BJP lost Bihar because Grand Alliance was united, not because of Modi or Bhagwat

The post-Bihar drama within the NDA resembles the script of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs — disclaimer, any resemblance with the Shatrughan Sinha-Kailash Vijayvergia spat is purely coincidental — where the partners start blaming each other after a failed heist. Jitan Manjhi is pointing fingers at Mohan Bhagwat; Arun Jaitley is blaming the party’s failure to negate the Mahagathbandhan social base; Shotgun Sinha is ruing the BJP’s reluctance to name him as the CM candidate and Begusarai MP Bhola Yadav has summoned rare courage to accuse the PM of ruining it with his “irrelevant speeches” and needless sparring with Lalu Prasad Yadav. At the rate holy cows in the NDA are being attacked, somebody is soon bound to bring up beef and Dadri. Amidst this ugly finger-wagging and tongue-lashing, the NDA seems to have ignored the data from Bihar’s polls. Figures and statistics collated by various agencies point out that the Bihar election was lost the moment the Mahagathbandhan was formed and Nitish Kumar named the CM candidate. Nothing the BJP did, or couldn’t do, after that changed the result. Facts don’t lie. A breakup of votes polled by the two alliances shows a difference of 31 lakh in 2015. This is almost identical to the difference of total votes between the NDA and JDU+RJD+Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, which was almost 31 lakh. So, in absolute terms, the Mahagathbandhan retained its Lok Sabha lead over NDA in the assembly polls. [caption id=“attachment_2502856” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. AFP[/caption] During the debate on exit poll figures released by NDTV on 6 November, CP Joshi, the Congress general secretary in charge of Bihar, had made an important observation. “In the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the NDA vote share was around 38.7 per cent. The Mahagathbandhan’s combined figure was around 44 per cent. Since every election after the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP has lost around six per cent votes. How will it buck the trend in Bihar?” he had asked. Joshi got it right. The NDA’s vote share in Bihar fell by nearly five percent in 2015 to 34.1. Though the Mahagathbandhan also fell to 41.9 percent, the gap was big enough to give Nitish Kumar’s alliance 120 more seats than the NDA . Many factors contributed to the Mahagathbandhan’s lead and most of them have been analysed threadbare in the past. The limited point here is this: The Bihar election panned out as scripted. One, the trend of BJP losing around six percent votes in every election after 2014 continued; and, two, the Mahagathbandhan retained the lead it had over the NDA from the very beginning. Though there are no clear starting points in an election, a snap poll conducted by ABP Nielsen in February could be a good reference. In that survey, only 41 percent respondents had shown their willingness to vote for the NDA; 57 percent had favoured the evolving Mahagathbandhan. So, how much did Mohan Bhagwat, Dadri, PM Modi, Hindutva hotheads contribute to the pre-destined result? Consider phase five of the election in Bihar’s Seemanchal, where the combined strength of Muslims and Yadavs was considered a decisive factor. Just before this round, the NDA tried its best to polarise voters on communal lines. It issued ads featuring gau mata, made ugly references to celebrations breaking out in Pakistan after the BJP’s defeat and raised the communal temperature. Moreover, several fringe players like Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM and Pappu Yadav’s fledgling outfit were expected to eat into the Mahagathbandhan pie. But, the results were almost identical to the outcome in 2014. In 2014, the BJP had led in just 17 assembly segments in this region; the Mahagathbandhan had a clear lead in more than three dozen. The 2015 result is a replica with the BJP winning 18 and the Mahagathbandhan getting 39 seats. Clearly, pre-poll acrobatics, rhetoric and machinations did not alter the outcome. From the very beginning, for the BJP, winning the Bihar election was like climbing a hill with the rival already half way up there. Its only hope lay in the Mahagathbandhan falling because of the burden of its contradictions and fighting within its various factions. But, this did not happen. Lalu Yadav, Nitish Kumar and the Congress contested the polls like a united family facing a common enemy. The leaders campaigned for each other, the cadres cooperated in the field and their traditional voters forgot their old rivalries. In the end, the Mahagathbandhan emerged as a single entity, a perfect sum of its parts. Instead of fighting with each other, the BJP leaders should start worrying about two clear trends: Its voters are disintegrating and rivals are uniting. Both don’t augur well for their future.