SOROOR AHMED comments on the Lok Sabha poll results and holds Moditva responsible for the drubbings the BJP has received.
The verdict is out. It is not a fractured one as was being predicted. It is loud and clear: the country has rejected the ideology of Moditva. The Narendra Modi school of politics, which the BJP planned to resurrect after the failure of Hindutva in 2004, has backfired. In most of the states where the Gujarat chief minister went to campaign, the BJP performed badly. He did not visit Bihar – or not allowed to do so by the state chief minister Nitish Kumar – and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) performed exceedingly well.
What the BJP, and its partners in the (NDA), failed to appreciate this time too is that the Gujarat chief minister was to much extent responsible for its rout in 2004 parliamentary election as well. The 2002 Gujarat riots had its detrimental impact on the Vajpayee-led conglomeration.
Let the industrialists and a section of the BJP root for Modi as the future Prime Minister of the country, the truth is that this man has proved a disaster, a liability. Moditva at best can be a non-serious opposition slogan or war-cry but can never be a ruling mantra. If the BJP has been performing well in Gujarat, it is not because of Narendra Modi. There are a number of factors in its favour. These factors are present even in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh too.
For all his faults Atal Behari Vajpayee was an acceptable face for the large segments of the country. It was under his leadership that the BJP alone rose its tally to 183 to be cut to 139 in 2004. Lal Krishna Advani, though responsible for the revival of the BJP in late 1980s, has his limitations. He took the BJP from two seats in 1984 to 88 in 1989. But that was his last. This time his party is down from 139 to 117 while the tally of the Congress party jumped by over 60 seats, that is, from 145 to 206. This stunned all the media projections which at best were giving over 200 seats to the entire UPA.
A man with a destructive slogan – for example demolishing a mosque in his case – can at most rise to the post of the leader of opposition. He can never become the Prime Minister. He should have at least some constructive quality which Advani seriously lacked. This is the message of the voters. Howsoever soft the BJP may project Advani today, the truth is that he is the Narendra Modi of yesteryears. During the heydays of rath yatra he presided over communal riots – from Bhagalpur to Ayodhya to Mumbai and from Delhi to Bhopal to Coimbatore. He was never a prime ministerial material. It was thanks to Atal Behari Vajpayee that Advani rose to the position of Deputy Prime Minister. He proved to be one of the weakest and most ineffective home ministers of the country. During his days the Indian Parliament was attacked. Rightly or wrongly, he himself confessed that he was not aware of the deal with the terrorists which led to the release of Azhar Masood and others. On his own Advani can never rise above the leader of the opposition.
The two successive defeats of the NDA would certainly lead to its disintegration. If more than half its constituents deserted BJP after the 2004 debacle, this time barring Shiv Sena and Akali Dal the rest may too part ways in due course. Even Nitish Kumar, the oldest ‘secular’ partner of the NDA may start twisting the BJP’s arm more strongly as, with 20 seats, his Janata Dal (United) has emerged the second biggest partner of the alliance.
While success has many fathers, defeat has none. With second successive defeat of BJP in five years, nobody is going to take the responsibility of the party. Lal Krishna Advani’s offer to quit the post of the leader of opposition has been rejected by the party as today nobody is ready to wear a crown of thorns.
There is no dearth of people in the BJP who were realistically thinking that Advani is not going to become the Prime Minister of the country. What they were not expecting was that the UPA on its own would come so near to the magic figure of 273 and be able to form the government smoothly. Never in the wildest imagination they dreamed that the gap between the Congress and BJP would be of about 90 seats and of the UPA and NDA of over 100 seats. What they thought was that there would be a fractured verdict with the BJP playing some role. Now this party with a difference has been completely sidelined.
The decimation of the Third Front and the so-called Fourth Front was another special feature of the election. While the Congress-Trinamool alliance was expected to do better, nobody thought that Mamata Banerjee’s outfit alone would win 19 seats and in alliance with the Congress more than half of West Bengal’s seats. Never in the last 32 years the Left received such a serious drubbing. Post-Nandigram and Singur, Mamata has managed to demolish the rural bastion of the Left, something very remarkable.
The results of Tamil Nadu also came as surprise. Though the Congress failed in that state, its ally DMK did well thus breaking the tradition of DMK once and AIADMK in the next. Like in 1991, this time too the developments in Sri Lanka had its shadow on the election. In that year Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE militants while the country was still going for election.
However, in Kerala this tradition continued. In the form of Shashi Tharoor, who won from the state, India may get a foreign minister, who is expert in his subject.
Another important aspect of this election was the party-defeat of all the Prime Ministers-in-waiting: from Lal Krishna Advani to Narendra Modi, Mayawati, Lalu Prasad, Ram Vilas Paswan, Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar. Though the last two did well in their respective states the sweep by the Congress poured cold water in their future plan of action. They would not be much-sought-after politicians at the Centre any more.
Yet another important feature of the Verdict 2009 was the decimation of Dalit and tribal leaders. If Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party was checkmated, the Shibu Soren-led Jharkhand Mukti Morcha barely managed to hold on two seats while Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party was completely wiped out.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad committed the biggest blunder of his life by keeping Paswan in good humour at the cost of Congress. He succumbed to Paswan’s blackmail of contesting 16 seats out of 40 and in the process ended up giving him 12, even though in 2004 the LJP won only four seats. This compelled the RJD to give the Congress only three seats. This angered the latter and the subsequent collapse of alliance in Bihar. Ram Vilas not only lost his own seat but failed to translate the Dalit votes. In contrast Nitish Kumar-led NDA in Bihar successfully wooed the 28-29 per cent strong Extreme Backward Castes and Mahadalit votes.
Congress too blundered in Bihar. In almost half of the 39 seats which it contested in the state it gave ticket to the upper castemen thus creating more problem for the NDA. In the beginning there was a sigh of relief in the RJD-LJP camp. Lalu and Paswan thought that they would be benefited by the friendly fight as the upper caste votes would get divided between the Congress and NDA candidates in most of the seats. But Sonia Gandhi made a tactical mistake. Five days before the first phase of poll she on April 11, while addressing an election rally in Jamui in Bihar, chose to attack the most trusted partner in the UPA, Lalu Prasad, though the latter till that date did not say a single word against the Congress.
As if that was not enough Rahul Gandhi too targeted the 15 years of Lalu-Rabri rule in Bihar. The state Congress leaders also opened a big front. This created a messy situation and on April 17, that is, a day after the first phase of poll Lalu hit back and held the Congress responsible for the Babri Masjid demolition and Bhagalpur riots of 1989. Nitish fully capitalised on this sudden change of scenario. It is not for nothing that three out of four seats which the RJD won went to poll on April 16, that is, before the start of full-scale internecine quarrel within the UPA. The friendly fight turned into bloodbath. Elections were held for 13 seats on April 16 while in the rest 27 on April 23, April 30 and May 7.
In Uttar Pradesh the situation was entirely different. If Sonia attacked Mulayam or Mayawati there was no strong NDA in power in the state to cash in on. Unlike in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh there were at least some senior Congress leaders. Besides, there was strong presence of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi themselves. So the strategy of attacking the friends, instead of fighting a friendly fight, proved dear both to the RJD-LJP alliance and Congress in Bihar. While the Congress has the scope to compensate the loss in Bihar, in other states the RJD and LJP were simply doomed.