What Delhi election results say: PM Modi's beloved middle class delivered AAP landslide

New Delhi: The landslide victory of AAP in Delhi brings to mind former New York mayor Mario Cuomo, who once said, “You campaign in poetry, and govern in prose.” The profundity of this observation was presumably lost on the BJP a fortnight before Delhi went to polls, mounting as it did a campaign which not only lacked the music and elegance of poetry but was, for most part, peevish and petty, communicated in prose quite jarring.

The BJP turned peevish because it hadn’t expected AAP to mount an astonishing challenge for the battle to win Delhi. Or perhaps it believed Prime Minister Narendra Modi would trigger a wave significant enough, as he did in four state Assembly polls over the last few months, to sweep aside AAP.

This belief of the BJP was based on a misreading of the 2014 Lok Sabha results of Delhi, where it bagged all the seven seats. In its complacency it simply missed the clue to the threat AAP could mount in the future. Despite the Modi wave engulfing much of north India, AAP, quite incredibly, increased its vote-share in 2014 by 3 percent over what it had secured in the Assembly polls in December 2013.

The significance of the 3 percent increase seemed magnified because of the context in which AAP had achieved it. Not only had the BJP picked votes across the class-caste divide, it had through Modi’s slogan of good governance won the allegiance of the middle class to an overwhelming degree. In 2013, AAP was undoubtedly strong among subaltern groups, but did also pull enough middle class votes but not enough to form the government.

The three percent increase in its vote-share in 2014 possibly accrued from greater consolidation of lower classes and the religious minorities behind AAP, and primarily from the bleeding Congress. The Muslim vote in the 2013 polls was the same for both, the BJP and the AAP at 12 percent, while in the Lok Sabha polls, AAP won 56 percent, while the BJP won just two percent.

And that is exactly what was expected this time around, hence all the talk about polarisation and the class divide in the run up to the elections. But the big story of this election is the extent to which the BJP and Modi have squandered the faith the middle and upper classes, who were once his most loyal constituency.

While the initial exit polls had predicted that the AAP would eat into the Congress and BSP vote share, a mandate of this nature – 65+ seats – is a clear indication that the party has also managed to wrest a significant amount of upper class votes. As of 11.30 am, the AAP had 54.2 percent of the vote share, while BJP had 32.8 percent.

In the last two polls - the 2013 Delhi assembly and the 2014 Lok Sabha - the BJP managed to win 46 percent and 65 percent of the Brahmin vote respectively, while the AAP managed to win 23 and 22 percent respectively. While the final numbers aren’t in, it is clear from the sheer scale of the AAP victory those numbers have shifted as well.

So how did Modi and the BJP lose the urban middle class?

This election wasn’t billed as a referendum on the communalism-secularism debate, but fears about BJP’s polarisation tactics became campaign subtext in Dehi. The middle and upper classes became alarmed by the slew of issues the Sangh leaders began pulling out from the pockets of their khaki shorts. Love jihad, ghar wapsi, the controversy around Aligarh Muslim University, the intemperate remarks of BJP MPs, antediluvian prescriptions for women reeking of patriarchy – it just seemed the Hindutva hotheads weren’t willing to hit the pause button.

For Delhi’s middle class veritably in thrall to Modi and his hype over governance and development, these episodes either seemed the antics of the loony brigade best ignored or were happening in the backwaters of India, too far away to singe the city.

But these issues began to ring far too closely to home in recent months. Delhi’s Trilokpuri area rioted. Then followed concerted attempts to trigger communal tensions in Bawana, Nangloi, Nand Nagiri and Okhla, all defused in time, suggesting Delhiites were perhaps no longer as susceptible to communal mobilisation as, say, two decades ago.

It is hard to tell whether the middle and upper classes were alienated from the BJP because of its communal rhetoric or simply because such politics threatened social stability and law and order, which are values dear to those who are relatively privileged. And so as one church after another was vandalized – in fact, five in two months – the deepest fears of the middle and upper classes about the Sangh were kindled. True, no BJP activist had been implicated in attacks on churches. Yet it was almost unanimously recognised that the ruling party’s brand of politics creates an ambience in which violence is inevitable.

