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.