Ordinarily, if the country is less than a few months away from
three assembly elections, particularly if a state as significant as Maharashtra
is among them, one can expect a fair bit of buzz building up in the political
and media circles. If past trends are anything to go by, now would roughly be
the time when a few theatre-turned-cinema artistes would begin to write a
letter or two decrying some perceived injustice or the other and a few other
‘eminent historians’ and ‘public intellectuals’ would return some of the awards
that they had won during more ‘secular’ times. Thankfully, the nation has been
spared such theatrics this time around. Even the major political opposition
party, the Congress, has restricted its attacks to acerbic missiles around the
state of the economy and has not really shown any inclination to get its hands
fully dirty. The internal turbulence in the opposition and fairly clear
verdicts from all the three states in the general election have made the
opposition and its larger ecosystem almost concede defeat to the BJP.
However, for those interested in a more than casual analysis,
the elections of Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand will represent a critical
step in the political project that the BJP, under the Modi-Shah duo, has
effected in the country over the last five years. The genesis of this
initiative can be said to have been in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the
run-up to the 2014 general election, when Amit Shah was sent to the heartland
as its state in-charge. In UP, Shah managed to revive his party in a
spectacular fashion, by winning it 71 of the state’s 80 seats. He did this by
orchestrating a rainbow coalition of castes --- prizing away micro-castes
(non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits) from their larger caste groupings and
adding them onto the already existing social alliances of the BJP. Of course,
he was helped by the image and oratory of Narendra Modi but at the end of the
2014 general election, it was evident that, as an electoral strategy, Shah’s plan
of creating a social coalition of non-dominant castes had worked.
The elections of Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana quickly
followed and the strategy was replicated in all three. It needs to be noted
that in all these states, the BJP had been in power only intermittently and
never on its own strength. The polity of Maharashtra had come to be dominated
by the Marathas, Haryana’s by the Jats and Jharkhand had never seen a
non-tribal chief minister since its formation. The Modi-Shah duo built their
social alliances against this tide and after unprecedented victories in the
polls, reinforced these tactics with their selection of chief ministers from
the non-dominant communities. While it may seem that the Modi-Shah strategy has
paid off today, the move was fraught with risks at the time. Both Fadnavis and
Khattar bore the brunt of the wrath of the dominant groups (no doubt egged on
by the opposition) in the form of reservation protests, which nearly cost them
their chairs, and their party, the state. Also, this move was in stark contrast
to the practice followed rather successfully by the Congress and its allies for
decades in Maharashtra and, post the rise of Hooda, in Haryana. The strategy
was to target the most electorally dominant caste and combine it with their
traditional minority vote bank in order to create formidable social arithmetic,
which almost guaranteed a victory in the face of a fractured opposition. Essentially,
the path that the BJP chose to follow was far more difficult and required a
herculean effort from the party and its larger ideological organization. Not
only did it require the devolution of power into multiple social groups, it
also involved the identification of a larger pool of leaders from the targeted
groups. Not to mention the challenges of balancing a wider range of interests,
which can, even at the best of times, be mutually conflicting. Once this narrative
has been set, including in all three states, not only has there been a
solidification of existing caste alliances, there is also evidence of the BJP’s
expansion into the dominant caste groups.
The mass migration of a host of Maratha satraps into the party,
its inroads into the Jat bastions of Haryana and UP and the addition of Hindu
tribals in Jharkhand to the saffron coalition only point to the fact that the
gambles of 2014 seem to have paid off. It is also significant to note what the
reasons of such a migration could be. Certainly, the social schemes of the NDA
government and the last-mile delivery achieved by the Prime Minister’s emphasis
on implementation would have had its part to play. Even so, the historic
cultural profiles of the Marathas and Jats when combined with the patterns of
the fissuring of the tribal vote also point to the growing public resonance of
the nationalist and Indic value systems represented by the Prime Minister and
his party. It remains to be seen whether this result will be replicated in the
assembly elections, when Narendra Modi is not on the ticket and more local
factors begin to take precedence. There will certainly be more emphasis on the
performance of the respective Chief Ministers, candidate selections and local
governance issues than there was in the general elections (which the opposition
unwittingly made out to be about Modi). In a sense, the voting patterns from
the assembly polls will serve as an indicator of the long-term cohesiveness of
the BJP’s social alliance, especially when it does not have the overt appeal of
Narendra Modi to bind it. If the party succeeds in holding onto its newer and
more expansive base, then the signs will be ominous for the opposition,
especially with the Bihar polls coming up next year and the UP elections
looming in the medium term. A repeat of the clean sweep in October followed by
wins in Bihar and UP (the result in Delhi notwithstanding) will signify a
quantum change in the political and social narrative of the country. Such
victories could also open up this template to be replicated in the areas where
the party has not managed to make significant inroads yet, specifically states
in the south like Tamil Nadu. Perhaps more importantly, it will also represent
a major step forward in the larger ideological battle to move the Indian polity
towards one driven by Indic values.
I’ll specifically be covering in next blog how Fadnavis and Khattar have done in their states.
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