Opinion BJP’s post-mortem of 2024 verdict: Learning to listen

Ever since results of the general election came in, the BJP has been in the throes of a post-mortem — and so far, it is only shining a light on the flailing within. Be it politically crucial Uttar Pradesh, where the party’s winning streak of 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2022 was arrested, its tally sliding from 62 to 33 and vote share plunging by 8 per cent, or West Bengal, where its relatively recent rise has been interrupted, its Lok Sabha tally dropping by six, the BJP’s search for answers is marked by party leaders sniping at each other, settling scores, deflecting blame. In UP, senior party leaders have suggested that the BJP’s losses can be attributed primarily to the party organisation being forced to take second place to government, and to a high-handed bureaucracy given a free run while the party worker was marginalised — a thinly veiled attack on Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. In Bengal, Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has sought to fend off the calls for accountability directed at him by upending a slogan coined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Why “Sabka saath, sabka vikas”, Adhikari has asked. In other words, and despite his subsequent attempts to backtrack, he has posed a fundamental — and in a country of many diversities, a fundamentally disturbing — question: Why must the BJP court the minority at all, why have a Minority Morcha, if the minority won’t vote for it?

Of course, in a party that has grown so spectacularly and where power, especially since 2014, has been so concentrated, discordant voices in public also betray stirrings within and may strengthen the party’s feedback mechanism. They can suggest new directions, help in course correction. But ruling parties, as they look within, must walk a fine line between looking back and moving ahead, between finding scapegoats and searching for solutions. As the mainstay of the NDA combine, the BJP has just won a third consecutive term in power and the onus of continuing and re-imagining governance of this large and complex country is on it. That also depends on what lessons it learns from Mandate 2024 which, in turn, depends on how it reads it. While it needs to find out why it lost 63 seats, and even a simple majority, it should resist the temptation to jump to self-serving conclusions like Adhikari and his colleagues have done. A look-back by the ruling party is useful in as much as it helps it move on quickly, shows a clear way forward, not if it leads to an incoherent standstill and reinforces its weaknesses.

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Its diminished numbers also mean that, not just the Opposition, its allies are also watching the BJP. Some have spoken out already. In UP, Nishad party chief, Sanjay Nishad, has raised the issue of “misuse of bulldozer against the poor”. Subsequently, the RLD and the JD(U) have openly questioned and described as divisive an order by the Muzaffarnagar police directing that shops and carts on the Kanwar Yatra route display the names of their owners. This push-back and those questions are welcome and reassuring in a democracy — after a decade, the BJP is being held to account both by an emboldened Opposition outside and by stronger allies within. Listening to these voices could be the first lesson for the party as it tries to figure out Mandate 2024.