Advertising and brand guru Alyque Padamsee has a favourite old line: I do not believe in repositioning my brand, but in forcing my rival to reposition his. Alyque may find it particularly revolting that I borrow his old wisdom to explain the impact of Narendra Modi, against whom he has campaigned with such dedication. So my apologies to him. But the fact is, Modi’s appearance on centrestage, and the polarisation it promises, has sent some of the BJP’s old rivals scurrying for a share of the Muslim vote. As if there is nothing else left to fight for in 2014.
It’s got the Congress making silly statements on issues like the Batla House encounter (doesn’t matter if it took place under its own watch). But even more specifically, he has forced Nitish Kumar and Akhilesh Yadav to reset their own politics in response to his. As a consequence, the chief ministers of India’s most populous states, who only recently won handsome victories and looked smug, are both looking stranded now.
It is still too early to say how big a difference it will make in terms of Lok Sabha seats. But the gainer from this, to whatever extent, will be the BJP. No surprise that they are now beginning to make mistakes, a bit like a punch-drunk boxer swaying aimlessly and getting even more battered in the process.
But what do we mean by Modi psyching them into repositioning their own brands? The fact is, both Nitish and Akhilesh won famous majorities on the slogan of better governance and development. Nitish was encashing his success with law and order, road-building and free bicycles, besides, indeed, the fact that he had been able to persuade the BJP to keep Modi out of Bihar. A dominant local leader laying down the law for a national party was a heady sher ka bachcha act for the Muslims of Bihar, and many broke ranks with old friend Lalu. Nitish was clean, modern, governance-oriented and secular, while being a senior partner of the BJP. That made for a brand that swept the market.
Similarly, Akhilesh was young, sincere, accessible and humble, promising jobs, public-private partnerships and, most importantly, computers and English education, thus breaking from his party’s outdated Lohiaite fixation. That election campaign was remarkable in how little his party focused on making a direct appeal to the Muslims. Funnily, it was the SP’s most secular campaign ever. And, led by such a young, convincing leader, this too made for a killer brand in a market peopled by India’s most frustrated voters.
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And what has each one done to his brand now? Nitish broke with the BJP over Modi with a flourish and enjoyed his 48 hours of fame. Whatever his explanation, he saw an opportunity to wean his state’s sizeable Muslim population away from Lalu. He became an overnight darling of the Congress and secular intellectuals, whose adulation can be heady but counts for little in elections. The Congress in Bihar is rightly called the Nano Party (since all its four assembly members can fit into one tiny car) and, in any case, has zero transferable vote should Nitish align with it. Will the Muslims now shift wholesale to Nitish after his repudiation of the BJP, and thereby make up for the loss of the upper caste vote the BJP alliance brought him? Unlike the Congress, the BJP had transferable vote in the state. His calculation simply is, this loss of upper caste vote will be more than compensated by the shift of Muslims to him from Lalu, his main rival, bringing him double benefit. But Lalu is not such a pushover. He has an argument, and he knows how to communicate. So all he has to do is remind his Muslims that besides the Akali Dal and Shiv Sena, Nitish has been the most loyal ally of the BJP and did not even whimper in protest when Gujarat burned, unlike other secular leaders in the NDA, notably Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik and even, to some extent, Chandrababu Naidu. So all Lalu has to say is, nau sau choohe kha ke billi haj ko chali. Or some even more colourful variant of that.
In the process, Nitish has taken his eye off what brought him such a historic mandate in his second term: good governance. His response to the midday meal tragedy, I regret to say since I’ve been such a fan of his is self-serving and juvenile. Good, confident and experienced leaders with national ambitions do not respond to a setback or a challenge by hurling illiterate and stupid conspiracy theories. Losers do that. But Nitish is now not talking about governance or development. It is all about minorityism and vote bank populism. His loosening grip is evident in the rise of Naxal attacks in his state and you have to say, regrettably again, that the live-and-let-live deal that his government seemed to have struck with the Maoists has also now broken. The departure of the BJP has lost him his most competent ministers, particularly Finance Minister Sushil Kumar Modi (who, frankly, is no fan of the other, more famous, Modi). He had won such a remarkable second mandate on a wave of aspiration and optimism. Today, his politics and economics have both returned to old minority victimhood and freebie-fuelled populism. So much so that it has forced even my old friend N.K. Singh, one of India’s most committed and successful economic reformers, to begin sounding like a sad povertarian. No wonder all three of the recent opinion polls show Nitish suffering significant attrition.
Akhilesh’s situation is more complicated. He came to power on his youthful charm. But he gave in too easily to the constant meddling by his father and an entire cricket team of uncles. The only promise he seems to have lived up to is the distribution of free computers, development and job-creation be damned. And unlike Nitish, who wisely gave money to girls to buy their own bicycles, since Akhilesh has had his notorious government procurement system buy his computers, it is a matter of time before controversies, if not scandals, erupt around them. He failed entirely to either persuade his father from publicly running him down or to counter him. At an Indian Express Idea Exchange recently, Omar Abdullah made a most tellingly honest comment when he said that if his own father (Farooq) was making similar statements about him, he would have been very resentful of him.
The quality of governance, law and order, even communal harmony in his state is so badly shot that people are already nostalgic about Mayawati’s years. And his latest would even make his bureaucracy long for her return: she only transferred them every now and then on a whim. But this one has suspended, and is threatening to chargesheet, one of his state’s youngest woman IAS officers and has unleashed an entire wolf-pack of abusive Samajwadi Party uncles on her. The youngest ever chief minister of India’s largest state taking on his most vulnerable, rookie woman IAS officer: the move is so idiotic, it has lose-lose written all over it.
And why is he doing it? Apparently, to appeal to his Muslim loyalists. Because he worries that the fear of Modi may drive them to the Congress. So, here I am, young Akhilesh, so mercilessly squashing an even younger woman officer because she dared to touch an unauthorised construction, see how much I love my Muslims. And this is by no means an isolated example. He tried only recently to withdraw cases against all Muslim terror suspects. In that case, he was thwarted by the courts. In this case (Durga Shakti Nagpal), he will be defeated by public opinion. And both are examples of him abandoning his youthful, sincere, humble and modern governance card, and a return to what used to work once, but then failed.
Both these powerful icons of better governance and development have stepped back in time and politics, abandoning what won them brilliant mandates just recently, to the rotting trenches of the past. Now how else would you describe this, if not as a case of both Nitish and Akhilesh doing an Alyque Padamsee to themselves?
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