The Bharatiya Janata Party is reaping it big time in West Bengal. Since last December, 13 MLAs have defected to the BJP — nine from the ruling All India Trinamool Congress, and two each from the Congress and the Left parties. So have a sitting and a former Member of Parliament from the TMC.
Two more ministers have resigned from the Mamata Banerjee government this month. At least one of them is heading towards the saffron camp. The TMC acted swiftly Friday to expel another dissident MLA — Baishali Dalmiya, daughter of ex-International Cricket Council (ICC) chief Jagmohan Dalmiya and friend of current Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) chief Sourav Ganguly.
The TMC leadership must worry about more implosions in the party ahead of Home Minister Amit Shah’s visit to Kolkata on 30 January.
At this rate, the BJP looks poised to make the biggest-ever haul of pre-election defectors (legislators) in one state. The best so far was arguably in Maharashtra ahead of the 2019 assembly election, when 23 MLAs from the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had defected to the BJP. But this is only in the context of pre-election defection by legislators. The saffron party has done even better post-elections.
The BJP has come a long way since 1996 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee had declared: “Party todkar satta ke liye naya gathbandhan karke agar satta haath mein aati hai to mein aisi satta ko chimte se bhi chhoona pasand nahin karoonga (If power comes by breaking a party and making a new alliance, I wouldn’t like to touch this power even with a pair of tongs).”
That was the time the BJP used to call itself the ‘party with a difference.’ It has no such pretence now. Critics may blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah for turning the BJP into a ‘party of, by, and for power’. Their political adversaries may blame them for practising and mastering what was essentially a Congress forte-politics of defections. So, if Haryana CM Bhajan Lal led 35 of 50 Janata MLAs into Indira Gandhi’s Congress to retain his chief ministership in 1980, Arunachal CM Pema Khandu led 32 of his People’s Party of Arunachal (PPA) MLAs into Amit Shah-led BJP to retain his chief ministership in 2016.
Not that Modi and Shah were the pioneers in the BJP when it comes to practising realpolitik and treating political morality for what it’s worth in the power game. They were in Gujarat and Vajpayee was alive when the BJP launched what has come to be known as ‘Operation Kamal’, way back in 2008. Banking on a handful of independent MLAs for a majority in Karnataka assembly, Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa had then engineered the defection of seven Janata Dal (Secular) and Congress MLAs to consolidate his position. What Modi and Shah have done since 2014, is to expand the scope of ‘Operation Kamal’ and make it more effective with central investigation agencies adding to its firepower.
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Modi, Shah raise the stakes for defectors
There was a time when politicians were defecting from the Congress and other opposition parties just to ensure their survival. They could see the force of the Modi juggernaut and found it safer to switch their loyalties. So, many of them managed to return to the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, abandoning their sinking ship and riding on the Modi wave. That was a good enough reward for them. Some lucky ones like Rita Bahuguna Joshi, former Uttar Pradesh Congress chief, managed to get into the Yogi Adityanath Cabinet for a couple of years before being eased out and sent to Delhi. She is an MP now, but it’s not the same as being a minister.
Another MP from UP, Jagdambika Pal, had quit the Congress to join the BJP ahead of the 2014 elections. The three-term MP is now heading a parliamentary committee — not exactly the dream-come-true job for a ministerial aspirant.
Some defectors, however, did have a lucky run. Sarbananda Sonowal, for instance, joined the BJP in 2011, became Assam BJP president in 2012, Union Minister in 2014, and Chief Minister in 2016. But, it was part of the BJP’s strategy in a state where the party had won 5 of the 120 seats it had contested in the 2011 assembly election.
Over the years though, the BJP has been putting an increasing premium on defectors, especially those who could overturn election mandates. So, in Madhya Pradesh, 14 of the 22 Congress defectors who had brought down Kamal Nath government became ministers in the Shivraj Singh government; it’s down to 11, as three of them lost the bypolls. In Karnataka, 12 of the 17 JD(S)-Congress defectors who brought the H.D. Kumaraswamy government down in 2019 have become ministers.
No wonder, Trinamool Congress legislators are making a beeline in front of the BJP office. If a faceless BJP in Assam had to reward Sarbanand Sonowal — and later Himanta Biswa Sarma —to win power, Suvendu Adhikari, Mamata Banerjee’s former lieutenant, must hope for a similar treatment if the BJP wins in West Bengal.
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Defectors hurt when it’s time for payback
Look at the drama in Karnataka since the time Yediyurappa brought down H.D. Kumaraswamy government one-and-a-half years back. He has been fighting for survival all along, pacifying his party snipers, and pandering to those defectors who are in the BJP now. It’s getting worse day-by-day. After months of this, he was able to expand his cabinet a fortnight ago. The immediate fallout: about a dozen BJP MLAs rebelled, with some of them publicly accusing him of being blackmailed because of a “CD”. It took him about a week to allocate their portfolios. In the next cabinet meeting, four ministers—part of the 17-member squad of defectors of 2019—skipped, embarrassing the CM. He had to change the portfolios in two days. Similarly, the Madhya Pradesh Cabinet has more Jyotiraditya Scindia loyalists than those owing allegiance to CM Shivraj Chouhan. In the mini-cabinet reshuffle he affected early this month to accommodate two Scindia loyalists, he had to leave four vacancies because three of Scindia loyalists had lost the bypolls and he wouldn’t let the CM fill up those vacancies. Ask the young Tripura CM, Biplab Kumar Deb; his party colleague Sudip Roy Barman, ex-Congressman and ex-TMC leader, has become his tormentor-in-chief.
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Modi keeps his stable clean, but CMs’ dirty
PM Modi seems to have adopted a two-pronged strategy. The government in Delhi must look clean and ideologically committed. Three of four ministers in his government are rooted in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). In the list of 21 Cabinet ministers, there are just two who came from another party into the BJP— Arjun Munda and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. Munda had quit the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha to join the BJP in 1998. Naqvi had been associated with the Janata Party for a few years before he joined the BJP way back in 1986. For all practical purposes, the only political turncoat Modi rewarded with a ministerial berth was Rao Inderjit Singh, who had quit the Congress before the 2014 Lok Sabha election. He has retained his place in the Modi government, but hasn’t been promoted to the Cabinet rank over the last six-and-a-half years.
But the BJP high command has a different approach when it comes to its state governments. A detailed analysis done by ThePrint in March 2019 had shown that 29 per cent of all BJP ministers in states were, in fact, defectors from other parties.
The numbers might have changed a bit in the past couple of years, but given the way defectors are ruling the roost in states like Karnataka and MP, the BJP seems to have a clear strategy: Put a premium on political and ideological loyalty in Team Modi. In CMs’ Teams, the defining element has to be: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Views are personal.