Decoding BJP's winning formula

Book review of 'How the BJP Wins: Inside India's Greatest Election Machine'

How the BJP Wins

Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine

Prashant Jha

Juggernaut

235 pages; Rs 399

The successive electoral triumphs of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have mesmerised its supporters and rivals alike. After their election victories in Assembly polls this year, particularly in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah are perceived to be invincible.

If the 1984 Lok Sabha verdict can be attributed to a sympathy wave in favour of the Congress, a majority of Indians were either not born or too young to remember a leader and party exercise such sway over voters, last seen in the heydays of Indira Gandhi in the early 1970s. 

In his latest book Prashant Jha credits the BJP’s electoral success to Mr Modi’s near hypnotic grip over the masses that few leaders have had since 1991, and to Mr Shah’s “school of election management”.

Mr Jha’s book was officially launched on Monday at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, with the venerable institution advertising the event in leading newspapers.

In this exhaustive but racy account, Mr Jha credits the BJP’s electoral successes to Mr Modi’s credibility and popular connect, Mr Shah’s indefatigable energy, their willingness to learn from mistakes, ability to raise resources efficiently, a dash of social engineering and appropriate tablespoonfuls of communal polarisation.

The book doesn’t, however, provide historical contexts of how elections have been planned and fought in India since 1935. While the dexterity of their skill cannot be doubted, Messrs Modi and Shah come across as pioneers in the esoteric art of election management.

Yet Mr Jha quotes K N Govindacharya, one of the BJP’s most influential leaders of the 1990s, who says Mr Modi’s “forte is political marketing”. On April 6, 2014, L K Advani had put it a bit differently: Mr Modi was not his protégé, but he was “an excellent event manager”.

Apart from its eulogy to the Modi-Shah duo, the book highlights the key role of another rising star, Ram Madhav, who some in the Sangh would love to see as the next BJP chief. It is unsparing in its criticism of Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi.

Mr Jha, however, goes beyond collating his own reportage and that of others to present this account sans “theoretical mumbo-jumbo”.

The chapter “Shah’s Sangathan” is enlightening even for journalists who cover the party. It details the organisational changes that Mr Shah and his Man Friday in Uttar Pradesh, Sunil Bansal, have effected since 2014. 

“Social Engineering” is another engrossing chapter that explains BJP’s caste calculations. “H-M Chunav” brings out the Sangh Parivar’s majoritarian project, how it helped it win UP and encouraged the demise of “secular politics”. 

The final chapter, “The Future of the Hegemon”, charts the uphill task for the Opposition in the next general elections, but also the challenges for the BJP in maintaining its support among competing caste and class groups.

Mr Jha ably elaborates how Mr Modi reinvented himself as an icon of the poor after Rahul Gandhi’s barb that he ran a “suit-boot ki sarkar”.

In UP, the BJP leveraged data from the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) to project itself as a party for the poor. Effective roll-out of the Ujjwala scheme to provide cooking gas to poor families, toilet construction under the Swachhata Mission, the Jan Dhan Yojana and the Mudra Yojana helped. Mr Jha recounts how the BJP chief persuaded the PM, after feedback from the state unit, on the importance of a farm loan waiver.

Another interesting peep into the BJP’s UP campaign is the money the party spent. According to Mr Jha, the estimates range from Rs 16 crore to Rs 1,500 crore! There was a bottom-up resource collection, he says. The candidate was expected to be “economically strong”, but the bulk of BJP’s resource mobilisation happened at the central level. 

Mr Jha says that unlike the Congress, which goes through a leaky, corruption-prone chain to collect money, the BJP leadership knows which ministry in which state government offers opportunities and it deals with the businessmen or individuals concerned directly. 

During the UP Assembly polls, the authorities seized Rs 115 crore from the day the model code of conduct came into force to the conclusion of the election, three times the money seized in the 2012 polls. Mr Jha argues that this was evidence enough that demonetisation didn’t impact resource mobilisation for major political parties.

Instant political analysis is fraught with risks — more so in a country as diverse as India where the political ground can shift within weeks.

The book has tried to make sense of the events from 2014 Lok Sabha polls till the end of July, when Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar jumped ship to align with the BJP. “It is striking that three years into his term, there is no anti-incumbency against Narendra Modi. In fact, power has only added to his appeal,” Mr Jha writes.

But August and September have brought about some of the worst days for the Modi government since it lost in Delhi and Bihar in 2015. The list is long — the Supreme Court verdict on privacy, the mess in Haryana, the unabated farmers’ agitation in parts of the country, the embarrassing failing to ensure the defeat of Congress leader Ahmed Patel in a Rajya Sabha election, the controversy around the murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh, and the anger over steep diesel  and petrol prices.

Most of all, the government is being accused of running the economy into the ground with demonetisation and the hurried roll-out of the goods and services tax (GST) regime. The narrative, has shifted enough for the BJP chief to recently caution supporters, with no hint of irony, not to trust all they read on social media, which remains the backbone of Sangh Parivar campaigning. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is unhappy, as are its fraternal organisations working among farmers and workers.

In the past two months, opposition parties have been persistent in raising economic issues and resisted the trap of binary identity politics. Interesting bypolls are due in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar that will test the index of opposition unity. Assembly polls are round the corner in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.

It is possible that the BJP will recover some lost ground as the Supreme Court starts daily hearings in the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. But stranger things are known to have happened in Indian politics.