The BJP has put all its eggs in Modi’s basket. In a detailed state-by-state analysis, Ajit Sahi assesses how this could play out
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The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has named Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, as the chairman of its campaign committee. Modi will now lead India’s principal opposition party in the country’s 16th General Election. A backroom boy until his surprise elevation as Gujarat CM in October 2001, few would have thought Modi would ever grow so big as to be projected as a candidate for India’s top job.
No doubt, it is a rare privilege, one that has gone to only two others in the party’s 33-year history — Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who rose to be prime minister, and Lal Krishna Advani, who became his deputy prime minister and was the party’s prime ministerial candidate at the 2009 election. Once Modi’s benefactor and now an adversary, Advani quit all party posts after Modi was named its torchbearer. He took back the resignation under pressure from the party and its ideological parent, the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), but the animosity lingers.
Though the BJP has had a string of presidents over the years, Vajpayee and Advani alone were considered PM material. Now that he hopes to become PM, Modi has his task cut out. With only 11 months to go for the next General Election, he has little time to craft a winning team and strategy, or to alter an image of being socially divisive, created by the charge that he allowed, or even connived with, right-wing Hindu zealots to massacre some 2,000 Muslims in his state in 2002.
Would Modi succeed where Advani failed? Just how would Modi deliver a victory that has eluded the party in two successive parliamentary elections? Does Modi have greater traction with the voters than Advani had in 2009? Would existing and potential allies accept Modi as PM just as they accepted Vajpayee in 1998? Both Modi’s supporters and critics recognise him as rabidly anti-Muslim, a perception that has forced at least one coalition ally of the BJP — the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar — to threaten a pull-out if Modi is named the PM candidate. Indeed, Modi is one of the few politicians seen as toxic for India’s pluralistic politics. Would his perceived anti-Muslim persona whip up a frenzy of support among India’s 80 percent Hindu population or would it drive the BJP into the ground?
Modi’s other image is that of a launcher of prosperity predicated on the high economic growth that he asserts Gujarat has netted on his watch. Would Modi’s claim of quality governance in Gujarat carry a decisive edge with India’s 800 million voters? A similar claim by Vajpayee’s government — called ‘India Shining’ — had flopped with the voters in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Finally, would Modi’s stunning three backto- back wins in Gujarat rub off on his maiden bid to win a parliamentary majority?
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BJP IN STATE ASSEMBLIES
The BJP is undeniably worse off today than it was in 2009. If anything, Modi’s path is far more tortuous than was Advani’s then. Statistically, Advani was dealt a better hand than Modi has been given. Five years ago, the BJP was in power in seven states, including Karnataka, its first full government in south India. Today, the BJP rules only four, two of which are the politically irrelevant Goa and Modi’s own Gujarat. In Karnataka, the BJP’s humiliating loss in the Assembly election last month and in municipalities weeks earlier has lost the party its only toehold in the south.
In Bihar, the BJP-JD(U) alliance appeared cast in stone after it spectacularly won the 2005 Assembly election. It went on to win an unprecedented 32 of Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats in 2009, with the BJP equalling its highest ever tally of 12 that it had got in 1999. The gains were equally prodigious in the 2010 Assembly election, when the partners substantially improved their tallies to retain power. But today, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is inches away from splitting as he fears that embracing Modi could alienate many of Bihar’s 17 percent Muslims who earlier voted for his party.
In Jharkhand, opportunistic politics toppled a BJP government in January, bringing the state under President’s Rule. The party lost Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in Assembly elections last year.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and electorally most influential state, the BJP scraped through in only 47 of the state’s 403 seats in last year’s Assembly election, coming a distant third to the Samajwadi Party (SP), which won power, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In fact, the BJP’s performance in 2012 was not only poorer than its 51 seats in 2007, but also far worse than its 88 seats in 2002 when its government there headed by Rajnath Singh, now BJP president, was voted out. This shows that the BJP has failed to capitalise on the failures of the state governments of the SP and the BSP who have alternated in ruling Uttar Pradesh since 2002. Worryingly, while the sp and the Congress, the BJP’s national rival, which came fourth in the 2012 election, increased their vote shares compared with 2007, the BJP’s vote share declined from 17 percent to 15 percent.
Indeed, the BJP has been in an electoral free fall in Uttar Pradesh for more than a decade. Both the numbers of seats and the vote share have declined through four Assembly elections 1996 onwards, when it had polled 32.5 percent votes and won 174 of the 425 seats. (Uttar Pradesh now has 403 seats as the rest belonged to the part that became Uttarakhand, which was carved out of the state in November 2000.) The BJP’s fortunes have sunk so deep that last year it won only one of the five Assembly seats that fall in the state capital Lucknow’s Lok Sabha constituency, which Vajpayee held until 2009.
In Maharashtra, where the BJP, with its local ally Shiv Sena, has lost three Assembly elections on the trot since 1999, the BJP’s fortunes have steadily dipped in the number of seats and in the vote share. It is in a worse position today in India’s second most populated state than it was in 2009. In Odisha, the BJP has virtually drowned since the state’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (bjd) leader, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, dumped it as a coalition partner in 2009. The BJP’s only saving grace came last year when its ruling alliance in Punjab, with the Sikh party of Akali Dal, won the Assembly election to retain power. The BJP expects to hit the jackpot only in Rajasthan where it hopes to beat the incumbent Congress in the Assembly election in November.
In both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the BJP has won two successive terms since 2003, elections are due six months from now (along with in Rajasthan and Delhi, both currently ruled by the Congress). Although the BJP governments there project themselves as still popular, the Congress is pinning its hopes on anti-incumbency to claw its way back. Should the BJP lose both or either state, Modi’s capital with the voters, as well as in the party, could diminish severely.
