Riding high on Modi's charisma, BJP remains India's pole party: Takeaways

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has reaffirmed its status as India’s pole party, beating principal opponent, the Congress, by leaps and bounds as it did in 2014.  The party has yielded very little space to regional forces that at one point looked like standing up to some competition against the BJP and even aspiring to form a federal front as a third alternative. 

Riding high on the charisma, credibility and ideological convictions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, complemented by the unflagging diligence and unerring strategising and planning by the BJP president, Amit Shah who showed remarkable resilience in accommodating allies punching above their weight and a formidable party machinery that was reinforced by the apparatuses spawned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP comfortably secured a majority of its own, going by available trends and looked like cushioning its own strength with the gains made by its partners.

The biggest achievements of the Modi-Shah duo were to not let go of the BJP’s base in north and western India and enhancing that by breaching West Bengal, that was out of bounds for the party for a long time with a spectacular debut that kept the ruling Trinamool Congress on edge. The duo swept away the Congress and the Left Front, consolidating hold over Assam and displacing the Congress as the second party to the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha. The BJP’s success saga is underwritten by the fruition of the grandiosely named “Look East” blueprint that Shah began working on three years ago and whose results were first evident when the BJP won Assam and later Tripura elections.

Although Hindutva and the collateral Ram temple were conspicuously missing in the BJP’s narrative, save in passing, its hard-core ideology was rooted and disseminated in the “nationalism” strand that came in full focus after the air strikes on Pakistan.  While Pulwama and Balakot did not pro-actively figure in popular responses on the BJP’s prospects, nationalism got fused in Modi’s personality because in the current political spectrum, he was seen as the only leader who could be trusted to keep India’s sovereignty safe and secure.  Indeed, this election was overwhelmingly dominated by Modi to the extent that the party became secondary to him. 

The trends also signalled Congress’s near collapse. The only state where it managed to stay afloat was Tamil Nadu and that was because of the bigger partner, the Dravida Munnetra Kazahagam (DMK) that outpaced the ruling AIADMK and its splinter. The Congress also made gains in Kerala but was wiped out in Andhra Pradesh by the YSR Congress Party and pushed down to the third position after the BJP in Telangana Rashtra Samithi-dominated Telangana.  Perhaps the most dismal news from the south of the Vindhayas for the Congress came from Karnataka. Despite—or perhaps in spite—of running a coalition government with the Janata Dal (Secular), the BJP had a free run over the state, knocking down stalwarts like M Mallikarjun Kharge of the Congress and remarkably, former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda on the latter’s home terrain Tumkur. The trends showed that the BJP, once identified as a party of the Lingayats in Karnataka, subsumed the caste divisions in an essentially casteist state in a larger message. The already shaky Congress-JD(S) coalition’s durability is now in doubt after today’s setback.

Notably, let alone build on the gains that accrued in the December 2018 assembly polls in parts of the Hindi heartland, the Congress was decimated in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where it has governments. As per trends, the only seat it will likely win in MP is that of Chhindwara that was contested by the chief minister, Kamal Nath’s son, Nakul Nath. In Rajasthan, chief minister Ashok Gehlot might have to swallow the ignominy of seeing his son routed by the sitting BJP MP, Gajendra Shekhawat. The BJP has put up an even more stellar performance in these states than in 2014 while in Gujarat, it has not yielded a single seat to the Congress. In Maharashtra, the Congress could possibly lose its stalwarts such as Sushilkumar Shinde and Ashok Chavan to the BJP-Shiv Sena while its ally, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) might just retain its 2014 tally. 

Of all the states where a regional coalition was projected to put up a challenge to the BJP, the Uttar Pradesh “gatbandhan” strung together by the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)-Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) based on its expectations on a caste combination that it hoped would trump the BJP’s “nationalist” ideology and the ruling party’s own formula of keeping the upper castes and some backward castes and Dalits together. On the last count, the BJP was close to getting 60 of the 80 seats while the “gatbandhan” hovered in the 20-25 range, with the BSP getting most of the seats.

The BSP’s ability to stay ahead of the SP was perhaps for two reasons: one, its leader Mayawati was better organised on the ground and managed to pull out her voters while the SP suffered from organisational infirmities caused by the split in the party and the exit of Akhilesh Yadav’s uncle, Shivpal Singh Yadav, who floated his own party, Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party (Lohia). While Shivpal did not pick up a single seat, he ensured that two of Akhilesh’s cousins, Akshaye and Dharmendra Yadav were in trouble and possibly get defeated by the BJP in Firozabad and Badaun.  Akhilesh’s poor showing also showed that the votes of the Yadavs, his mainstay, were split and could possibly have even gone to the BJP in places where younger Yadavs felt it was important to vote Modi back as the PM. In an election that in UP was consistently characterised by a moderate or less-than-moderate turnout, the BJP’s success was also due to its vastly superior organisational apparatuses.

Apart from the DMK, the only other provincial parties that stayed afloat as the political landscape was awash with the Modi wave were the Trinamool Congress, the TRS, the TSRCP, and the BJD. However, in the elections to come, the Trinamool, BJD, and TRS have to contend with the reality of facing up to the BJP and not the Congress as their principal adversary.