All this while, the AAP was focussing on issues related to everyday problems faced by the people. Kejriwal looked more honest in his intent and accepting of his miscalculation in resigning after just 49 days of his initial stint as the chief minister; the AAP had emerged as the first ‘regional party’ of Delhi. From the mohalla sabhas (public meetings) they organized during the run-up to elections in 2013, the party had cultivated a positive image among many urban poor. Taxi and auto drivers got relief, perhaps for the first time, from the culture of collecting haftas by the police. It is no surprise, then, that the urban poor—especially taxi and auto drivers—were upset when the AAP dissolved the government as they had benefited from the daily harassment with Kejriwal at the helm, but they did not seem to have second thoughts in giving him another chance. In contrast, Amit Shah’s strategy looked like a formula movie, and an attempt at cloning a strategy that he might have thought worked elsewhere. Lack of leadership and lack of local voices belonging to Delhi were clearly the standout factors in the misadventure of the BJP’s national leadership, which essentially derived its electoral strategy from its experience in Gujarat.
The more affluent sections in Delhi also leaned towards the AAP—perhaps due to a disapproval of the ‘extremist agendas’ of the Hindu Right—including the Ghar Wapsi reconversion programme, the ‘love jihad’ campaign targeting Muslim-Hindu relationships, and the call for putting up statues of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.5 The BJP and its allies have undermined the fact that Gandhi is still appropriated by the well-to-do sections of the Indian society, and more of an enigma with the lower classes. Finally, the spectacle created around the visit by the US President Barack Obama came across as shallow, not to mention the parting gift he delivered by raising the issue of growing intolerance, even as Modi made claims of a warm personal friendship with ‘Barack’. The BJP looked like a different party now, and Modi’s abilities appeared more measured without the anti-Congress wave witnessed during the general elections. With Congress being a non-starter in this election, the vulnerability of the BJP’s electoral strategy was left exposed, allowing voters to focus on what had been delivered in the preceding months.
Higher Expectations and Stronger Demagogues
In this cycle of growing expectations and the inability to deliver on them, it was Kejriwal’s turn to occupy a position (at least in Delhi) similar to what Modi had experienced earlier. The same questions were asked to Kejriwal in the months following the election. As the electorate seems more critical of Modi’s personality-centric politics—projected and accepted as showing decisiveness only a few months before the Delhi elections—his appearance in a suit, allegedly worth `10 lakh, was more a confirmation of self-adulation than a larger-than-life personality. But Kejriwal appears to have driven the internal dynamics of the AAP into a personality-centric mode without an effective second rung of leaders to follow up on his actions. What looks like a democratic tendency in picking new and unknown faces, as the AAP did in this election, may soon be perceived as the party’s inability to nurture effective and strong leaders.
The AAP today is facing the same dilemmas that the BJP was dealing with for having made contradictory promises. The AAP had promised to regularize slums and make Delhi a real-estate haven, and a global city with sanitized urbanization. Personality-centric politics is the starting point and a signpost of eclipsing these contradictory dynamics, but as the elections have repeatedly proved, its resonance does not last for too long, and the gestation period is shortening dramatically with each passing election. For now, there is a break from the Modi-mania projected by the media, and in fact, relief from the media’s manufactured consent as the electorate seems to have read meanings of media images against the grain of what was being projected. Indian electorates seem to have learnt the art of rejection but there seems to be little option for both the parties and the electorate after neo-liberal reforms to initiate any radical changes in the existing order. This lack of choice—due to the new consensus-elite across the parties—is being made good with the projection of personality cult and the phenomenon of demagoguery at one end and unleashing higher expectations and a newer imagination—best captured by the slogan, ‘New India’—at the other end. Electoral results in Delhi were a clear signpost of growing expectations based on large promises made by the parties and the growing discontent being attempted to be arrested and addressed through demagoguery and the cult of the strongman. How long will this hold and how the electorate approaches will be significant in the run-up to 2019?
Does Bihar Hold the Key to the Future of Indian Politics?
Election results of Bihar had significance for national politics in general and the future of the BJP and Modi’s leadership in particular. Elections in Bihar were held in the context of a transition into a post-Mandal and post-liberalized Indian polity. To begin with, in the changing terrain of Indian politics, the anti-Congress wave that marked the general elections of 2014 and the assembly elections in Rajasthan and Chattisgarh are not the determining factor for the voting pattern in Bihar anymore. Further, the ‘Modi wave’ and the myth of the ‘Gujarat model’ appeared to be already on the wane, in light of Modi’s one-year rule, which has left a palpable gap between what was promised and projected and what has been delivered so far.
The contest in Bihar reflected the tension between the anti-incumbency factor against the Nitish government, as against the demystification of the ‘Modi phenomenon’ and the pressures of electing and having the same party in the state as the centre to gain quick benefits and additional funds. Although the 1.25 crores development package announced by Modi has had a seemingly little impact on the voters, the ‘politics of hope’ and the demands of a new aspirational class emerging in Bihar held the capacity to generate a narrative in favour of big growth, development, and governance.