BJP IN PARLIAMENT
The BJP’s first national government lasted only 13 days in 1996 as it could not get enough allies for a simple majority of 272 in the Lok Sabha. Its second coalition government formed in 1998 lasted a month over a year, and its third, formed in 1999, nearly completed a full term before Vajpayee called elections. In 1998 and ’99, the BJP had won 182 and 183 seats, respectively, and gained simple majorities with support from allies.
It can be assumed that the BJP would be in the hunt once again if it gets around 185 seats in the next election. To achieve that target, Modi appears to be at a greater handicap than Advani was in 2009.
In 2009, Advani led the BJP into the election defending 144 seats it had won in 2004 and therefore needing to improve the party’s tally by only 40-odd seats. This time around, the BJP holds only 116 seats in the outgoing Parliament. Modi would need to wrest about 70 seats from other parties. Given the declining electoral fortunes of the BJP since 2009 across India, both in Assembly and parliamentary elections, Modi faces an uphill task. Especially as the BJP might be able to contest only about 365 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats as it did the last time in 2009, and leave the rest for its allies.
UTTAR PRADESH
Modi’s hopes to bring his party to power and become PM would be unrequited unless he dramatically alters its fortunes in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Lok Sabha, the most for an Indian state. The BJP currently holds only nine of those seats. In the three elections of 1996, ’98 and ’99 that returned the BJP as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha, it had won 48, 52 and 25 seats, respectively. (The figures for 1996 and ’98 exclude the seats the BJP won in the part that later became Uttarakhand.) In 2004, when the Vajpayee government was voted out, the BJP won only 10 seats.
Theoretically then, the BJP can have another shot at power in New Delhi if it wins around 25 seats — or 16 more than it currently has — in Uttar Pradesh. But winning 25 seats next year could be a steeper climb than it was in 1999. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had secured 30 percent votes to grab those 25 seats. In fact, from 1991 to 1999, which were the BJP’s glory years in the state, it got upwards of 30 percent in each of the four Lok Sabha elections, the highest 37.5 percent in 1998. That slipped to 22 percent in 2004 and to 17.5 percent in 2009.
What might put the BJP at a further disadvantage is that the two regional parties, the SP and the BSP, have consolidated enormously in the state in the intervening 14 years. In 1991- 99, the BJP either had the largest or the second largest vote shares in both the Assembly and parliamentary elections. Now those top two slots switch between the sp and the BSP, with the exception of the 2009 Lok Sabha election when the Congress won 21 seats, one more than the BSP. Though the BSP still had the second highest vote share, much ahead of the Congress.
Why has the BJP slipped so badly in Uttar Pradesh? It is no secret that the party’s hold has weakened over the uppercaste voters, who are about 18 percent of the state’s electorate and whose support the BJP had increasingly wrested from the Congress since the 1989 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Until 1999, a large chunk of the upper castes — Brahmins, Banias (trading castes) and Thakurs (warrior castes) — formed the BJP’s warren. But over the past 10 years, both the SP and the BSP have claimed sizeable portions of the upper-caste vote by widening their ambit and fielding candidates of those castes.
The BJP cornered 74 percent of the upper-caste votes, or three in four, in the 1996 Assembly election. This declined to 47, or under half, in 2002. In contrast, the BSP, which had won only 4 percent of the Brahmin votes in 1996, got 14 percent in 2002. The BSP’s share of other upper-caste votes too nearly doubled in that period. In last year’s Assembly election, the SP got 19 percent of Brahmin votes. The politics of both the SP and the BSP, once narrow caste-based formations, has increasingly turned inclusive by targeting upper-caste votes.
In the past two Assembly and two parliamentary elections, the SP and the BSP got a big chunk of upper-caste votes by fielding a record number of Brahmins, Banias and Thakurs. Indeed, in 2009, the BSP fielded more Brahmins for the Lok Sabha — one in five — than Dalits, the former untouchables who are the BSP’s raison d’être. Historically, Brahmins and Thakurs have been at political loggerheads in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP’s current president, Rajnath Singh, is a Thakur and a known Brahmin-baiter. Modi might find it not too easy to woo the state’s Brahmins with Singh by his side.
Even if the BJP somehow wins 25 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, Modi would still need to snag 160-odd more seats nationally to stay in the hunt. Just where might he get them? Let us look at the other states with parliamentary heft.
MAHARASHTRA
THE BJP fights elections in Maharashtra in alliance with the Shiv Sena, a regional player. The most the BJP ever won there was 18 of the 48 parliamentary seats in 1996. It did well in 1999, too, winning 14 seats, and in 2004, winning 13. But in the 2009, it came down to nine. The failure to win big in 2009 hurt also because the BJP had hoped to benefit from the perceived national security failure of the Congress-led Central and state governments after Pakistani gunmen killed over 150 people in luxury hotels, a hospital and a railway station, among others, in Mumbai six months before the elections.
The BJP was stung that it failed to capture even one of Mumbai’s six Lok Sabha seats. In 2009, the BJP had missed the presence of leader Pramod Mahajan, a fundraiser nonpareil who was shot dead by his brother in 2006. Last year, the Shiv Sena lost its fiery founder, Bal Thackeray, to the grim reaper. Few believe that his son and successor, Uddhav, has the same mojo. Besides, a splinter party that Uddhav’s cousin, Raj, floated in 2006 has increasingly been splitting anti-Congress votes since. The forecast for 2014 may not be very sunny for the BJP.
WEST BENGAL
THE BJP has a virtually nonexistent record in West Bengal. In 2009, it contested 40 of the 42 seats. It lost all but one, with party strongman Jaswant Singh winning in Darjeeling. (Incidentally, Singh is bitterly opposed to Modi.) The best that the BJP has ever done in West Bengal was to win two seats in 1999. Vajpayee was quick to make both the victors ministers in his government. Both lost in 2004 as also in 2009.
The victories in 1999 had been made possible by the BJP riding piggyback on its then ally, the Trinamool Congress, which was the main opposition in the state and had captured power in 2011 after stunningly routing the 34-year reign of a communist coalition in the Assembly election. It must have hurt the BJP when both its former West Bengal mps lost to Trinamool candidates in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
The unpredictable Trinamool president, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, could well choose to tie up again with the BJP, especially as she has broken from the Congress, her ally of seven years. But would she agree to be led by Modi? That might be tough. A quarter of West Bengal’s voters are Muslim as are two of Trinamool’s 19 MPs. Banerjee just might flinch at backing Modi as PM.
ANDHRA PRADESH
Of the BJP’s chances in Andhra Pradesh, the less said the better. It fielded 37 candidates in the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2009. Every one of them lost. The BJP has seen better days. In an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), a regional player, the BJP won seven Lok Sabha seats in 1999. But it has drawn a blank in the past two elections. Its record in Assembly elections, too, is pathetic. In 2009, it fielded 271 candidates for the Assembly’s 294 seats. All but two lost. The TDP played a key role in propping Vajpayee in 1998 and 1999. But the two split in 2004.
Even if that alliance were to somehow revive, the tdp is a pale shadow of its former self. In 2004, it was famously voted out of power in the Assembly election held simultaneous to the Lok Sabha polls, in which, too, the tdp was trounced. In 1999, the tdp had won a whopping 29 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats. In 2004 and 2009, it managed only six each time. With a breakaway faction led by the son of a late Congress cm in the fray this time, the tdp may need to fight for the anti-incumbency votes from the Congress, which had taken 31 Lok Sabha seats in 2009.
BIHAR
In 2009, the BJP won 12 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, thanks to its tie-up with the JD(U). This was double of what it had won in 2004. Even in 1998, when the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha for the second time and Vajpayee formed his first stable coalition government, the BJP had won only eight seats in what is today’s Bihar. (It had won 12 other seats, too, in 1998 but they were in the part that is now Jharkhand, which was carved out of Bihar in November 2000.)
While the BJP spin doctors argue that the JD(U) would be the bigger loser in Bihar if it quit on the BJP ahead of next year’s election, the fact is the BJP gained enormously from the tieup as the JD(U) brought it both backward and Muslim votes. In 1996, when the BJP became the single largest party in the Lok Sabha for the first time, it won only six in Bihar. It had drawn a blank in 1991, the year the BJP first touched a threefigure mark nationally riding on the back of its controversial campaign to build a Hindu temple in place of a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya town in Uttar Pradesh. Earlier, too, in 1989, when the Ayodhya movement was the rage, the BJP had won only four seats out of Bihar’s 40 (excluding the part that would later be Jharkhand).
TAMIL NADU
With 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state, Tamil Nadu once offered hope to the BJP. The party sensationally opened its account in the state in 1998, bringing it much joy. It went on to win five seats in the 1999 parliamentary election. That is the last time it won any seat in Tamil Nadu. Today, two regional parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), leave little room for the BJP. Both these parties are opportunistic and would likely compete with each other to join a Modi-led government. But they fight a mean battle always, and rarely has one wiped out the other. Hence, even as an ally for Modi, neither might offer Modi too many seats.
MADHYA PRADESH
Modi can can hardly expect the BJP top guns in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to roll out the red carpet for him. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is a direct competitor to Modi. Chauhan has been a member of the RSS since he was 13. In fact, the current crisis in the BJP over Modi’s elevation began after Advani chose to praise Chauhan last week placing him directly over Modi, congratulating Chauhan for performing better in Madhya Pradesh than Modi had in Gujarat.
Ironically, Chauhan delivered more mps — 16 from a total of 29 in Madhya Pradesh — to the BJP in 2009 than Modi did — 15 of Gujarat’s 26 seats. (Modi increased that number last week by wresting two seats from the Congress in by-elections.) The soft-spoken Chauhan is no lightweight and has been a favourite of the party’s national bosses, including senior leaders like Arun Jaitley and Ananth Kumar. The rss, too, solidly backs him. It might not be easy for Modi to overrule Chauhan in the selection of BJP candidates for this November’s Assembly election. And if Chauhan wins the BJP its third straight term in the state, he might get more of his loyalists to contest the Lok Sabha polls there.
Modi would do well to remember that Chauhan is no pushover. To humour Chauhan, the party threw out Uma Bharti, a firebrand leader, when she objected to Chauhan being made cm in 2006. Bharti had led the BJP to win a stunning three-fourth majority in the 2003 Assembly election and become chief minister until a financial scandal roiled her, forcing her to step down. When the party took her back in 2011, Chauhan ensured she promised to stay away from politicking in Madhya Pradesh.
RAJASTHAN
BJP leader and former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje may be even more resentful of Modi encroaching on her turf. She believes she is within striking distance of victory in this November’s Assembly election to unseat the five-year-old Congress government in the state. It was she who had brought the BJP to power in 2003 and she again who lost it in 2008. And, like Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh, if she, too, fetches a BJP victory in the state election, then Modi would find her fighting him tooth and nail if he makes unilateral choices in Rajasthan during next summer’s Lok Sabha election. And the BJP may well strike gold in the desert state as it currently holds only four of the state’s 25 Lok Sabha seats. Rajasthan would be the BJP’s to lose.
KARNATAKA
It would be hardly surprising if Modi decides to give a wide berth to Karnataka given the paucity of time until the next General Election. The BJP won a handsome 18 of 28 parliamentary seats in 2009 — more than what it won in Gujarat. But the party is in a mess in the southern state since losing power there last month. That loss was so bad that the BJP wound up behind not only the victor, the Congress, but also the JD(Secular), a regional player. The departure of former strongman and former chief minister, BS Yeddyurappa, on corruption charges hurt the BJP immeasurably as he floated his own party in November and took away crucial votes.
