The BJP’s hold on the map of India has shrunk. In 2017, after the party’s spectacular victory in Uttar Pradesh and Nitish Kumar’s return to the NDA, the political map of the country was swathed in saffron. Since then, however, there have been major reverses at the state level. The one big state the BJP has gained is Karnataka – and we all know how that was won, through back-room manoeuvring and suborned institutions, instead of a straightforward clean victory. In return, it has lost much of central India, as well as Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, in both of which it alienated its allies. Some of its high-profile targets held out against a sustained assault – most notably Odisha, where Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal somehow managed to be re-elected amidst the second Modi Wave of 2019. And now Jharkhand has fallen. Things have gone even worse for the BJP in the Jharkhand assembly election than it expected. A few weeks ago, everyone agreed the race was tight but expected that at least the BJP would be the single largest party on its own, perhaps half a dozen or so seats short of a majority – and what are half a dozen seats to Amit Shah? “We’ll have to do a bit of breaking,” one BJP leader told me, referring to the smaller parties that India’s political behemoth considers fair game.
But in the end, the BJP hasn’t wound up even as the single largest party in the legislature. That honour goes to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha of Hemant Soren, who, with his allies in the Congress, looks set to form the next government. By the standards of the Modi era, this is a strong repudiation of the BJP government in the state. There are several reasons for the BJP to worry. Each state it loses means that getting a consistent Rajya Sabha majority for the NDA, let alone the BJP itself, becomes more difficult. (Including nominated members, the alliance currently counts on 121 seats in the Upper House out of a total 245. Of course, its vast increase of MLAs in Uttar Pradesh gives it a consistent buffer against reverses elsewhere going forward.) But more to the point, the more state chief ministers there are who see their position in their state politics as dependent on taking an antagonistic position to the centre, the tougher it becomes to rule India. Hemant Soren has already claimed his government won’t implement the NRC and the CAA, for example. The consensus that had been built up in the GST Council is also fraying, with state leaders now seeing an opportunity to blame the BJP for a failure to deliver their share of taxes on time. I have argued before that the Modi mystique depends in large part upon being all-powerful, and the Amit Shah appeal is that he does not lose. With a scrappy opposition in so many states, these auras of invincibility are going to start eroding. But the BJP should also ask itself a more fundamental question: Has it caught the Congress disease? Remember the malaise the Congress suffered during its years of ascendancy. First, there was a high command culture, in which state leaders were constantly being subordinated to the whims and fancies of the party leadership in New Delhi. Second, allies felt they were being treated with summary arrogance. And third, service delivery at the state level began to suffer as the party’s hubris grew. The BJP is a much more disciplined outfit than the Congress has been for decades – a radical ideology does that for you – but nevertheless it is showing some of the symptoms of the Congress disease. Most relevant, perhaps, is its treatment of allies. The AIADMK, which formally joined the NDA earlier this year, is constantly being pushed to adopt positions that do not serve its domestic politics in an increasingly sub-nationalist state. The party used to sweep elections in Tamil Nadu when J Jayalithaa stood tall as a defender of Tamil rights; those days appear very long ago now. The BJP sees the AIADMK as nothing more than a shell it can inhabit in order to enter the politics of India’s most anti-BJP state. Then, there are the many allies that it has allowed to disappear. The Shiv Sena was pushed into leaving one of the longest alliances in Indian politics; it saw the BJP as deliberately setting out to erode its ally’s political space. The Telugu Desam Party left the NDA in 2018 amid accusations that the BJP was trying to steal away some of its leaders. The less said about its strategy in the north-east, the better. In Jharkhand, it is worth noting that the BJP needed the All Jharkhand Students Union to form a government last time, but it went into the elections alone this time. And it suffered strongly as a consequence. Look, for example, at the constituency of Ghatsila: The JMM’s Ramdas Soren has won with just over 37 per cent of the vote, the BJP got 33 per cent, but the AJSU got almost 19 per cent. Or Jugsalai, where the JMM’s Mangal Kalindi got 41 per cent, but the BJP and AJSU vote shares together are over 50 per cent of the vote. And in Chakradharpur, the BJP state president Laxman Giluwa got only 26 per cent of the vote, losing to Sukhram Oraon of the JMM by 11 percentage points, but the AJSU got 15 per cent of the vote. There is a similar pattern in many other state assembly constituencies. Had this been the Congress instead of the BJP losing because of a failure to form alliances, we would certainly have heard criticism of the party’s arrogance. Surely the BJP needs to ask itself questions as well?
The BJP has long desired a Congress-Mukt Bharat. Actually, it seems to think it will achieve an Opposition-Mukt Bharat. But does it also believe it can have an Ally-Mukt Bharat? That might be a bridge too far. The sort of confidence that leads some in the BJP to believe that any party, whether the AJSU, or the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, can be bought or split after the elections are over is exactly what is hurting them in state after state in India. It believes that it can expand into every Indian state with exactly the same method: find the supposedly dominant voting bloc, and win over communities that are less prominent. So it has made inroads with non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBCs in Uttar Pradesh; it has installed a Punjabi Chief Minister in Jat-dominated Haryana; and it put in a Brahmin chief minister in Maratha-centric Maharashtra. This is the high command’s strategy, and every state must implement it, apparently. But each state is different, and it might not always work. A non-tribal chief minister in Jharkhand may have sounded like a good idea in New Delhi, but it has to be a seen as a failure when combined with Raghubar Das’ image of arrogance and his sponsorship of laws that some tribal communities believed reduced their control over their land.
Next year, it has to deal with a possible loss in Delhi early in the year – and then it has Bihar in November or December, with a prickly ally who has a great sense of his own importance and is paranoid about being the junior partner in their alliance. The open question is whether the BJP is open to a course correction. Breathless profiles claiming the BJP exhibits unparalleled political acumen can only go so far. It does well in many states and nationally because its ideology is dominant and Modi’s popularity is unmatched. But, beneath that veneer, it is slowly developing the Congress disease.