Growth versus Welfare
However, this narrative had to contend for space with a strong discourse on ‘social justice’ and empowerment that has been at the centre stage of politics in Bihar for more than three decades now. On one hand is the new idea of Bihar’s economy being integrated with the national and global capital flows that BJP has now come to represent under Modi’s leadership, while on the other is the pressing need to provide immediate social welfare policies relating to better education, health, and a robust Public Distribution System (PDS), along with the more visible ‘populist’ policies that the electorate expect. Nitish Kumar’s policies such as rejecting the Special Economic Zone (SEZ), obstructing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the retail sector, and populist policies such as providing bicycles and sanitary napkins to girl students continue to remain popular, along with a visible difference he made to providing security and making bureaucracy more accountable.
It was a contest between fast growth, new infrastructure, and corporate capital flows that the BJP was promising in order to bring Bihar out of decades of slow growth and underdevelopment and an emphasis on a social welfare discourse, with a tinge of governance. The other major political process at the heart of Bihar’s elections is the evident contradiction between ‘newer forms of social fragmentation’ and the necessity of cobbling up a numerical majority to garner a majority of seats in the assembly.
Social Fragmentation versus Electoral Majority
In most of the other states in India, new forms of social fragmentation among the OBCs, Dalits, and Muslims are still an emerging prospect; however, in Bihar, not only is this fragmentation evident but also has been playing a key role in electoral mobilization. New categories of EBC, Most Backward Classes (MBC) among the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and Mahadalits among Dalits and Pasmanda Muslims among the Muslim community have necessitated new kinds of strategies to hold these fragments together. In this sense, elections in Bihar will hold important clues for future elections in India as to how these fragments will play out, and what they mean for the future of national parties such as the Congress and the BJP.
On the one hand, the Rasht
riya Janata Dal (RJD) and Janata Dal-United (JD-U) are pitching for the votes of Muslims and Yadavs (MY), along with the EBCs and the Mahadalits; on the other, Lalu Prasad has staked a claim to polarizing the electorate in announcing that this round of elections is a battle between the ‘forwards’ and the ‘backwards’. BJP was primarily hoping for the support of the upper castes, and among the Dalits, of that of the Paswans and the Musahars represented by Jitan Ram Manjhi, and expecting to split the Muslim vote with Asaduddin Owaisi joining the fray. In addition, the confidence of the BJP was reflected in gaining ground among the Yadavs by providing 30 seats to candidates from the Yadav caste, with Modi elevating them by referring to them as ‘Yaduvanshis’ and taking the silent support of a disgruntled Pappu Yadav. Along with these caste calculations, the BJP attempted to polarize the electorate along religious lines in not offering seats to Muslim candidates, and with Syed Shahnawaz Hussain missing from the campaign and with incidents such as those in Dadri. Further, along the caste lines, a larger polarization was being attempted to counter Lalu’s ‘forward’ versus ‘backward’ posturing with an announcement by the RSS chief that reservations along caste lines need to be relooked into and instead framed on economic grounds. While this can be seen as an attempt to consolidate the upper caste votes, it was also projected to consolidate the votes among the EBCs.
This gave an opportunity to the Grand Alliance to project the NDA as an eventual threat to the very notion of reservation based on the quota system. However, what lent confidence to the RSS-BJP campaign was that this general statement against reservation does get nullified by the growing conflict on the ground essentially between the Yadavs and the Dalits, replacing the earlier articulation of the conflict with the upper castes. This, they believe, leaves Dalits with the sole choice of moving into the fold of the BJP since the JD(U) and RJD combine were viewed essentially as representatives of the dominant backward classes. It is intriguing to observe how political parties are staking claims to the support of a specific social/caste group, yet can make announcements contrary to its interests. This is a part of new strategies that political parties are designing to counter and live up to the crosscurrents created by the deep social fragmentation that is now thickly part of the electoral skyline of Bihar.
Flexibilisation of Voting Patterns
This makes mapping a pattern all the more difficult and allows for open-ended elections where almost all caste groups have a choice to vote across parties. It is a distinct possibility that a single caste group can vote for different parties in substantial measure. This ‘flexibilization’ would, in turn, make the role of the media and the election campaign an essential, and not a mere synthetic part of the electoral battle. Prime Minister Modi addressed not less than 20 rallies across Bihar, making it a unique contest between a prime minister and a chief minister. Here, leadership and individual personalities might have had some value in swaying the voters.
Indian elections are complex with a maze of issues at work making it difficult to predict which of the issues gain ground sidelining others. It is even more difficult to provide a consistent explanation as to why specific issues gained ground leaving others behind. As we argued, Bihar had a range of issues, including the contest between ‘Bahari’ versus ‘Bihari’, need for growth versus social welfare, the autonomy of state versus the need to align with the centre to get more funds, and finally impending social fragmentation to gain new grounds versus conjuring up a majority. What did the results in Bihar tell us? Can the rise of populism under Narendra Modi forge a new kind of equivalence between disparate and contesting issues?