ODISHA
Modi seems to have got off on the wrong foot in Odisha. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said this week that the BJP’s newfound hero has little to offer by way of solutions to the nation’s various problems. Currently, the BJP has no mps from Odisha. In 1999, it rode piggyback on the BJD, winning nine of the state’s 21 parliamentary seats. In 2004, the alliance helped the BJP win seven seats, equalling its tally in 1998. But angry over anti-Christian violence in the state by rss affiliates, Patnaik abruptly broke the alliance a month ahead of the 2009 Lok Sabha election, leading to the BJP’s wipeout. Now, Patnaik holds the parliamentary key to his state, and appears to be in no mood to oblige Modi.
JHARKHAND
Among the states with fewer than 20 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP once ruled mighty high in Jharkhand, which has 14 seats, winning 12 of them in 1996 and ’98. It was wiped out in 2004 and recovered somewhat to take half of the state’s seats in 2009. But such has been the nasty politicking in Jharkhand lately that the BJP and Modi may well find it difficult to return to the halcyon results of 1996 and ’98.
DELHI
The BJP would also desperately want Modi to revive the party’s fortunes in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, or NCT, which has seven Lok Sabha seats. In 1999, the BJP had swept the region, winning every seat — a crowning glory for the party that had made solid inroads in Delhi on the back of the Ayodhya movement, winning four seats in 1989 and again in 1991, five in 1996 and six in 1998. But in 2004, it was jolted from its complacence, being routed in every single seat in Delhi save one. And in the 2009 election, it lost even that, with the Congress sweeping all seven.
OTHER STATES
Decent numbers for the BJP may yet come from Chhattisgarh, where it holds 10 of the 11 seats, because the Congress has been weakened by the killing of its top leaders in an attack by Maoist rebels last month. But in Assam, where it already holds its highest ever, four of 14 seats, Modi might not find it easy to jack that number up. In Haryana, too, where the BJP snapped five of the 10 seats in 1999, it drew a blank in 2009. Its former partners in that state have fallen on even worse times. In Kerala, the politics is split between a communist-led coalition and a Congress-led one, both virulently opposed to the BJP.
THE BEST OF THE BJP
So where does this leave Modi? If a ‘Best of BJP’ tally is created by totalling the party’s best ever performances in individual states since 1984, when it contested its first Lok Sabha election, it adds up to only 251 seats — 21 short of a simple majority. Even if Modi pulls it off outdoing the BJP’s best ever scores, he may find it difficult to garner support of allies other than the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the Akali Dal in Punjab and either the dmk or the aiadmk in Tamil Nadu to back him for the top job.
Of course, such a tally is only hypothetical. But it shows the enormous difficulty that Modi and the BJP face in their bid to win the next General Election based on their past and current performances. The BJP has had several great electoral boosters in its three-decade history and, greyed watchers might agree, the current so-called “Modi Mania” is not as energised as those momentums that spun solid wins for the party.
Founded in 1980, the BJP made a disastrous parliamentary start four years later winning only two seats while then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress won a landslide in the wake of his mother’s assasination. Even Vajpayee had lost. But five years later the BJP rose to a breathtaking 89 seats. In 1991, less than two years later, the BJP leapt further to notch 121 seats. Both those victories were triggered by a massive political campaign that the BJP launched across India to build the temple in Ayodhya. Such was the political power that campaign unleashed that the BJP took only four General Elections and 16 years to emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha ahead of the Congress, a century old party that had won India’s freedom.
The BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha, in 1998 and 1999 by projecting Vajpayee, a veteran politician perceived to be gifted with gravitas and wisdom, as its pm candidate. When his government turned out to be as disappointing as any, the voters gave it the short shrift in 2004. Does Modi have any such momentum?
At the moment, there is no evidence of that. Modi’s hardline image, built on the massacre of Muslims in 2002, is an 11-year-old story and may not convert passions into votes for him as much as he may want. The BJP used him quite a bit in the elections of 2004 and 2009 to not so happy results. In fact, his image as a national security hawk did not help the party in 2009, which lost all the six seats in Mumbai, where he had campaigned substantially, despite the 26/11 attacks. In comparison, the BJP’s hardline Hindu supremacist image built on the Ayodhya campaign had seemed to be far more pervasive and deeply embedded across India during the 1990s — and that brought it good results in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
Modi’s second calling card — of good governance and bringing development to Gujarat in his 11-year reign as chief minister — appears to have even less meat. Though Advani was playing politics last week when he said Modi had only improved his state as it was already developed when he took over, Advani could not have made that statement had it not been essentially the truth. It would be reasonable to predict that as the election season nears, Modi’s claim of governance and his economic prescriptions would be far more closely scrutinised than ever before.
So what makes Modi’s supporters, inside and outside the BJP, so ecstatic with him taking charge of the party’s campaign? The answer is simple. There is a total absence of any credible leadership in the BJP. Even though the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is widely seen to have made a mess of governance, the BJP is nervous that a negative vote against the incumbent may not be enough.
The BJP spinmeisters have drummed up a crescendo that the party’s “cadres” are unitedly demanding Modi’s leadership for the next Lok Sabha election. Even if that is true, the claim can be accepted only in good faith as such cadres are yet to pour out in towns and cities with their reported demand.
What is certainly true though is that the BJP’s second, third and fourth-rung leaders and camp followers across India see next year’s General Election as their last chance to grab power and the massive spinoffs of pelf and perks that come with it. They think Advani just cannot bring them that, having failed the last time round. Hence Modi.
ajit@tehelka.com
Illustration: Samia singh
No doubt, it is a rare privilege, one that has gone to only two others in the party’s 33-year history — Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who rose to be prime minister, and Lal Krishna Advani, who became his deputy prime minister and was the party’s prime ministerial candidate at the 2009 election. Once Modi’s benefactor and now an adversary, Advani quit all party posts after Modi was named its torchbearer. He took back the resignation under pressure from the party and its ideological parent, the Hindu supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), but the animosity lingers.
Though the BJP has had a string of presidents over the years, Vajpayee and Advani alone were considered PM material. Now that he hopes to become PM, Modi has his task cut out. With only 11 months to go for the next General Election, he has little time to craft a winning team and strategy, or to alter an image of being socially divisive, created by the charge that he allowed, or even connived with, right-wing Hindu zealots to massacre some 2,000 Muslims in his state in 2002.
Would Modi succeed where Advani failed? Just how would Modi deliver a victory that has eluded the party in two successive parliamentary elections? Does Modi have greater traction with the voters than Advani had in 2009? Would existing and potential allies accept Modi as PM just as they accepted Vajpayee in 1998? Both Modi’s supporters and critics recognise him as rabidly anti-Muslim, a perception that has forced at least one coalition ally of the BJP — the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar — to threaten a pull-out if Modi is named the PM candidate. Indeed, Modi is one of the few politicians seen as toxic for India’s pluralistic politics. Would his perceived anti-Muslim persona whip up a frenzy of support among India’s 80 percent Hindu population or would it drive the BJP into the ground?
Modi’s other image is that of a launcher of prosperity predicated on the high economic growth that he asserts Gujarat has netted on his watch. Would Modi’s claim of quality governance in Gujarat carry a decisive edge with India’s 800 million voters? A similar claim by Vajpayee’s government — called ‘India Shining’ — had flopped with the voters in the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Finally, would Modi’s stunning three backto- back wins in Gujarat rub off on his maiden bid to win a parliamentary majority?
- BJP’s tally in the 2009 Lok Sabha election
The BJP is undeniably worse off today than it was in 2009. If anything, Modi’s path is far more tortuous than was Advani’s then. Statistically, Advani was dealt a better hand than Modi has been given. Five years ago, the BJP was in power in seven states, including Karnataka, its first full government in south India. Today, the BJP rules only four, two of which are the politically irrelevant Goa and Modi’s own Gujarat. In Karnataka, the BJP’s humiliating loss in the Assembly election last month and in municipalities weeks earlier has lost the party its only toehold in the south.
In Bihar, the BJP-JD(U) alliance appeared cast in stone after it spectacularly won the 2005 Assembly election. It went on to win an unprecedented 32 of Bihar’s 40 Lok Sabha seats in 2009, with the BJP equalling its highest ever tally of 12 that it had got in 1999. The gains were equally prodigious in the 2010 Assembly election, when the partners substantially improved their tallies to retain power. But today, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is inches away from splitting as he fears that embracing Modi could alienate many of Bihar’s 17 percent Muslims who earlier voted for his party.
In Jharkhand, opportunistic politics toppled a BJP government in January, bringing the state under President’s Rule. The party lost Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in Assembly elections last year.
In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous and electorally most influential state, the BJP scraped through in only 47 of the state’s 403 seats in last year’s Assembly election, coming a distant third to the Samajwadi Party (SP), which won power, and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). In fact, the BJP’s performance in 2012 was not only poorer than its 51 seats in 2007, but also far worse than its 88 seats in 2002 when its government there headed by Rajnath Singh, now BJP president, was voted out. This shows that the BJP has failed to capitalise on the failures of the state governments of the SP and the BSP who have alternated in ruling Uttar Pradesh since 2002. Worryingly, while the sp and the Congress, the BJP’s national rival, which came fourth in the 2012 election, increased their vote shares compared with 2007, the BJP’s vote share declined from 17 percent to 15 percent.
Indeed, the BJP has been in an electoral free fall in Uttar Pradesh for more than a decade. Both the numbers of seats and the vote share have declined through four Assembly elections 1996 onwards, when it had polled 32.5 percent votes and won 174 of the 425 seats. (Uttar Pradesh now has 403 seats as the rest belonged to the part that became Uttarakhand, which was carved out of the state in November 2000.) The BJP’s fortunes have sunk so deep that last year it won only one of the five Assembly seats that fall in the state capital Lucknow’s Lok Sabha constituency, which Vajpayee held until 2009.
In Maharashtra, where the BJP, with its local ally Shiv Sena, has lost three Assembly elections on the trot since 1999, the BJP’s fortunes have steadily dipped in the number of seats and in the vote share. It is in a worse position today in India’s second most populated state than it was in 2009. In Odisha, the BJP has virtually drowned since the state’s ruling Biju Janata Dal (bjd) leader, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, dumped it as a coalition partner in 2009. The BJP’s only saving grace came last year when its ruling alliance in Punjab, with the Sikh party of Akali Dal, won the Assembly election to retain power. The BJP expects to hit the jackpot only in Rajasthan where it hopes to beat the incumbent Congress in the Assembly election in November.
In both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the BJP has won two successive terms since 2003, elections are due six months from now (along with in Rajasthan and Delhi, both currently ruled by the Congress). Although the BJP governments there project themselves as still popular, the Congress is pinning its hopes on anti-incumbency to claw its way back. Should the BJP lose both or either state, Modi’s capital with the voters, as well as in the party, could diminish severely.
BJP IN PARLIAMENT
The BJP’s first national government lasted only 13 days in 1996 as it could not get enough allies for a simple majority of 272 in the Lok Sabha. Its second coalition government formed in 1998 lasted a month over a year, and its third, formed in 1999, nearly completed a full term before Vajpayee called elections. In 1998 and ’99, the BJP had won 182 and 183 seats, respectively, and gained simple majorities with support from allies.
