THE BJP’S MOUNTING WOES
Amulya Ganguli
The election season has begun on a sour note for the BJP. In the run-up to the Bihar polls which are due later this month, the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) has split. The Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) of former Union minister Ramvilas Paswan has broken away to fight on its own.
Curiously, it has not deserted the BJP, but only severed its ties with Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United). Evidently, the main grouse of the LJP president, Chirag Paswan, who is the late Union minister’s son, is only against the Bihar chief minister.
Although the BJP has maintained that it continues to accept Nitish Kumar as the leader and has even come to a seat-sharing arrangement with him, there is speculation that Chirag Paswan has been secretly put up by the BJP to undercut the chief minister’s position.
Whatever the truth, it is obvious that the BJP will not have an easy run in the first major election since the coronavirus outbreak. If it stumbles, either because of Nitish Kumar’s unpopularity, which made the LJP walk away, perhaps with the BJP’s tacit approval, or because of the division of the NDA votes between the BJP-Janata Dal (United) and the LJP, then it will be a bad omen for the next round of elections in 2021 starting with West Bengal.
It remains to be seen whether the cracks in the NDA help its main rival – the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-Congress-Left combine – which has been able to get its act together on the sharing of seats with surprising ease. The RJD leader, Tejashvi Yadav, doesn’t have his father, Laloo Prasad’s popular appeal among the Yadavs and other backward castes.
But he can be deemed to be on a much better position than before in view of Nitish Kumar’s inability to live up to his reputation of providing su-sashan or good governance, especially during the exodus of the Bihari migrant labourers from the other states.
However, to what extent the people of the state will be willing to accept Tejeshvi as a chief minister is open to question. His own nervousness in this respect was evident from his reluctance to let the former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student, Kanhaiya Kumar, who is an excellent orator, campaign for the opposition line-up.
An intriguing question in the context of the polls is the effect which the tragic death in Mumbai of the rising Bihari actor, Sushant Singh Rajput, will have on the fortunes of the various parties.
At one time, it was believed that the charge, levelled mainly by pro-BJP television channels, that Rajput was the victim of a diabolical plot of established Bollywood actors to deny him space in the tinsel town, would generate a sympathy wave in the NDA’s favour by targeting the powers-that-be in India’s finance capital, viz. the Shiv Sena working in cahoots with the Mumbai police.
But recent developments have shown that the story has more sides to it than mere professional jealousy fuelled by the use of narcotics. As a result, the theory that Rajput was murdered has been more or less discounted, thereby substantiating the Mumbai police’s original assumption that the death was a case of suicide caused by depression.
In any event, it doesn’t seem likely that the narrative of a Bihari simpleton who lost his way in the big, bad movie world and was conveniently eliminated will influence the state elections. The contest will be back, therefore, to the grounds of caste, which is the RJD’s forte, Hindu-Muslim animus, which is the BJP’s, and the clout of local leaders.
However, since caste is bound to play a crucial role, as is common in the Hindi heartland, the rape and murder of a Dalit girl belonging to Hathras in U.P. cannot but have an impact on the elections.
Since the accused are from the upper caste, the familiar sectarian prejudices with their deep resonance in the so-called cow belt will feature in the speeches of the opposition parties, which are dominated by the backward castes and the Leftists, and also the LJP, which is a party of Dalits.
Needless to say, the BJP will be on a back foot, first, because of its known upper caste bias and, secondly, because of the egregious blunders committed by the government of chief minister Yogi Adityanath (who belongs to the upper caste), of which the most scandalous was the cremation of the girl’s body in the middle of the night in the absence of her family members.
Not only that, the village where the family lived was cordoned off for more than a day and opposition politicians who tried to go there were accosted by the police and even pushed around. A belated awareness that all of this was showing the state government in a poor light persuaded Adityanath to blame an “international conspiracy” for the events. But it is unlikely to have many takers.
As for the international angle, the decision of the reputed humanitarian organization, the Amnesty International, to close shop in India because, it felt, that it was being hounded by the Indian government has also underlined the government’s authoritarian tendencies with their marked aversion for dissent.
As long as critics in India were targeted and even booked for sedition, the world could regard it as an internal matter even if the international community disapproved of such acts. But the Amnesty’s ouster cannot but evoke wider censure.
There is little doubt, therefore, that apart from the problems posed by the pandemic and the economy, the BJP is under stress on various counts. The fallout is evident from the fact that the party has lost three allies in the course of a year – the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the Akali Dal in Punjab and the LJP in Bihar. Its need to perform well in Bihar is, therefore, never more important.
