Modi for Lucknow and other election-time red herrings

Nothing illustrates the phoniness of election season as the statements made by politicians. When Mulayam Singh Yadav wants to get himself some upper caste votes in Uttar Pradesh, he even goes around praising LK Advani for his truthfulness. When Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wants to pressure the BJP to keep Narendra Modi under wraps, at least till the polls, he will hold rallies to press for special status to Bihar. And when Narendra Modi wants to throw a feint, he will get a fan club in Uttar Pradesh to pretend that he may even contest from Lucknow in order to show he can win outside Gujarat. None of this means anything. They are meant to confuse. To start with the last idea first, Modi will not be contesting from anywhere before the next Lok Sabha polls, least of all from Lucknow. An Open magazine article talked about this possibility in the context of a Muslim, Khursheed Suma, heading the Narendra Modi Fan Club (read here) in Uttar Pradesh, but this is an obvious decoy. If Modi sees himself as a PM aspirant, the last thing he would want to do is to start worrying about his own seat.[caption id=“attachment_676164” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Modi is unlikely to step into Vajpayee’s shoes. AFP[/caption] Just as an ace football forward will be marked by the opposing team, political rivals will do everything to tie down Modi to one constituency or state so that he cannot score anywhere else. They fear Modi precisely because he is a visible and salable brand for large sections of the middle class, and even in some OBC caste categories. Against this backdrop, it would make strategic sense for Modi’s opponents to unite and put up a very strong candidate against him if he stands from Lucknow. This is not about whether Modi will win or not, but he cannot afford to tie himself down to a new constituency. If he is to be the face of the campaign, he has to be everywhere but his own seat. This is why Lucknow is not on. Another reason trotted out for Modi wanting to contest from Lucknow is that this constituency is associated with Atal Behari Vajpayee, whose mantle Modi wants to don. But Vajpayee’s mantle is one thing, and his electoral magic another. In 2004, Vajpayee said the BJP would win 60 seats in Uttar Pradesh. It won 10. So much for the Vajpayee magic. Modi cannot be in any illusion that Vajpayee’s name alone is enough to win Lucknow. However, Modi will be seen a lot not only in Lucknow, but in all of Uttar Pradesh, because that is where the BJP’s fortunes will be made, if at all. With just 10 seats out of 80 in 2009, the BJP has fallen far from the 52 seats it won in 1998. In 1999, it fell to 29 and further to 10 in 2004 and 2009. It thus has everything to gain from using Modi to the hilt in Uttar Pradesh, where it cannot possibly fall any lower. If the BJP is to have a reasonable chance of forming a government in Delhi after 2014, it has to get more seats in Uttar Pradesh. Minhaz Merchant gives the BJP 156 seats in the next elections, and this includes a tally of 20 from this most populous state. The question is whether the Modi effect will bring 20 seats or more (or less) for the party in Uttar Pradesh. Either way, trying to fight his own seat in Lucknow serves no purpose other than to give his opponents one more way to trip him. In fact, one is willing to bet the Modi may not contest any seat anywhere (except possibly Gujarat). He may choose to contest only after the polls. This way, he can be fully focused on the campaigning. Modi’s best hope of making it to PM is to ensure the BJP gets a large number of seats. Getting himself elected is for later. If the BJP, despite its best efforts, fails to do as well, getting Modi elected from anywhere will be of no use anyway. The next bit of red herring is Nitish Kumar’s special status gambit. It is always nice to be wooed, and the Congress is happy to dance around trees and talk special status with Nitish Kumar. But this is being done with the next six months in mind. The Congress is probably keen to hold elections by October, after it presumably wins Karnataka. After October, it has only losses and uncertainties ahead – in Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. By dangling the special category status before Nitish Kumar, the Congress hopes it can survive any effort by Mulayam Singh Yadav to pull the rug from under the government according to his convenience. So why is Nitish Kumar playing this game? Does special status mean so much to him? In politics, you have to pretend that the state will benefit from something that someone else is denying you. Special status will not immediately improve Bihar’s economic growth—which is already the fastest growing state in the country—or improve state incomes significantly in the short run. Nor is it even likely that the Congress will immediately oblige. There are other states that could object. The fact that Bihar is poor and has had a poor record in family planning and per capita income growth is no reason to give it special favours. As Swaminathan Aiyar writes in The Times of India : “Bihar has long been among the worst states in family planning and population growth. Its population expanded 25 percent in the last decade against the national 17.6 percent, and its women have on average 3.7 children against the national 2.5. This has depressed its per capita income. But can this be a reason to demand more cash, which will come at the expense of states that have controlled their populations and hence improved per capita income? Should Tamil Nadu and Kerala subsidise Bihar’s bedroom profligacy?” Surely, even Nitish Kumar knows the answer to this. Then why is he playing bashful bride to Congress wooing? The answer is simple: he wants to keep the pressure up on the BJP to avoid announcing Modi as the PM candidate before the polls. This way he can keep his BJP tieup in Bihar – without which he too will be decimated, as Aakar Patel notes in this article in Firstpost _._ By getting many seats, Nitish will hold high cards when the next government is formed – whether it is by the BJP or Congress. Going with the Congress right now is suicidal for him. As for Mulayam Singh’s praise for Advani , the motives are even clearer: Modi as a backward class politician, even though he never uses this caste affiliation for political ends, has a certain appeal to both the upper castes and the OBCs in Uttar Pradesh. As the alleged champion of Hindutva—something he has never tomtommed after 2002—his image needs no special Hindutva mention. It is assumed. Add the development agenda, and his CV looks infinitely better in Uttar Pradesh. Mulayam Singh may even be worried about his Yadav base. This is what gets Mulayam’s goat. He won the last election on the basis of a growing share of upper caste votes, but these came to him because the BJP looked like no-hopper. Under Modi, it is not. Hence the praise for Advani, who was till recently the villain in Mulayam Singh’s books, having led the Ayodhya movement. Mulayam Singh, it should be recalled, has previously hobnobbed with Kalyan Singh, another Ayodhya movement posterboy, but this did not yield dividends. His embrace of Advani is thus another effort to fool two constituencies – the upper castes, in the hope that they will notice, and the minorities, in the hope that they won’t notice what he said. As for his third front gambit, that is for laughs. In India, there are no fronts before an election. There may be state-level alliances, but fronts and alliances get formed after elections, calculators in hand. The MP head count is what matters to building an alliance, not ideology.