If the party fails to course-correct, it will further expose the chinks in its armour and allow Prime Minister Modi's and the party’s political opponents, who had been lying low all this while, to re-group and attack
It will take some time for both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress to fully comprehend what hit them on February 10 and to take stock of the drubbing that both the national parties got at the hands of the Aam Aadmi Party — a fledgling group that had nothing more than public sympathy and pro bono volunteers when it was launched just a few years ago.
Though both the national parties have suffered grievously, the reasons for their poor showing are very different. The Congress is devoid of credible leadership at the national level. Since no remedy is visible on the horizon, it is seen to be in terminal decline. This is undoubtedly the most important reason for the party’s complete whitewash in Delhi and for the AAP walking away with much of its vote. On the other hand, the BJP, which boasts of several brilliant electoral strategists, committed some fatal errors that resulted in the party snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. While the BJP’s ‘What went wrong’ list is rather, long, I would like to confine myself to just two: The first relates to the timing of the Delhi State Assembly election, and the second to the manner in which the party enabled Mr Arvind Kejriwal to cash in on the underdog effect .
First, the timing. The BJP would never have got such a pounding at the hands of the AAP if it had gone in for the election within a month of its remarkable victory in the lok Sabha poll in May 2014. In that election, the party had won all the seven lok Sabha seats in Delhi and had forged ahead of its rivals in most of the 70 State Assembly segments. Anyone who has studied electoral history in India will vouch for the fact that barring exceptions, such encashment of popular support is possible if elections are held to other democratic bodies in a State in the immediacy of a major electoral victory.
For example, the Janata Party dissolved many State Assemblies soon after its lok Sabha victory in March 1977 and obtained comfortable victories in all of them. Indira Gandhi returned the compliment when she was back in the saddle in January 1980, and with similar success. The decision to postpone the Delhi poll till February 2015 was, therefore, a bad decision. The party may not have won 60 seats in the State Assembly, but it would surely have secured a simple majority. BJP leaders got this one wrong, and it has cost them dearly.
The first reason for the BJP’s terrible performance is that the party completely forgot the reasons for the terrific advantage that Mr Narendra Modi got over other political leaders after his anointment as the prime ministerial nominee, between September 2013 and May 2014. large sections of the media mounted a concerted assault on him for 11 long years and blamed him for the 2002 Gujarat violence, although there had been no evidence that pointed to his complicity.
Also, fearing his popularity among the masses, a large phalanx of politicians from the Congress to the Samajwadi party to the Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal and even regional parties like the Trinamool Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, made him the sole target of political attack and tried every trick in the book to derail his campaign. During those eight months, not a single day passed without a prominent political leader throwing a jibe at Mr Modi or hurling the choicest invectives at him. Since the Congress, which has a political dynasty at its apex, poured scorn on Mr Modi for being a chaiwala in his childhood, the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee secured a humongous advantage. He built on this by emphasising his humble beginnings in life.
He spoke of how he was an “outsider” to Delhi and its devious ways, how he wanted to root out corruption and how he wanted the bureaucracy to think afresh and come up with out-of-the-box solutions for some festering problems plaguing the country .
As a result, he was perceived as the underdog who deserved public sympathy because of his humble origins, public protection because of the sustained bombardment on him by leaders of all other political parties and influential sections of the media and lots of votes, to help him settle scores with his detractors. Mr Modi got all of this in abundance and secured a spectacular mandate with a clear majority to rule India for the next five years.
But, come January-February, 2015, the BJP completely forgot all of this. It also forgot that it was now in power — and complete power — and that in the country and in the public mind, the equations had begun to change. Mr Modi was no longer the bechara, the poor tea-seller who was being hounded by well-entrenched politicians. He was now the raja — the king of all he surveyed. It was now his turn to follow Raj Dharma, and pay special attention to the weak and the dispossessed, who too wanted to live the great Indian dream and, like him, climb the ladder socially, politically and economically.
On the other hand, the vulnerable man was the Muffler Man. The results show that the BJP did everything in its command to make Mr Kejriwal the bechara who deserved sympathy, public protection and an abundance of votes! It resorted to carpet-bombing Delhi’s 70 Assembly constituencies with dozens of Union Ministers and MPs, most of whom showered abuse on Mr Kejriwal and his party.
The final outcome has stunned everybody — the electorate, the Aam Aadmi Party, the BJP and the Congress. Such extraordinary aberrations occur in the first-past-the-post system and invariably give the first party a huge advantage over the party that comes second when the vote-share gap between the two crosses 10 percent. In the Delhi Assembly election, the gap in the vote share of the AAP and the BJP is close to a staggering 23 per cent.
The BJP will now have to go back to the drawing board and ask itself how, after so many remarkable electoral and political successes, it blundered so badly in the national capital. If it addresses this question squarely, it will recover from the Delhi shock in time for the great battles that lie ahead in Bihar and in Bengal.
If not, the failure will further expose the chinks in its armour and allow the party’s and Prime Minister Modi’s political opponents, who had been lying low all this while, to re-group and attack.