Assembly Polls Will Decide Which Way the Fortune Cookie Crumbles for the Big Five
Opportunism trumps ideology, come election time. The axiom appears to
be metamorphosising into a fact in the ongoing countdown for the
Assembly elections. During the next few weeks, over 170 million voters
in Assam, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry will vote and
elect 824 new leaders. But, even before a single nomination has been
filed in any of the states, political parties and their supreme leaders
have begun looking for new allies and causes for seeking a legitimate
mandate. Since politics is the art of converting symbolic-egotistic
impossibility into a remunerative possibility, the leaders are working
on a negative agenda, where the others’ defeat is more important than
their own victory.
In Tamil Nadu, the Karunanidhi clan wants to
dislodge current Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa by forging an alliance
with those who have hardly anything in common with the DMK, including
caste or religion. In West Bengal, the Reds have gone forth and merged
with the tricolour to defeat Mamata Didi. Never before has a formal
alliance between the Marxists and Congress taken place in the state just
to trounce a ruling political deity. In Kerala, the BJP is out to
cohabit with caste-led small parties only to stop both the United
Democratic Front and the Left Democratic front from grabbing power. The
BJP doesn’t and can’t become the ruling party in the state but, in
anticipation of a photofinish outcome, it wants to win at least a couple
of seats and thereby play kingmaker. In Assam too, the BJP is confident
of forming its first legitimately elected government in the Northeast
by polarising the entire electorate along regional and communal lines.
It has been able to instal a rebel Congress government in Arunanchal
Pradesh by breaking it. In Assam too, the BJP has split the Congress by
admitting a large number of partymen during the past few months.
A
prerequisite to winning the battle for ballots is a meticulous
deployment of logical contours and formations. Hence, breaking parties
matters more than projecting an alternative leader or an agenda for
governance. From Thiruvananthapuram to Guwahati, thus, political parties
have unleashed deal-makers to strike visible and invisible deals with
caste dons, religious gurus, corporate promoters and local
opinion-makers to market their parties. But none of them have put forth
even a strategy that’s synchronised with its ideology or leadership for
seeking the mandate.
The outcome of the coming elections has
serious implications for five individuals: Prime Minister Narendra Modi,
BJP president Amit Shah, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalithaa, DMK
chief Karunanidhi, and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. All
of them have points to prove. But the stake is especially high for the
BJP, which is still battling the dilemma of whether or not to fight the
elections in the name of the Prime Minister. Of the 824 Assembly seats,
the BJP won less than double digits during the 2011 state elections.
Riding on the massive Modi wave, however, the party led over its rivals
in 114 Assembly segments in the May 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Currently,
the BJP has the highest number of about 1,000 MLAs in all the states
put together; that is some 100 more than the Congress.
But the
BJP doesn’t expect to form the government in any of the states except
Assam. It is neither a ruling party nor an influential group in any of
these states. After its ignonimous defeat in Delhi and Bihar, Shah and
his team need to reverse the downward turn in the electoral fortunes of
the party. The beating in the two northern states was seen as a mark of
the diminishing appeal of the Prime Minister and the fallibility of Shah
as master strategist.
But the saffron party doesn’t have a
single local leader in any one of the four states, much like Bihar and
Delhi. In fact, it is confronted with formidable local leaders. Even a
79-year-old chief minister like Tarun Gagoi is giving the BJP a serious
fight in Assam after remaining in power for just over a decade. Though
the BJP has formally forged an alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad and
appointed a new state party chief, it is still depending on the Congress
rebels to give it a majority. Buoyed by winning seven of the 14 Lok
Sabha seats in 2014, the BJP is confident of forming a government on its
own. The party led in 79 of the 126 Assembly segments during the Lok
Sabha elections although it had won barely five seats in 2011. Its share
of popular votes rose tremendously from 11.45 per cent in 2011 to
36.50 per cent in 2014.
According to party managers, both Modi
and Shah have decided to move manpower and resources to Assam and win it
at any cost. Though it has indirectly projected Union Minister of State
for Sports Sarbananda Sonawal as its chief ministerial candidate
against Gogoi, it dreads an unprecedented backlash from the Muslim
community, which determines the outcome in about 30 seats. The
Muslim-dominated AIUDF won 16 of the minority seats and led in 24
segments in 2014. The Congress party is already trying to strike a
strategic alliance with the Badruddin Ajmal-led AIUDF to defeat the
BJP+AGP combination. West Bengal’s case is more dire. There, the BJP is
faced with the same threat of polarisation of votes along religious
lines to prevent the division of anti-Mamata votes. The party has only
one MLA in the current Assembly and has not been able to groom a
state-level leader even after leading in 24 Assembly segments. In
southern states, the party is conspicuous by its token presence outside
the state Assemblies.
Well, 2016 is not 2014 when Narendra
Damodardas Modi was taller than all the other leaders put together. In
2016, he may still be the tallest leader individually, but the BJP has
failed to create anyone who can stand up to the likes of Mamata,
Jayalalithaa and Nitish Kumar. Going by the early signals, both Mamata
and Jayalalithaa are likely to romp home with handsome victories while
the Left may stage a comeback in Kerala. For the BJP to prove to the
country that the Modi-Shah partnership wasn’t a one-knock wonder, it
needs to beat or at least repeat its 2014 Lok Sabha performance in terms
of vote share.
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com; Follow me on Twitter @PrabhuChawla
1 comment:
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