It can be assumed that the BJP would be in the hunt once again if it gets around 185 seats in the next election. To achieve that target, Modi appears to be at a greater handicap than Advani was in 2009.
In 2009, Advani led the BJP into the election defending 144 seats it had won in 2004 and therefore needing to improve the party’s tally by only 40-odd seats. This time around, the BJP holds only 116 seats in the outgoing Parliament. Modi would need to wrest about 70 seats from other parties. Given the declining electoral fortunes of the BJP since 2009 across India, both in Assembly and parliamentary elections, Modi faces an uphill task. Especially as the BJP might be able to contest only about 365 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats as it did the last time in 2009, and leave the rest for its allies.
UTTAR PRADESH
Modi’s hopes to bring his party to power and become PM would be unrequited unless he dramatically alters its fortunes in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Lok Sabha, the most for an Indian state. The BJP currently holds only nine of those seats. In the three elections of 1996, ’98 and ’99 that returned the BJP as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha, it had won 48, 52 and 25 seats, respectively. (The figures for 1996 and ’98 exclude the seats the BJP won in the part that later became Uttarakhand.) In 2004, when the Vajpayee government was voted out, the BJP won only 10 seats.
Theoretically then, the BJP can have another shot at power in New Delhi if it wins around 25 seats — or 16 more than it currently has — in Uttar Pradesh. But winning 25 seats next year could be a steeper climb than it was in 1999. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, the BJP had secured 30 percent votes to grab those 25 seats. In fact, from 1991 to 1999, which were the BJP’s glory years in the state, it got upwards of 30 percent in each of the four Lok Sabha elections, the highest 37.5 percent in 1998. That slipped to 22 percent in 2004 and to 17.5 percent in 2009.
What might put the BJP at a further disadvantage is that the two regional parties, the SP and the BSP, have consolidated enormously in the state in the intervening 14 years. In 1991- 99, the BJP either had the largest or the second largest vote shares in both the Assembly and parliamentary elections. Now those top two slots switch between the sp and the BSP, with the exception of the 2009 Lok Sabha election when the Congress won 21 seats, one more than the BSP. Though the BSP still had the second highest vote share, much ahead of the Congress.
Why has the BJP slipped so badly in Uttar Pradesh? It is no secret that the party’s hold has weakened over the uppercaste voters, who are about 18 percent of the state’s electorate and whose support the BJP had increasingly wrested from the Congress since the 1989 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Until 1999, a large chunk of the upper castes — Brahmins, Banias (trading castes) and Thakurs (warrior castes) — formed the BJP’s warren. But over the past 10 years, both the SP and the BSP have claimed sizeable portions of the upper-caste vote by widening their ambit and fielding candidates of those castes.
The BJP cornered 74 percent of the upper-caste votes, or three in four, in the 1996 Assembly election. This declined to 47, or under half, in 2002. In contrast, the BSP, which had won only 4 percent of the Brahmin votes in 1996, got 14 percent in 2002. The BSP’s share of other upper-caste votes too nearly doubled in that period. In last year’s Assembly election, the SP got 19 percent of Brahmin votes. The politics of both the SP and the BSP, once narrow caste-based formations, has increasingly turned inclusive by targeting upper-caste votes.
In the past two Assembly and two parliamentary elections, the SP and the BSP got a big chunk of upper-caste votes by fielding a record number of Brahmins, Banias and Thakurs. Indeed, in 2009, the BSP fielded more Brahmins for the Lok Sabha — one in five — than Dalits, the former untouchables who are the BSP’s raison d’être. Historically, Brahmins and Thakurs have been at political loggerheads in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP’s current president, Rajnath Singh, is a Thakur and a known Brahmin-baiter. Modi might find it not too easy to woo the state’s Brahmins with Singh by his side.
Even if the BJP somehow wins 25 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh, Modi would still need to snag 160-odd more seats nationally to stay in the hunt. Just where might he get them? Let us look at the other states with parliamentary heft.
MAHARASHTRA
THE BJP fights elections in Maharashtra in alliance with the Shiv Sena, a regional player. The most the BJP ever won there was 18 of the 48 parliamentary seats in 1996. It did well in 1999, too, winning 14 seats, and in 2004, winning 13. But in the 2009, it came down to nine. The failure to win big in 2009 hurt also because the BJP had hoped to benefit from the perceived national security failure of the Congress-led Central and state governments after Pakistani gunmen killed over 150 people in luxury hotels, a hospital and a railway station, among others, in Mumbai six months before the elections.
The BJP was stung that it failed to capture even one of Mumbai’s six Lok Sabha seats. In 2009, the BJP had missed the presence of leader Pramod Mahajan, a fundraiser nonpareil who was shot dead by his brother in 2006. Last year, the Shiv Sena lost its fiery founder, Bal Thackeray, to the grim reaper. Few believe that his son and successor, Uddhav, has the same mojo. Besides, a splinter party that Uddhav’s cousin, Raj, floated in 2006 has increasingly been splitting anti-Congress votes since. The forecast for 2014 may not be very sunny for the BJP.
WEST BENGAL
THE BJP has a virtually nonexistent record in West Bengal. In 2009, it contested 40 of the 42 seats. It lost all but one, with party strongman Jaswant Singh winning in Darjeeling. (Incidentally, Singh is bitterly opposed to Modi.) The best that the BJP has ever done in West Bengal was to win two seats in 1999. Vajpayee was quick to make both the victors ministers in his government. Both lost in 2004 as also in 2009.
