One has to give it to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s central leadership. They don’t change their electoral strategies just because they suffer setbacks. In hindsight, one can count the mistakes they made in the Karnataka assembly election in May 2023. I flagged a few of them about a couple of weeks before the election in my column, earning some brickbats as expected.
Let’s recap them briefly. The party undermined the only pan-state mass leader it had – BS Yediyurappa. It ostensibly wanted to promote new leadership that wasn’t there even then. It made Prime Minister Narendra Modi the face, ignoring the fact that people don’t necessarily vote for him in assembly elections. He promised a double-engine government — something that lost its novelty and appeal after the first cycle of assembly elections after 2014. His attack on the opposition was familiar—dynastic, corrupt parties. The presence of so many dynasts in the BJP made it a non-issue.
As for corruption, it’s lost the sting due to the single-minded pursuit of opposition leaders by central agencies all these years. The BJP high command took decisions based on their own assessment— from selection of candidates to campaign strategies— no matter what leaders in Karnataka thought. The party focused on Hindutva nationalism again—more for want of a better idea than its effectiveness.
BJP repeats Karnataka strategy
Now look at the BJP’s strategy for upcoming elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Telangana—except Mizoram, where the party has little stake. Doesn’t it look like a repeat of Karnataka? The answer is a big ‘yes’—although with slight state-specific variations.
In Madhya Pradesh, the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led government might be looking better-placed after the successful implementation of the Ladli Behan Yojana. But PM Modi, obviously prompted by his party colleagues in Delhi, still appealed to MP voters to extend him “direct support”. The party won’t go with 64-year-old Chouhan as its face ostensibly because there is a ‘fatigue’ factor working against him.
In other states, the argument being built is that there is a need to promote younger leadership as former Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje is 70 and former Chhattisgarh CM Raman Singh is 71. The BJP has no alternate popular face in any of these states. If Jyotiraditya Scindia was seen as a dynamic, young, popular leader with chief ministerial potential, he has not been fielded in the election. As for Telangana, state BJP leaders are still wondering why Bandi Sanjay Kumar, who had emerged as the party’s face against CM K Chandrashekar Rao, was suddenly removed as the Karnataka unit president. A section of ambitious BJP leaders held a grudge against him, but that couldn’t be the reason for dropping such a popular face.
Unlike in Karnataka, where the 80-year-old Yediyurappa found it better to retire from electoral politics, CM contenders like Chouhan, Raje, and Singh have forced the party to field them in the elections. However, this might not bring much solace to them because the BJP’s insistence on “collective leadership” and PM Modi as its face strongly suggests that they won’t be the party’s CM choice even if it wins the polls.
For these leaders, BJP’s victory would, ironically, put a question mark on their relevance as mass leaders. If the BJP can win without them, it would be a vindication of the party’s unstated assessment of them being spent forces. The BJP’s loss in Karnataka has kept Yediyurappa relevant, as is evident from the high command’s dithering over the appointment of a new state BJP president and the Legislature Party leader.
They can’t appoint Yediyurappa’s nominees because it would mean perpetuating his influence. But they can’t appoint somebody against his choice because the Lingayat strongman has proved in the assembly elections why he can’t be wished away. The BJP high command can’t afford to upset him in the run-up to the crucial 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It’s an irony that the party’s defeat ends up providing fresh oxygen to leaders in terms of validating their popularity.
So, why is the BJP high command sticking to a tried-and-failed Karnataka strategy for the upcoming assembly elections? The answer lies in their assessment that PM Modi is much more impactful in the Hindi belt than in southern states. The BJP lost in Rajasthan in 2018, but its vote share was 38.77 per cent as against the Congress’ 39.30 per cent—a difference of 0.53 percentage points. In Madhya Pradesh, the BJP secured 41.02 per cent as against the Congress’ 40.89 per cent. BJP spin doctors argue that these vote shares, despite huge anti-incumbency against the Raje and Chouhan-led governments in Rajasthan and MP in 2018, showed how PM Modi could get party votes despite the unpopularity of regional satraps.
As for Chhattisgarh, where the Congress had a 10 percentage point lead over the BJP in terms of vote shares in 2018, they argue that it was because Raman Singh was never “such a popular leader” that he could swing results. The BJP won the 2008 and 2013 assembly elections under Singh’s leadership. However, the differences in the vote shares of the BJP and the Congress were less than one and two percentage points at the time, say BJP leaders defending the party high command’s decision to look beyond Singh after the 2018 poll debacle.
They argue that even in Karnataka in 2023, thanks to PM Modi’s campaign, the BJP’s vote share remained the same as in 2018 – around 36 per cent. Well, there are always many sets of data and trust BJP spin masters to pick up the convenient one.
Don’t test Modi’s popularity at this stage
That aside, making PM Modi the face of these assembly elections isn’t a good idea. Come to think of it. When the results come out on 3 December, it will set the momentum for the Lok Sabha election just five months later. Is it a good idea for the BJP to make these assembly elections a test of PM Modi’s popularity so close to the general election?
Let’s assume that the BJP wins big in these assembly polls. Will it make Raje, Chouhan, or Singh chief ministers? Unlikely. The BJP is ready even to risk the elections, but it won’t acknowledge them as probable CM contenders even by way of hints. If the BJP loses, these leaders will have all the more reason to make the high command pay for their purported acts of omission and commission. In a nutshell, win or lose, these regional satraps may not find it in their interest to have a domineering high command. Never corner a tiger or tigress, as the saying goes.
One can argue that the BJP lost Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh in 2018 and yet won it big in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. That shows that there is no link between assembly and Lok Sabha polls when it comes to people’s voting preferences. Besides, PM Modi remains extremely popular, far ahead of anyone in the opposition camp. True. But what happened between the 2014 and 2019 general elections was phenomenal for the BJP—a spate of welfare schemes touching virtually every family, surgical strikes, the Balakot airstrike and a shell-shocked opposition waiting for deus ex machina.
Has the Modi-led government done as much as, if not better, between 2019 and October 2023? Let’s not talk about the remaining six months, given the widely held notion in political circles about Modi’s ability to do something spectacular right at the eleventh hour. Having said that, Modi’s appeal for ‘direct support’ from people for the fifth time in these states— previously in 2013, 2014, 2018, and 2019—may probably weaken the impact the sixth time, when he goes to them barely four-five months later. The BJP seems to be over-exposing PM Modi in the coming elections to cover up for its own failures. But the big question is: Is it worth the risk?
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)