BJP has much to celebrate. But it shouldn’t over-interpret these small victories as the real test will come in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
What’s this excitement over assembly results in three states whose capitals most people in the “mainland” may struggle to name? More importantly, which send just five MPs to the Lok Sabha. That is, less than 1 per cent of contribution to national power by all three of them together.
It isn’t just that these confirm the rise of the BJP in the northeast or that the national map is filling the saffron blanks. That’s indeed an important reality. More important is some political messages these results send out. My three takeaways:
The political Left is dead, too Left for India, not Left enough for JNU
We now know that the decline of the political Left is terminal. That story is now over. Kerala survives, but the next election will most likely clear out that outpost too. The state doesn’t vote an incumbent back. Pinarayi Vijayan will have to do something truly spectacular to win again. Or the Left will have to swallow its pride and align with the Congress. That won’t guarantee victory but give it a chance.
It’s a truism that everybody makes mistakes but if you repeat the same mistake, you need to get your head examined. But what if you make the mistake thrice? CPM/Left is a case of three historic blunders. No political party can survive that in a competitive democracy where, unlike Communist states, other parties are present.
The first was turning down the offer of prime ministership for Jyoti Basu in 1996. The second, withdrawal of support to UPA and joining hands with forces as dodgy (for the Left, ideologically) as the BJP and Mayawati’s BSP to bring down the Manmohan Singh government. The third, and more recent, was again its arrogant refusal to build a larger alliance with Congress.
The alliance with UPA following its best ever score in the Lok Sabha had given the Left its best chance to become a national power. All it had to do was, look at other Left parties around the world, especially Europe, and reposition itself as a social democratic, Left-of-Centre, but non-doctrinaire political force. It blew it because it couldn’t shake off its JNU-style anti-Americanism. It’s been downhill since.
The Left’s predicament is now “na khuda hee mila, na visaal-e-sanam/na idhar ke rahe, na udhar ke rahe (I got neither, the God, or my lover/I ended up neither here nor there). It is too boringly and bemusingly doctrinaire for most of India, and not Left enough even for the Republic of JNU.
Tripura, probably, has finished the story of the political Left. The epilogue could well be the BJP finishing as the second after Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, ahead of the Left and vacuuming the Congress vote as in Tripura.
BJP has much better generals & troops, but the big states next will be tougher
Just as the Left will happily drown with the millstone of ideology, the BJP has shown flexibility and fleet-footedness. See the unlikely alliance with Tripura’s tribal party with its dodgy politics and pedigree, or the suspension of the beef issue in Nagaland and Meghalaya.
The BJP’s unique strength: selfless, ideologically committed workers who can commit years in the prime of their lives to win, is also fully on display. No other party has a counter to this. Going ahead, if it can keep its focus and not expend all its energy and political capital in petty battles in Delhi, AAP might have some such. But that is too little and too far.
There is much for the party to celebrate, especially the fact that it is its first victory against its biggest ideological enemy, the Left. The BJP will now have the belief it can similarly take the Congress’ space in Kerala and West Bengal.
It will also carry the impetus into Karnataka. But it could be over-interpreting these small victories. Its real test will be Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh later in the year. Will it risk losing these, as both chief ministers suffer severe anti-incumbency? Or will it now be inclined to combine these with national elections and wrap the states into a lager Narendra Modi versus the rest contest? It will be risky to go into general elections with defeats in these key states behind it.
Congress can’t be lazy and keep waking up episodically. Must de-hyphenate from Left.
Tripura confirms to us again that wherever the Congress is lazy, its vote is up for grabs. In Delhi, AAP took it. In Tripura, it’s the BJP. In Punjab it wasn’t, in Gujarat it showed commitment and the results were different.
These elections have signalled the return of chronic laziness. It pretty much gave up on Tripura. If the idea was to make it difficult for the BJP, the least it could have done was stay in battle, show commitment, and cut into the anti-Left vote. It worked, on the other hand, like a silent BJP ally, transferring its votes to them.
Congress also has to reflect on where it belongs in 2018-19 ideologically and philosophically. From 2004 onwards under Sonia, influenced further by her National Advisory Council (NAC), which was nothing but the chic intellectual Left’s Trojan Horse, the party veered in that direction. In 2008, the party backed Manmohan Singh on the nuclear deal against the Left-led effort to bring it down. But instinctively, its heart wasn’t either in Manmohan Singh’s strategic vision, or economics. The fatal attraction for the sexy, articulate (in English) Left continued.
Now it doesn’t know where it belongs. Modern, post-ideological and “what’s-in-it-for-me” India doesn’t understand old Left. Populist welfarism has been taken away by Narendra Modi who has adopted all your yojanas and fortified these with Aadhaar, which you continue opposing with your wine ‘n cheese club. The result is this marginalisation. Rahul Gandhi has tried correcting some of this with his temple visits, and it brought benefit in Gujarat. But if he doesn’t rethink his economics, shift his party closer to the growth-oriented “centre”, the going will be tough. Because Modi has moved into the populist-socialist space.
The party thinks it will recover from Karnataka on. What kind of political party with a national presence thinks it can work episodically and then go to sleep. There was much protest from the Congress when I wrote that the party was lazy. Check that point out now. The true test of a leader, a general, is that he is with his troops in defeat, and orderly retreat. Where is Rahul Gandhi today?
I rest my case.