 "Ahead of polls, Modi unveils 'hidden' hawkish agenda to conquer UP")
Will Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi project development agenda nationally while playing communal card in Uttar Pradesh? Modi is trying to ride two horses simultaneously. Be a ‘Hindu hriday samrat’ (king of the Hindu heart) in UP and Bihar and a vikas purush (development man) in the non-Hindi-speaking states.
Muslims have shortlisted Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal as their key battleground states because their results would most impact who leads the next government at the Centre: the Congress or the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 2012, Muslims deserted the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), turning to the Samajwadi Party (SP) and providing it with a majority in UP. Haunted by the long shadows of the communal pogrom and challenged in his own party, the forthcoming general polls may not be as smooth a ride for him as Modi had hoped it to be. But as the BJP strongman moves closer to becoming his party’s probable candidate for prime minister, his model of development is coming under greater scrutiny by both rivals and the media. The biggest criticism is that he is too pro-business and that poor and minority communities, especially Muslims, have been left behind.
The BJP’s prime ministerial aspirant is trying to burnish his political brand appeal, he wouldn’t want to risk anything that could dent his image as a Hindutva poster boy. Consider this: in 2012 Gujarat elections, Modi polarised the society on communal line by describing Ahmed Patel as a Congress aspirant for chief ministership and referring to him as Ahmed "Mian" Patel. In Karnataka Assembly polls, Modi played the communal card, too. In a public meeting, he raised the attack on Sarabjit Singh’s in a Lahore jail and criticized the Congress for treating the episode with ‘contempt’.
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However, Modi’s failure to emerge as a vote multiplier in Karnataka has raised doubts among a section of the BJP top leadership at least on what he would mean electorally and whether it is worth risking a wholesale consolidation of the minority votes behind the Congress and other regional parties without achieving a reverse polarisation of the Hindu votes. Political pundits are of the view that Hindutva is still the hottest commodity in Hindi heartland and packaged in a development wrapper, it will probably find a market across India as well. The party sent out a clear signal about the brand of politics it intends to pursue in the run-up to elections next year by putting Amit Shah in charge of Uttar Pradesh.
Shah went to Ram Lalla’s temple in Ayodhya, prayed and claimed if voted to power, the BJP would construct a “grand mandir”, unmindful of a legal bar. So, is the BJP back to playing a card that was rejected by UP’s voters in the recent elections? The idea of resurrecting the Ayodhya plank was to regroup the BJP’s core voters, many of whom had shifted to the BSP and the SP. BJP spin doctors indicate the party will also not make any overt attempt to woo Muslims and any such attempt will hit Modi’s core Hindu middle-class votebank. Modi has been focusing on UP, considering the state’s strategic importance for the BJP. The heartland, which the party once ruled, sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Although caste and religious identity politics are gradually losing their shine, the idea of the religion-based vote, which is the source of power for smaller political parties, is strong in several parts of India.
For UP, Modi becomes all the more necessary as the party requires a name which could galvanise the voter and act as a catalyst. With the state unit is a divided house and factionalism proving to be its bane, the foremost task before the party would be forging unity among the BJP leaders and their camp followers. One school of thought argues that the real picture is: the RSS is well aware that the days of Lalji Tandon, Kalraj Mishra, Kalyan Singh and Vinay Kathihar are over. The elevation of Modi and the appointment of Shah as in-charge of the state affairs give a clear signal that the party plans to capitalise on his hardline image to regain lost ground and repeat the success of 1996 and 1998 to catapult it to power at the centre. The BJP won 10 out 80 in both 2004 and 2009.
For this, block voting by Muslims – their backing any party best placed to defeat the BJP – has played a major part. In 2004, it was the Gujarat riots and in 2009, Varun Gandhi’s inflammatory speech that provoked this tactical response. Experts believe that there will be a major shift in tactical voting by the Muslims this time. The possibility of a Congress-SP post-poll coalition is imminent. Muslims may vote for the Congress where its candidates are in the race and elsewhere, for SP candidates. Muslims may now vote positively to bring about a Congress-SP coalition in the state. But other like-minded parties can take advantage of this only if they do not overplay the Muslim card, otherwise there may be a Hindu backlash, giving an advantage to the BJP.
Advani’s Jinnah epiphany, when he rediscovered the Qaid-e-Azam as a secular statesman on a visit to Karachi in 2005, should be read as an odd incident in his ongoing crusade to recast himself as a non-sectarian ‘statesman’. There is no ideological difference between him and Modi in the matter of Hindutva; the difference lies in Modi’s willingness to be explicitly majoritarian and his ability to leverage this candour into political success.
Modi’s approach seems to be working in Gujarat, but such an autocratic style would be difficult to apply at the national level, especially in an era of coalition government. The heavyweight BJP leader remains a hugely controversial figure, especially beyond Gujarat, because of his alleged behaviour in 2002 soon after getting into office, when communal violence left over 1,000 people dead, most of them Muslims. At present, Modi has become one of the central concerns of the day in a way that Indira Gandhi was in 1971, 1977 and 1980. There is something of Sanjay Gandhi in Modi too — as in the brash, hyper-masculine style, the occasional targeting of Muslims.