Opinion Modi, for many reasons

However, a cyclone of a different kind has hit his party in the two states that went to the polls on October 15. As spectacular as the BJP’s victory in both states has been the defeat of the Congress, and Rahul is undoubtedly one of the principal architects of this defeat. Not only did his party lose power in both the states, but it has been cast away to a distant third place.

Coming in the wake of a fiercer electoral cyclone that battered the Congress in May, this debacle in Maharashtra and Haryana will, surely, further accentuate the crisis in India’s Grand Old Party. And since the GOP is unlikely to do very well in most of the states that will elect their new assemblies in 2015 (Bihar, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir), 2016 (Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry) and 2017 (Uttar Pradesh, Manipur and Punjab), it is safe to surmise that its fortunes will plummet further before they begin to climb again.

The Congress will someday bounce back. It must. But its leaders and followers must know that there cannot be revival without painful soul-searching and even more painful self-corrective action.

But until the revival of the Congress takes place, the near and medium future belongs to the BJP. Its victories in Maharashtra and Haryana are bound to further saffronise the political landscape in the country, with a distinct possibility of the BJP coming to power in the two key northern states, Bihar and UP, and the party making significant inroads even in states like Tamil Nadu and Assam, where non-Congress regional parties have so far kept it at the margins.

What accounts for the incredible tenfold rise in the number of seats the BJP won in Haryana? What is the main reason for the BJP recording a more than 100 per cent increase in its Maharashtra tally in 2009, and in the process achieving a feat — crossing the 100-plus mark on its own strength — that no other party in the state had managed since 1990?

The answer, indisputably, is the current nationwide popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The decisive mandate he won for his party in the parliamentary elections five months ago created a tremendously beneficial tailwind for the BJP as it prepared itself for the electoral sortie in the two states. But Modi did not remain content with that. He imparted tremendous physical energy to the BJP’s campaigns, so much so that he became the sole face of the party’s bid for power in the two states.

In Maharashtra, he, joined by Amit Shah, the party’s new president, took the calculated risk of severing the 25-year-old alliance with the Shiv Sena and fighting the election on the BJP’s own strength. The risk has brought its reward. In Haryana, too, the Modi-Shah duo’s decision to get the local unit of the BJP to go it alone was audacious, considering that it had only four MLAs in the outgoing assembly.

However, in both states, the BJP was helped by factors other than Modi’s persona. It benefited from the strong anti-incumbency that the ruling dispensations suffered from — the corrupt Congress-NCP combine in Maharashtra and the discredited Congress in Haryana. In both states — and this is a very hopeful development for the country as a whole — caste played a diminished role in these assembly elections.

For example, the shift of Dalit votes in favour of the BJP marks a significant socio-cultural transformation. Young and educated Dalits, who are or want to be part of the aspirational middle-class India, are disenchanted with the traditional Dalit leaders. Which is why, the BSP, which once exhibited a lot of promise in both Haryana and Maharashtra, has fared badly this time. In fact, this was also the reason for its poor performance in the Lok Sabha elections in UP.

This also explains why the Republican Party  of India (Athavale), which swears by Ambedkarism, chose to ally with the BJP in Maharashtra.

If the BJP shows sincerity — and not mere tokenism — in actualising the aspirations of the Dalit youth through its development and governance strategy, India will surely see an end to Dalit exclusivism. And this will help today’s inequitous Hindu society make significant strides in promoting the two inter-related ideals of social justice and social harmony.

The election results in Maharashtra show yet another positive development, of which the BJP has been the beneficiary. It is the Shiv Sena having been reduced to a distant second in the sweepstakes, as a result of which it perforce has to accept the role of a humbled junior partner in a BJP-led government, if at all it chooses to join the coalition. Why did the Shiv Sena fail to capitalise on the anti-incumbency mood in the state, whereas its former junior ally, the BJP, succeeded? The reason again is socio-cultural. Although Marathi-speaking people are proud of their language and cultural heritage, the Shiv Sena’s narrow-minded linguistic appeal has lost much of its potency. Indeed, young boys and girls in families that traditionally supported the Shiv Sena chose to vote for Modi’s BJP in this election. After all, they too are or want to be part of India’s aspirational middle class.

In this socio-culturally changed scenario, the BJP may — and I hope it does — feel emboldened to ignore caste considerations in selecting chief ministers to head its governments in Maharashtra and Haryana. In Maharashtra, it should entrust the responsibility of leading the state to an honest, untainted, socially committed and young leader like Devendra Fadnavis, disregarding his Brahmin birth.

The fact that the Hindutva-guided BJP has not yet begun to include Indian Muslims in its vision of development and socio-cultural change is, I continue to believe, a huge minus. Nevertheless, I have no hesitation in congratulating the party for some of the pluses that characterise its victories in Maharashtra and Haryana.

The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. After working for the BJP for 16 years, he left the party in early 2013 due to ideological differences.