The 2024 Lok Sabha election results have positives for everyone. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), though disappointed at its tally sliding from 303 seats in 2019 to 240 this time, is relieved to be in power for three consecutive terms — a feat that was last repeated over six decades ago. The Congress-led Opposition’s 2024 numbers may be lesser than the BJP’s total tally, but it is happy at detecting a chink in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s armour — or so it seems to believe.
The Congress, under Rahul Gandhi, may have delivered its third-worst Lok Sabha performance after being confined to two digits for three general elections in a row, but it is rallying around its supporters with a sense of achievement at keeping the BJP below the 272 mark. The same is the case with their respective supporters: While the Hindu voters of the BJP are elated with their party coming back to power again, the Muslim voters have reasons to believe they have regained their ‘veto power’ in Indian politics.
The Congress-led Opposition may be euphoric with the results, but it is the BJP that should be relieved. It has, after all, realised all is not well within the party without losing the levers of power in Raisina Hill. The party has now got five years to put its house in order. But the problem for the BJP is that, in an election where everyone has a thing or two to be happy about, it is easy to misinterpret the verdict.
To begin with, the BJP should own up the Lok Sabha results with cautious optimism, for rarely does a party retain power for three consecutive terms. The Modi government hasn’t just been able to beat anti-incumbency; it has also defied a post-pandemic trend of Covid-19 being a graveyard for ruling dispensations worldwide. Hardly any incumbents have made a comeback after the unprecedented coronavirus attack.
The danger for the BJP, however, isn’t just about not resorting to any corrective measures but, more importantly, taking to a wrong prescription. The latter, unfortunately, is a more likely scenario, given the egoistical tendency among politicians to blame voters rather than the party leadership for the recent electoral reverses. One has seen how the voters of Uttar Pradesh, especially Ayodhya, have been villainised post poll results. Political analysts with dubious intentions are already out with their verdict, highlighting the diminishing returns of Hindutva in Indian politics! The BJP would do well not to fall for such part feel-good, part-dubious analysis.
The party may also be tempted to look at the results as a localised, one-off phenomenon. Localised, because if the party lost almost 50 per cent of seats in Uttar Pradesh, it did a complete sweep in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh. The truth is that Uttar Pradesh could upset the BJP’s applecart because it, unlike Madhya Pradesh, has a semblance of opposition with a solid M-Y vote-bank going for anyone and everyone capable enough to defeat the BJP. Wherever the Opposition had a party infrastructure, even if rudimentary, and some vote-banks to cater to, whether in Uttar Pradesh or in Maharashtra, it did trouble the BJP. And then, of course, one saw a smart ticket distribution by the Opposition, especially in Uttar Pradesh where Akhilesh Yadav, to his credit, liberally gave SP tickets to Dalits and OBCs: less than 10 seats were given to M-Y candidates!
In contrast, the BJP had issues with ticket distribution. Many candidates were seen to be misfits, incompetent and corrupt; several others were direct imports from other parties. This caused a lot of dissent, angst and heartburn within the party. The BJP candidate from Ayodhya, for instance, was hugely unpopular, and it was evident well before the polling that he was on sticky ground. Of course, he made things even more difficult for himself and the party through his loose talks on reservations and the Constitution.
What further added to the BJP’s woes was the perceived ideological fluidity in the party. When a party, which gets 18-20 per cent votes just for being regarded as a vehicle of Hindutva politics, is perceived to distance itself from “bhagwa”, as its national president publicly did just during the election campaign, it is bound to boomerang on the party. JP Nadda, in an interview with a Delhi-based newspaper, said that the “BJP and bhagwa (saffron) are not synonymous”, and that the BJP didn’t need the RSS to win the 2024 elections! What he forgot was that when a Hindu doesn’t look at himself as a Hindu, then there are enough temptations for him to take on caste identities.
The BJP must realise that any compromise in its ideological positioning has invariably resulted in a political hara-kiri for the party. It happened in 1984, when the BJP, fresh out of the Jana Sangh, burnt its fingers by overtly associating itself with Gandhian socialism; it could win just two seats in the Lok Sabha. A similar fate awaited the party in 2004 and 2009 when the Jinnah-fied BJP softened its Hindutva identity. The problem for the BJP is that the moment it is seen to be ‘secularised’, its core voters either get disillusioned and disinterested, or they switch their loyalties to caste-based parties.
The BJP, unlike other parties, including the Congress, can never afford to go soft on the ideological front. It has to live with the fact that it is judged more stringently on the issue of ideology and corruption. Maybe that’s the price of being an ideology-oriented, cadre-based party — “a party with a difference”!
There’s one more reason for local BJP leaders and workers turning either lax or indifferent this time: they find their bhagidari both in party and administration diminishing. A number of local leaders told this author personally how they no longer are able to get the work of people of their constituency done. As one BJP leader in Bihar said, “Earlier, whenever I used to call a district administrator regarding a local work, it was done. Ab koi sunwayi nahin hai. In fact, now when someone comes up to me for work, I categorically tell them that I would call the concerned officer but there is no guarantee that it will be done.” The Modi government will have to find a middle path between political interference and bureaucratic highhandedness.
It’s an absolute compulsion for a cadre-based party like the BJP to be alive to the sentiments of its local leaders and workers. If a party worker in Ayodhya commits suicide over an alleged land encroachment issue and the party is seen to be doing pretty little about it, then it paralyses the whole system at the grassroots. When a resourceful, local BJP leader in Lucknow is unable to find a bed for his ailing wife in a decent hospital and is forced to fend for himself for her treatment, then it raises an alarm bell within the party.
In this backdrop, is it any surprise that the Opposition could go around duping the voters with its mindless promises and selling a nightmarish scenario vis-à-vis reservations to Dalits and OBCs, and yet the BJP leadership remained largely clueless about it? The party will have to revitalise its cadre base, and restart a two-way dialogue process.
Given the long litany list above, one may be tempted to believe it’s all over for the BJP. The fact, however, is that the saffron party is still well ahead of its rivals and has a well-oiled poll machinery. The issues that have come up this time are normal for a party that has been in power for over a decade now. But the very fact that the BJP, despite the above challenges, has got more seats than any political party in more than three decades, is self-explanatory. The BJP, by ‘servicing’ its organisational structure, by providing a voice to its local leaders and workers, and also by sorting out critical differences, if any, between the state and central leaderships, besides ironing out ideological fluidity, can again become an invincible poll machine.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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