Nitish Was Bihar’s Mann Ki Baat
The elections in Bihar were held at a transitory point where the electorate had ample opportunity to think and evaluate the ‘Gujarat Model’ of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah combine, based on their track record of the previous 18 months. The defeat of the BJP in Bihar opened up interesting dimensions that need careful analysis in order to understand the complexities of electoral politics and the vagaries of democracy in India.
First, the results clearly reflected the fact that the BJP’s strategy of combining high-intensity growth with low-intensity communalism had reached a dead end. While growth-talk was not delivering jobs and translating into welfare, the communally vitiated atmosphere on the ground was increasingly being seen as manufactured for electoral benefits (as was also the case with Delhi). The rhetoric of development and manufactured communal polarization seemed to have run its course. It was evident during the campaign that the electorate was not enamoured by the announcement of the `1.25 lakh crore package, which was seen more as creating a larger than life demonstrative/mediatized effect rather than being an authentic strategy to address the underdevelopment of Bihar. Similarly, incidents of communal violence such as those in Dadri failed to polarize the electorate along religious lines, partly reflecting the fact that Bihar hasn’t witnessed a communal riot since the Bhagalpur riots in 1984, and that the agenda of social justice was inclusiveness of, at least, the physical security of Muslims, if not their social or economic upliftment. By the last phases of the campaign, Shah’s reference to ‘celebrations in Pakistan’ seemed completely out of sync with the mood of the electorate. This, in a sense, was a repeat of what happened with the Delhi polls (as argued in the previous chapter), where the BJP attempted a similar strategy of using the rhetoric of development in combination with, as it appears, sparking riots and organizing attacks against churches.6 It did not work then, and it did not work now. This brings into relief the significant issue that economic upliftment has to be combined with cultural space and a democratic atmosphere of dialogue and dissent. The ‘Gujarat Model’, perhaps, undermines other kinds of democratic aspirations to mere business-like transactions.
‘Bihari’ versus ‘Bahari’
The second significant issue that the BJP’s defeat brings forth is the question of leadership and representation. The advantage the BJP has is that, while other parties have reached a saturation point in the way they can accommodate leaders of different social groups and castes, it is still a relatively young party in many states and has the advantage of expanding and providing representation to leaders from different social backgrounds. In a federal set-up, this ideally should have been a huge advantage but the way the BJP managed it by projecting Modi and a virtual non-entity like Amit Shah as leaders haven’t touched base with the bulk of the electorate. It has instead been seen more as undermining the local and state-level leadership—reflected in the Bihari-Bahari debate. The potency of national leaders has a substantial effect on the ground when backed by strong regional leadership. This was partly the reason for the decline of the Congress in many states. The BJP seems to be replicating its top-heavy organizational model. It became clear that the Modi-Shah brand of politics was attempting to undermine and take credit where the BJP met with success and distance and blame local leaders, where it bit the dust. This was evident in the way the BJP changed strategy mid-polls by changing hoardings with the Modi-Shah duo. This was the failed strategy it adopted in Delhi, where in anticipation of an adverse result, they began to project Kiran Bedi as a leader.
At the root, one could argue that the BJP’s leadership was suffering from a lack of imagination and ideas. In the previous year, there have been no striking schemes or policy shifts from the current dispensation. It has dabbled in changing the names of roads, of schemes, including renaming the Planning Commission as Niti Aayog, but what it perhaps failed to realize was that it needed an alternative vision, a new set of ideas to reinvigorate the aspirations of the electorate. What the BJP had done so far was replicate the model that returned Modi to power three successive times in Gujarat. However, India is not Gujarat. It is too regionally diversified to fit into any given model of politics. Each state and region has a rich history. It is imperative to make sense of these local sensibilities but whether that is possible for a party—led by the RSS—that believes in creating a homogenous-majoritarian polity is the moot point
that will await intriguing answers in times to come.
Survival Instincts or Suicidal?
The Nitish-led government in alliance with Lalu’s RJD survived for 18 months before Nitish Kumar decided to join back with the BJP.7 Nitish seems to have sensed a threat to his political survival in his partnership with the RJD that has a larger cadre base and also a social base. The dilemma for Nitish Kumar was to remain relevant as a leader coming from the Kurmi community that constitues not more than 8% of the population. As suggested above, Nitish survived this challenge by fragmenting the OBCs and Dalits into smaller units, thereby laying a claim to provide the leadership and new social opportunities. This, however, continued to leave him vulnerable with Lalu already occupying the mantle of social justice. This dilemma of Nitish is similar to that of Kejriwal who, being a CM of a small state like Delhi, had national ambitions. This tension got clearly reflected in the way AAP botched up their electoral chances in Punjab. Kejriwal could not have opted for another prominent leader like Navjyoth Singh Sidhu as he would become the CM of a much larger state. At one stage, Kejriwal projected himself as the possible CM candidate of Punjab but it looks like this did not go down well with the people of Punjab. A similar dilemma was also faced by Mayawati, who disallowed the expansion of BSP outside Uttar Pradesh, in spite of a robust Dalit movement in many parts of the country. She, perhaps, felt handicapped at dealing with Dalit leaders from other parts and to stake a claim to the national leadership of Dalits.
India After Modi Page 12
