 "Notebandi: BJP banks on SP, BSP’s ‘empty’ coffers")
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has claimed to have beaten the demonetisation “blues” in Uttar Pradesh, convinced that its political adversaries, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) were in “trouble” with their “hollowed out coffers”.
“The Samajwadi is registering its presence only through official functions hosted by (chief minister) Akhilesh Yadav. Mayawati (the BSP chief) is not seen anywhere after an initial flurry of rallies,” said Abhishek Kaushik, Man Friday to Sunil Bansal, the BJP’s Uttar Pradesh general secretary (organisation) and the principal conduit between Lucknow and Delhi.
Kaushik added, “Our campaigns and mobilisation are on course. We have not tweaked, downplayed or deleted any part of our pre-poll blueprint. Our parivartan (transformation) yatra is rolling on schedule, the Prime Minister and other top leaders are addressing the pre-planned rallies.” Minted from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s student pool of activism, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarati Parishad, Kaushik helms the BJP’s social media department housed inside a war room at the party’s Lucknow headquarter.
The war room was conceptualised and put in place in 2014 by Prashant Kishore, a former consultant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As Kishore’s role in the Congress, that hired out him to lift it from the two-decade morass it sunk into, remained ambiguous, his protégé, Siddharth Sikka, who remained with BJP, was emphatic about how he would deliver on his mandate in the 2017 state elections.
Sikka, an IIT Kanpur engineer, explained, “Our discourse is aspirational and critical. Every slogan that hits out at the Akhilesh Yadav government and sounds negative is juxtaposed with the vision of change that a BJP dispensation will unveil.”
For example, one slogan that recalled the bold confrontation between the Uttar Pradesh cops and squatters at Mathura’s Jawahar Bagh in June 2016 was accompanied by one highlighting the “benefits” brought to the poor by the Centre’s flagship “Ujwala” and “Mudra” schemes.
The “aspirational” motif was reinforced in other ways, too.
Nearly 1,500 “akansha petis” (boxes of aspirations) have been placed in colleges for students to tell what they “expected” of a BJP government. Sikka claimed while demonetisation-related issues figured high on the agenda in the provincial places and villages, city youths were “more concerned” about law and order and sanitation.
“These issues are fodder for our campaign against SP,” said Kaushik.
Ironically, it was not the anti-Samajwadi tirade on the BJP’s social media sites that drew as many “likes”—14, 98, 797 in a month — as a visual, depicting BSP leader Mayawati against a backdrop of the monuments of Dalit icons she had put up in Lucknow and Noida in her last stint as the chief minister. Mayawati was lambasted for the drain on the state exchequer that the Dalit memorials allegedly cost.
“Our job against Mayawati is done. We have only to remind voters of her corruption and they get put off,” maintained a UP BJP official.
As the BJP’s riders on the 1,650 motorbikes it purchased recently for Rs 6 crore—“payment only by cheques” and “fuel bought by Bharat Petroleum’s petrocard”, stressed Kaushik—fanned out into the villages to purvey the messages of Mayawati’s “corruption” and Akhilesh’s “patronage of criminals” from December 18, away from the glare, BSP has charted out its social and political trajectory.
“This is the BJP and RSS’s disinformation that the BSP has no money after the ‘notebandhi’. We don’t need money. We only need to follow the methodologies crafted by our founder, Kanshi Ram,” said a member of Mayawati’s team of strategists.
Among the facets of the BSP’s template were classifying the voters into upper castes, backward castes and minorities (the party assumed Dalits were its mainstay) and reaching out to these groupings through the “bhaichara samitis” (brotherhood committees) that Mayawati had first set up in 2006 to enlarge her social base before the 2007 elections and a campaign themed on law and order, demonetisation and the absence of a CM face in BJP, in that order.
Mayawati’s aide also said she will declare no more monuments or memorials will be raised.