The victories in 1999 had been made possible by the BJP riding piggyback on its then ally, the Trinamool Congress, which was the main opposition in the state and had captured power in 2011 after stunningly routing the 34-year reign of a communist coalition in the Assembly election. It must have hurt the BJP when both its former West Bengal mps lost to Trinamool candidates in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
The unpredictable Trinamool president, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, could well choose to tie up again with the BJP, especially as she has broken from the Congress, her ally of seven years. But would she agree to be led by Modi? That might be tough. A quarter of West Bengal’s voters are Muslim as are two of Trinamool’s 19 MPs. Banerjee just might flinch at backing Modi as PM.
ANDHRA PRADESH
Of the BJP’s chances in Andhra Pradesh, the less said the better. It fielded 37 candidates in the state’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2009. Every one of them lost. The BJP has seen better days. In an alliance with the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), a regional player, the BJP won seven Lok Sabha seats in 1999. But it has drawn a blank in the past two elections. Its record in Assembly elections, too, is pathetic. In 2009, it fielded 271 candidates for the Assembly’s 294 seats. All but two lost. The TDP played a key role in propping Vajpayee in 1998 and 1999. But the two split in 2004.
Even if that alliance were to somehow revive, the tdp is a pale shadow of its former self. In 2004, it was famously voted out of power in the Assembly election held simultaneous to the Lok Sabha polls, in which, too, the tdp was trounced. In 1999, the tdp had won a whopping 29 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats. In 2004 and 2009, it managed only six each time. With a breakaway faction led by the son of a late Congress cm in the fray this time, the tdp may need to fight for the anti-incumbency votes from the Congress, which had taken 31 Lok Sabha seats in 2009.
BIHAR
In 2009, the BJP won 12 Lok Sabha seats in Bihar, thanks to its tie-up with the JD(U). This was double of what it had won in 2004. Even in 1998, when the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha for the second time and Vajpayee formed his first stable coalition government, the BJP had won only eight seats in what is today’s Bihar. (It had won 12 other seats, too, in 1998 but they were in the part that is now Jharkhand, which was carved out of Bihar in November 2000.)
While the BJP spin doctors argue that the JD(U) would be the bigger loser in Bihar if it quit on the BJP ahead of next year’s election, the fact is the BJP gained enormously from the tieup as the JD(U) brought it both backward and Muslim votes. In 1996, when the BJP became the single largest party in the Lok Sabha for the first time, it won only six in Bihar. It had drawn a blank in 1991, the year the BJP first touched a threefigure mark nationally riding on the back of its controversial campaign to build a Hindu temple in place of a 16th-century mosque in Ayodhya town in Uttar Pradesh. Earlier, too, in 1989, when the Ayodhya movement was the rage, the BJP had won only four seats out of Bihar’s 40 (excluding the part that would later be Jharkhand).
TAMIL NADU
With 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state, Tamil Nadu once offered hope to the BJP. The party sensationally opened its account in the state in 1998, bringing it much joy. It went on to win five seats in the 1999 parliamentary election. That is the last time it won any seat in Tamil Nadu. Today, two regional parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), leave little room for the BJP. Both these parties are opportunistic and would likely compete with each other to join a Modi-led government. But they fight a mean battle always, and rarely has one wiped out the other. Hence, even as an ally for Modi, neither might offer Modi too many seats.
MADHYA PRADESH
Modi can can hardly expect the BJP top guns in the states of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to roll out the red carpet for him. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is a direct competitor to Modi. Chauhan has been a member of the RSS since he was 13. In fact, the current crisis in the BJP over Modi’s elevation began after Advani chose to praise Chauhan last week placing him directly over Modi, congratulating Chauhan for performing better in Madhya Pradesh than Modi had in Gujarat.
Ironically, Chauhan delivered more mps — 16 from a total of 29 in Madhya Pradesh — to the BJP in 2009 than Modi did — 15 of Gujarat’s 26 seats. (Modi increased that number last week by wresting two seats from the Congress in by-elections.) The soft-spoken Chauhan is no lightweight and has been a favourite of the party’s national bosses, including senior leaders like Arun Jaitley and Ananth Kumar. The rss, too, solidly backs him. It might not be easy for Modi to overrule Chauhan in the selection of BJP candidates for this November’s Assembly election. And if Chauhan wins the BJP its third straight term in the state, he might get more of his loyalists to contest the Lok Sabha polls there.
Modi would do well to remember that Chauhan is no pushover. To humour Chauhan, the party threw out Uma Bharti, a firebrand leader, when she objected to Chauhan being made cm in 2006. Bharti had led the BJP to win a stunning three-fourth majority in the 2003 Assembly election and become chief minister until a financial scandal roiled her, forcing her to step down. When the party took her back in 2011, Chauhan ensured she promised to stay away from politicking in Madhya Pradesh.
RAJASTHAN
BJP leader and former Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje may be even more resentful of Modi encroaching on her turf. She believes she is within striking distance of victory in this November’s Assembly election to unseat the five-year-old Congress government in the state. It was she who had brought the BJP to power in 2003 and she again who lost it in 2008. And, like Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh, if she, too, fetches a BJP victory in the state election, then Modi would find her fighting him tooth and nail if he makes unilateral choices in Rajasthan during next summer’s Lok Sabha election. And the BJP may well strike gold in the desert state as it currently holds only four of the state’s 25 Lok Sabha seats. Rajasthan would be the BJP’s to lose.
KARNATAKA
It would be hardly surprising if Modi decides to give a wide berth to Karnataka given the paucity of time until the next General Election. The BJP won a handsome 18 of 28 parliamentary seats in 2009 — more than what it won in Gujarat. But the party is in a mess in the southern state since losing power there last month. That loss was so bad that the BJP wound up behind not only the victor, the Congress, but also the JD(Secular), a regional player. The departure of former strongman and former chief minister, BS Yeddyurappa, on corruption charges hurt the BJP immeasurably as he floated his own party in November and took away crucial votes.
