BJP’s shrinking poll results flash danger signal for party

The Uttar Pradesh assembly poll result should give the BJP reason to worry. The Congress has failed in the popularity test but it has not come out with flying colours either. The predicament of both the national parties is similar. Both have virtually been marginalised in the country’s biggest state, both have serious problems at the organisation level, both lack good leadership in the state and neither has an answer to overcome these weaknesses. The party aimed at 90-100 seats but finished with 47. This is four seats down from its 2007 tally of 51. Worse, it lost three percent of its vote share – it has come down to 15 percent from 18 percent. With UP’s politics getting polarised between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, the BJP might find it difficult to create space for itself as the third alternative. To compound its woes, none of the other parties in the state is willing to align with it. This was the best chance for the BJP to revive itself in UP, the state it has ruled earlier and where it has some core voters, an advantage not enjoyed by the Congress. It also has some local leaders of stature and the extended Sangh Parivar network to fall back upon. Mayawati had enough chinks in her armour which the party could have exploited. Party president Nitin Gadkari displayed enough ability to experiment with innovative strategies. The results, however, were disappointing to say the least. [caption id=“attachment_237140” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“BJP President Nitin Gadkari with party leaders Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ananth Kumar at the party headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday. Shahbaz Khan/PTI”]  [/caption] The reasons are not difficult to find. Interestingly, many of these are common to both the Congress and the BJP. It had no regional leader who could be the face of the party’s campaign. State biggies like Rajnath Singh, a former BJP president, and Kalraj Mishra are way too limited in their appeal across the state. Thus Gadkari had to import Uma Bharti from Madhya Pradesh. This did not go well with either the state’s leaders or the local cadre. For sometime, Gadkari has been consciously trying to shed the communal image of the party and provide it a progressive outlook. He has shifted his focus to the development plank instead of harping on polarisng issues such as Ram Mandir and Hindu identity, both of which have become electorally unproductive. However, to sell the idea of development you need an organisational network that is tuned to the idea. However, most of the Sangh Parivar outfits are grooved in the idea of Hindutva. It is difficult to send across a new idea to people using these as conduits. Gadkari would have discovered this practical problem at some point. The Congress aggressively played the communal card, announcing sub-quotas for Muslims within the OBC category. The SP followed it with a bigger reservation promise. In normal conditions, such promises cause some polarisation of Hindu votes, which works in favour of the BJP. It did not happen this time. The UP voter seems to have stopped thinking on communal lines. The BJP, like the Congress, sought to play the caste card hard for the first time. When it invited Uma Bharti – she belongs to the Lodh community – to the state, the game plan was to target the backward vote. The induction of BSP discard Babu Singh Khushwaha and others, and the emphasis on the rights of the OBCs during campaigning were part of a larger strategy. However, it failed to deliver. Only a few of the party’s 126 OBC candidates have won. Gadkari’s plan was not unsound given the history of caste equations in UP but in a situation where there is a wave in favour of one political party, many strategies are bound to fail. The BJP ran a lacklustre campaign. Its senior state leaders were too busy settling turf issues, nursing ego issues and promoting their kin to take real interest in the party’s campaign. Uma Bharti’s arrival on the scene and the importance accorded to her irked these leaders no end. Bharti, who was supposed to lead the campaign, had to be pushed out of the campaign mainstream to Bundelkhand where she stayed busy contesting a seat. None of the star central campaigners of the party was conspicuous by their presence in UP. The likes of LK Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley were hardly in the show that was run almost entirely by Gadkari. There’s reason to believe he was not getting full support from party veterans. Also, he did not bother to invite Narendra Modi to UP. It is possible Gadkari is creating his own power formation within the BJP. The party lacked the energy and enthusiasm one usually expects in the BJP. Now that it has suffered, the party must sort out intra-party issues. It has not done too well in other states either. It has lost five seats in Punjab and drawn level with the Congress in Uttarakhand. Goa is the only saving grace but it is too small a presence in the electoral map of the country.