Roller-coaster at snail's pace

The UP results have upset all the big plans to capture power at the Centre that the BJP and Sangh Parivar had conceived. Where does the BJP go from here?

Hardnews Bureau Delhi

“The vote that you give for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) here is not only to deliver UP from the misrule of the Mulayam Singh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party (SP) government but also to throw out the lumbering and irresponsible United Progressive Alliance (UPA) ministry at the Centre. You install a good government under Kalyan Singh here and naturally this would be followed by the rise of a National Democratic Allia-nce (NDA) ministry at the national      level.    This way, we shall bring back the golden regime of the NDA.” The BJP Presi-dent Rajnath Singh never failed to repeat this line in all the 150-odd public meetings that he addressed during his long and arduous campaign for the UP assembly elections.

For Singh and thousands of activists of the BJP at various levels of the party's organisational hierarchy this was not mere rhetoric. Evidence from hundreds of workers' meetings across the state during the election season confirm that the party's leadership as well as large sections of the rank and file were convinced that this was a prospective reality. All levels of the party hierarchy, from the top leadership to activists in middle and lower party committees, were seen and heard expressing this “possibility” from time to time. It was evident that it was not only the BJP that thought on these lines. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the leader of the Sangh Parivar, also shared the optimism. The most telling manifestation of this came in the form of repeated statements by the organising secretaries deputed by the RSS in the different regional and district committees of the BJP, who claimed a tally above 150       (out of 403) in UP.

The reasons for such conviction were not far to seek. The BJP and its alliance, the NDA, had come into the UP campaign after a string of convincing electoral victories. It had started with the civic polls in Maharashtra and the Uttarakhand and Punjab victories had come in just about two months before UP was to go to polls. This was perceived as a terrific morale booster for the rank and file. Given the fact that the BJP had scored significant victories in the urban centres of UP during the civic body polls held in October-November last year, there was also the expectation that the salutary organisational effects of the Punjab-Uttarakhand results would be more concrete than mere morale boosting.

A particular qualitative attribute was supposed to contribute in a big way to an improved BJP performance in the UP polls. The party could fight the polls this time on an all-out opposition plank. the Sangh activists pointed this out in widespread interactions. According to them, the BJP had the burden of incumbency one way or the other in all the assembly and Lok Sabha elections since 1996. The BJP was either in power at the Centre or in the state and often both at the Centre and in the state. But 2007 had “brought back those days of high-pitched agitation” of the mid-1980s and early 1990s when the party had gone “no holds barred” on an opposition plank and the Hindutva campaign. This qualitative streak, it was surmised at various levels in the BJP, would lead to a repetition of the quantitative victories of the '80s and '90s.

As it turned out, all these hopes of the BJP were dashed by the 2007 election results. The party sank to its worst ever performance in UP in the past 16 years with merely 50 seats and 17 per cent of vote share. In 1991, the party had come to power on its own with 221 seats and 31.45 per cent share of votes. What 2007 proved was that the downward slump that started five years later was continuing on even keel. The seats had come down to 174 in 1996, and to 88 in 2002. The vote share too had dropped correspondingly from 32.52 per cent in 1996 to 20.08 per cent in 2002. The steady loss shows that there is a continual decline of its core upper caste vote base, consisting of the Brahmins and Thakurs, as well as its supplementary votes coming in from Other Backward Caste (OBC) communities such as the Lodhs, Kalyan Singh's community.

The results have upset all the big plans of a national level political intervention to capture power at the Centre that the BJP and the Sangh had conceived. The dismal result is bound to act as a morale 'de-booster' among the rank and file. The leadership's abject failure to gauge the “ground situation” in a state that was once a bastion is bound to lead to some major internal upheaval in the organisational set-up of the BJP. Such was the failure to measure the popular mood that even on the day of counting the top BJP leaders were working out plans as to how they would share power with the SP or the Bahujan Samaj Party (SP).

At the centre of the internal turmoil would be Rajnath Singh, who, being the 'son of UP's soil', was supposed to know the popular mood and political swings and fine-tune the organisational machinery accordingly. By all indications, powerful sections of the larger Sangh, including Mohan Rao Bhagwat, the redoubtable number two in the RSS, are upset with Singh's failure. The deliberations between the RSS top brass and Atal Behari Vajpayee have gathered greater significance. Vajpayee was instrumental in anointing Rajnath Singh for the top job, but indications are that the 'most popular' Sangh leader is not happy with the way his protégé has carried on in the last few months.

Sections of the Sangh even believe that the Bhagwat-Vajpayee deliberations could, in due course, even lead to Singh's replacement as party president. Whether this happens or not, there can be little doubt that other leaders sidelined by Singh such as Narendra Modi and Arun Jaitley would make use of the post-UP debacle to strike out. Undoubtedly, these prospective developments should ring in interesting times in the BJP and the parivar.

Close associates of Singh are hopeful that 'destiny' would help the Thakur to rescue his position. Till the debacle in UP, the BJP chief had managed to raise his stock by making, what his opponents in the party term, 'gains by default'. These gains had come in the form of victories in the assembly elections of Jharkhand and Bihar as well as in the Maharashtra civic polls. These victories were served on a platter to the BJP by the infighting in the UPA, caused mainly by the 'big brotherly' political manoeuvers of the Congress. In Punjab and Uttarakhand, a strong anti-incumbency wave against the serving Congress governments helped Singh score a “gain by default”.

The calculation in the Rajnath Singh camp is that things would once again fall into the victory mode in the forthcoming assembly elections in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Though a victory in Gujarat could well go into the account of inner-party adversary, Narendra Modi, the successes in the other two states should come to Singh's credit. The thinking in the Singh camp about these two states is that the new upper-caste tilt towards the Mayawati-led, Sarvajan Samaj-oriented BSP could be the very factor that would help the party make a comeback to power in MP and Rajasthan. In both states, the Brahmins are mainly with the Congress and if the UP social engineering experiment of the BSP were successfully repeated, the loss would essentially be that of the Congress.

The Singh camp is hopeful that such a victory would once again propel the return of the NDA to power in Delhi. Given the ground situation, these calculations have some merit. But will Rajnath Singh be able to hold on to his organisational reins until things turn for the better? The response to that question is, at the moment, in the realm of conjecture and by extension there is an element of speculation in the future of the BJP itself. As a party insider in Delhi remarked wittily, the “BJP seems to be on a roller-coaster that not only has lofty highs and unfathomable lows but also a racing speed at times, followed by a snail's pace”.