ODISHA
Modi seems to have got off on the wrong foot in Odisha. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said this week that the BJP’s newfound hero has little to offer by way of solutions to the nation’s various problems. Currently, the BJP has no mps from Odisha. In 1999, it rode piggyback on the BJD, winning nine of the state’s 21 parliamentary seats. In 2004, the alliance helped the BJP win seven seats, equalling its tally in 1998. But angry over anti-Christian violence in the state by rss affiliates, Patnaik abruptly broke the alliance a month ahead of the 2009 Lok Sabha election, leading to the BJP’s wipeout. Now, Patnaik holds the parliamentary key to his state, and appears to be in no mood to oblige Modi.
JHARKHAND
Among the states with fewer than 20 Lok Sabha seats, the BJP once ruled mighty high in Jharkhand, which has 14 seats, winning 12 of them in 1996 and ’98. It was wiped out in 2004 and recovered somewhat to take half of the state’s seats in 2009. But such has been the nasty politicking in Jharkhand lately that the BJP and Modi may well find it difficult to return to the halcyon results of 1996 and ’98.
DELHI
The BJP would also desperately want Modi to revive the party’s fortunes in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, or NCT, which has seven Lok Sabha seats. In 1999, the BJP had swept the region, winning every seat — a crowning glory for the party that had made solid inroads in Delhi on the back of the Ayodhya movement, winning four seats in 1989 and again in 1991, five in 1996 and six in 1998. But in 2004, it was jolted from its complacence, being routed in every single seat in Delhi save one. And in the 2009 election, it lost even that, with the Congress sweeping all seven.
OTHER STATES
Decent numbers for the BJP may yet come from Chhattisgarh, where it holds 10 of the 11 seats, because the Congress has been weakened by the killing of its top leaders in an attack by Maoist rebels last month. But in Assam, where it already holds its highest ever, four of 14 seats, Modi might not find it easy to jack that number up. In Haryana, too, where the BJP snapped five of the 10 seats in 1999, it drew a blank in 2009. Its former partners in that state have fallen on even worse times. In Kerala, the politics is split between a communist-led coalition and a Congress-led one, both virulently opposed to the BJP.
THE BEST OF THE BJP
So where does this leave Modi? If a ‘Best of BJP’ tally is created by totalling the party’s best ever performances in individual states since 1984, when it contested its first Lok Sabha election, it adds up to only 251 seats — 21 short of a simple majority. Even if Modi pulls it off outdoing the BJP’s best ever scores, he may find it difficult to garner support of allies other than the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the Akali Dal in Punjab and either the dmk or the aiadmk in Tamil Nadu to back him for the top job.
Of course, such a tally is only hypothetical. But it shows the enormous difficulty that Modi and the BJP face in their bid to win the next General Election based on their past and current performances. The BJP has had several great electoral boosters in its three-decade history and, greyed watchers might agree, the current so-called “Modi Mania” is not as energised as those momentums that spun solid wins for the party.
Founded in 1980, the BJP made a disastrous parliamentary start four years later winning only two seats while then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress won a landslide in the wake of his mother’s assasination. Even Vajpayee had lost. But five years later the BJP rose to a breathtaking 89 seats. In 1991, less than two years later, the BJP leapt further to notch 121 seats. Both those victories were triggered by a massive political campaign that the BJP launched across India to build the temple in Ayodhya. Such was the political power that campaign unleashed that the BJP took only four General Elections and 16 years to emerge as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha ahead of the Congress, a century old party that had won India’s freedom.
The BJP emerged as the single largest party in the Lok Sabha, in 1998 and 1999 by projecting Vajpayee, a veteran politician perceived to be gifted with gravitas and wisdom, as its pm candidate. When his government turned out to be as disappointing as any, the voters gave it the short shrift in 2004. Does Modi have any such momentum?
At the moment, there is no evidence of that. Modi’s hardline image, built on the massacre of Muslims in 2002, is an 11-year-old story and may not convert passions into votes for him as much as he may want. The BJP used him quite a bit in the elections of 2004 and 2009 to not so happy results. In fact, his image as a national security hawk did not help the party in 2009, which lost all the six seats in Mumbai, where he had campaigned substantially, despite the 26/11 attacks. In comparison, the BJP’s hardline Hindu supremacist image built on the Ayodhya campaign had seemed to be far more pervasive and deeply embedded across India during the 1990s — and that brought it good results in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
Modi’s second calling card — of good governance and bringing development to Gujarat in his 11-year reign as chief minister — appears to have even less meat. Though Advani was playing politics last week when he said Modi had only improved his state as it was already developed when he took over, Advani could not have made that statement had it not been essentially the truth. It would be reasonable to predict that as the election season nears, Modi’s claim of governance and his economic prescriptions would be far more closely scrutinised than ever before.
So what makes Modi’s supporters, inside and outside the BJP, so ecstatic with him taking charge of the party’s campaign? The answer is simple. There is a total absence of any credible leadership in the BJP. Even though the Congress-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is widely seen to have made a mess of governance, the BJP is nervous that a negative vote against the incumbent may not be enough.
The BJP spinmeisters have drummed up a crescendo that the party’s “cadres” are unitedly demanding Modi’s leadership for the next Lok Sabha election. Even if that is true, the claim can be accepted only in good faith as such cadres are yet to pour out in towns and cities with their reported demand.
What is certainly true though is that the BJP’s second, third and fourth-rung leaders and camp followers across India see next year’s General Election as their last chance to grab power and the massive spinoffs of pelf and perks that come with it. They think Advani just cannot bring them that, having failed the last time round. Hence Modi.
ajit@tehelka.com