective Rahul Gandhi was as a leader and how his stewardship was taking the party towards peril.
December 11, 2018, changed this political narrative for all time to come. Its developments have come barely three months before the announcement of the general election, triggering a political tsunami and throwing open all sorts of possibilities. All of a sudden, there is a spring in the steps of the Congress workers while in the BJP, an element of doubt has crept in.
This brings forth the most plausible question: Will the Modi magic work or not? Even though party spokespersons keep hammering the fact that the Prime Minister’s personal integrity is intact and that issues for Assembly and Lok Sabha polls are entirely different, this is hardly convincing for both sceptics and supporters. They know it well that victory in the Assembly elections in these very States five years ago, in 2013, had set the ball rolling for the saffron party and it built on the momentum of the wave in May 2014.
Five years down the line, that pace is now with the Congress and it will expectedly follow it till the 2019 Lok Sabha poll. In fact, the Grand Old Party was building a thrust ever since it made crucial headway in the Gujarat Assembly polls in December 2017, where for the first time, Modi had to campaign really hard and Shah had to use all his electoral arithmetic to romp home. A resurgent Congress had given the BJP a run for its money in a State which for long had been considered a laboratory for Hindutva politics.
There was more to follow. Karnataka was widely billed to go the BJP way. This is what the spin doctors of the party had projected — the sulking Yeddyurappa was back with the BJP, moneybags were with the party managers, the Congress Government was facing anti-incumbency and what not. Everything was supposedly going for the BJP and against the Congress. But that was not to be. The BJP failed to get a majority on its own. “Congress-mukt Bharat was too arrogant a slogan,” said a BJP leader on condition of anonymity, adding that this was a classic case of unrealistic politics, bereft of grassroots reality. He hoped that this slogan would never be raised now, and even if it did, it would instantly become a matter of ridicule.
Similarly, the systematic targeting of the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were in bad taste and the appropriation of other Congress stalwarts by extolling the virtues of the likes of Sardar Patel and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose did not quite have the intended effect. “Leave historical figures alone for history books and academic discussions, not for electoral rhetoric and as poll issue,” summed up the leader.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha poll, obviously, the BJP will try to turn it into some sort of a presidential election, pitching Modi versus Rahul, and asking people if they would vote for an untested, unwilling and timid leader or go for the qualities of “a time-tested, strong face with muscular politics.”
The BJP’s second strategy would be to polarise the election with a strong pitch for building the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. But given the fact that the issue has already been milked to the hilt by the party for over the last quarter of a century and which yielded rich electoral dividends up to a point, this plank has reached a saturation level. The BJP can no longer hope for the same result and the law of diminishing returns will automatically apply. This is what happened in the three States.
So what’s the way forward for the BJP? First, it has to abandon the Congress-mukt Bharat pitch. Second, it must draw a list of achievements of its major decisions — demonetisation and GST — and keep hammering about their long-term benefits repeatedly and see how much traction it gets. Third, now that it has been cleared by the Supreme Court in the Rafale jet deal, it should keep the Opposition in the loop for future acquisitions rather than being defensive about them. Fourth, it would have to stop pitchforking the Modi-Shah axis and democratise its intra-party discourse. “At present, party MPs are treated more like booth-level workers to whom directions are hurled and there is no process of consultation or listening involved,” a BJP MP told this writer after the poll results.
Last but not the least, it would have to stop polarisation of votes through hawkish leaders like Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. He will hardly attract any new votes as the Assembly elections of Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, where he campaigned extensively, have proved that there aren’t many takers for the religion card. At the same time, it would damage the body politic of India. Already, banners have come up in Lucknow extolling the hardliner Yogi as “Prime Minister material” and Modi has been painted as some sort of a liberal.
Similarly, what’s the way forward for the Congress? Right now it is the default Opposition party in several States and is expecting to get the anti-incumbency votes from those who expected too much from the first majority Government of the BJP in decades. This complacency has to end. First, it has to come out with an aggressive and workable solution to the problems it has been highlighting. It should spell out what it would do to solve farm distress beyond loan waivers. Second, if traders and small enterprises are distressed, what is the solution to the woes? Third, offending slogans like “chowkidar chor hai” should be banned; it is similar to “Congress-mukt Bharat” and even worse.
It should articulate what its policies would be at the Centre and how different they would be from the ones followed by the BJP Government? It also has to spell out its plan for job creation and how it proposes to go about it.
The days of sloganeering are over. The youth had a lot of expectations in 2014 and will have similar expectations in 2019 as well. Hollow and emotive slogans will no longer yield electoral dividends. Both parties should come with policies, which are implementable with details of how they intend to proceed. That would be the key to gaining the trust of our electorate.
(The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer, Chandigarh)