This was best symbolised through the extolling of Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. Godse may have his followers, but he did, in the final analysis, resort to violence, which the middle class condones as long as the state perpetrates it. It also seemed a tad confusing to have Modi invoke the Mahatma every third week and yet have his own party MP and footsoliders lavish praise on Godse. This was particularly perturbing to Delhi’s middle class because the BJP’s politics seemed to violate the idea of good governance, which was what had prompted it to fervently support Modi in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

These episodes had three other consequences. One, it pushed out the positive headlines Modi had been generating; the feel-good mood began receding overnight. Two, Modi’s reluctance to reprimand the Sangh hotheads diminished his image among his middle class followers, who saw him as a decisive, no-nonsense leader having, unlike his predecessor, a majority of his own. They expected to hear him criticise the hotheads. Not for this class the subtleties of Sangh politics or, for that matter, understanding the compulsions behind revising history books and introducing Sanskrit or to discover plastic surgery in ancient times.

Three, and more importantly, Modi’s silence was construed as a reflection of his indifference, arising from the arrogance of possessing the kind of power no prime minister had over the last 30 years. To have bureaucrats clean their office on the birth anniversary of Gandhi is one thing. But to declare Christmas as the day to propagate good governance smacked of authoritarianism. What else could have prompted him to alter the significance of Dec 25? It seemed almost god-like.

It was then that you began to hear in middle and upper class gatherings the danger of vesting too much power in the BJP. Fuelling this fear were media stories of the control Modi exercises over ministers and MP, lecturing them as a teacher would his pupil; there were accounts of the disdain with which bureaucrats were treated; and, above all, about how BJP President Amit Shah calls the shots in the party. It was against this backdrop that their decision to impose Kiran Bedi on the BJP was seen as arising from their hubris – of believing they could do no wrong, of being absolutely sure of the wishes of voters.

The chatter not to bestow too much on the BJP acquired a crescendo during the visit of American President Barrack Obama. Perhaps nothing cost the BJP more than his insistence to address the American President as Barrack, even as he, the world’s most powerful man, studious refrained from calling the Indian Prime Minister by his first name. Then Modi’s dress into which his name was woven was construed as a manifestation of megalomania, inevitable for one who possessed enormous power he possessed.

So when Bedi began to fumble and bumble, the BJP forgot the observation of Mario Cuomo that “you campaign in poetry…” and simply turned nasty, flinging mud around at AAP and Kejriwal. Gone was Modi people knew in 2014, assured, weaving dreams, and educating people about his agenda. He took to calling Kejriwal badnaseeb (unlucky), Naxalite, anarchist, a 49-day disaster. Amit Shah went even a step ahead. In an interview to The Times of India, he said Kejriwal quit the government because he would have been otherwise lynched.

This terrible prose inspired the doubting middle and upper classes to warn Modi and the BJP through their vote in Delhi. The more the BJP sensed their alienation, the more it became desperate. It accused AAP of receiving donation through hawala channels, but then itself issued front page advertisements in leading newspapers for days. It spoke to readers about the overflowing coffers of the BJP, which was accusing its rival of corruption even though it didn’t have finances to insert even a small-size advertisement in a newspaper. The BJP seemed to mock the intelligence of voters. The middle class felt particularly insulted as its members place such primacy on the virtues of mind.

Delhi’s middle class is quite from its counterparts in other cities. It comprises bureaucrats who don’t wish see their power diminished. Here are people networked into the city’s power grid. It is a city which is a media hub, therefore intensely scrutinizing of those in government. It is a city which has over the last 25 years developed a radical bone, its middle and upper classes quick to take to streets to register their protest. It is also the city where the BJP has failed to win a state election five times in a row.

You can’t replicate the politics of India’s deep interiors and triumph in Delhi. The BJP was vanquished also because there was Kejriwal, hopping from place to another, asking people for forgiveness for quitting the government in 2013, and rolling out his agenda for the poor as well as the middle and upper classes. But that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that Delhi punishes, but it also forgives.

Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores.