It’s something to do with the age: everyone, it seems, is fallible. Each individual who lived blissfully in a cocoon of undimmed vigour and elan is suddenly faced with a new awareness of mortality. At a time when the image of humanity is marked by symbols of vulnerability—the double mask and a fear of being with others—Indian politics didn’t remain immune to the infection. It was given a paradoxical inversion of those symbols, but with the same message. For nearly a decade, the BJP has been galloping over the landscape in the self-assured manner of an expansionary Mongol army—or like the storied spectre of the ancient ashwamedha ritual. The saffron army seemed to possess that impermeable armour no one could pierce. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi was like that grand steed no one could catch. In reality, there had been setbacks earlier—a series of assembly election defeats, from Delhi in 2015, to Rajasthan-MP-Chhattisgarh in 2018, to Maharashtra et al in 2019—and yet the overall elan of victory elsewhere masked over that. But the summer of 2021, in the midst of a pandemic that has brought India to its knees, that mask of invincibility lay like a fallen shield on the battlefield. The Teflon coating, finally, seemed thin. Head to head against a woman leader who just wouldn’t give up, Modi, the Alexander-like conqueror, finally appeared in the ranks of other, lesser mortals—as vulnerable, as fallible, the body unaware of its depleted oxygen.
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Four states, all big states, politically speaking. Three defeats, and just one victory to show for it—that too, a tense holding operation in Assam, rather than the conquest of new territory. In all three, what proved their undoing was the presence of strong, rooted regional stalwarts who knew their ground and their battle tactics. Of the three, two were foregone conclusions. Tamil Nadu was being ruled by a near-proxy regime headed by alliance partner AIADMK, one that was living on dregs after the demise of the imperious J. Jayalalitha—the arrival on stage of the DMK’s M.K. Stalin was a certainty. Kerala had the formidable Pinarayi Vijayan marshalling his resources like an expert commander secure on his turf. The BJP, at best, had the modest ambition of shaving off some of the Left’s political sheen in its last redoubt, but proved unequal to the task. The real battle—indeed, the mother of all battles—was Bengal. Mamata Banerjee could have been conceivably deemed ready to be felled after a decade-long stint of mixed colours. Anti-incumbency was on the BJP’s side. And it poured all its energies and resources to breach that fortress. The way Modi and his general, home minister Amit Shah, risked their personal prestige and invested all their macro and micro ammunition in the battle showed that they smelt a real good chance. And yet, in the end, a cartoon that renamed Bengal as ‘Ben-Gaul’ said it all.
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Outwardly, the BJP seemed to take it in its stride, resuming hostilities and accusing Mamata of post-victory violence, calling for nation-wide protests—a nominal thing amidst pandemic lockdowns. Internally, though, the sense of a crushing defeat has to be processed. Party leaders are taking refuge in the more philosophical approach of one of its tallest leaders, Atal Behari Vajpayee. Kailash Vijayvargiya, the BJP’s West Bengal in-charge since 2015, quotes lines from a poem that Vajpayee used to recite often—“Kya haar mein, kya jeet mein, kinchit nahi bhayabheet mein/ Sangharsh path par jo bhi mila, yeh bhi sahi, woh bhi sahi” (What victory, what loss, I fear neither. Whatever the fruits of struggle, I accept). Written by celebrated Hindi poet Shivmangal Singh ‘Suman’, the lines capture the spirit prevailing in the BJP, says Vijayvargiya. “We gave it our all. Yes, we did not win Bengal, but we have not lost anything either. We made big gains. From three seats in the last assembly, we now have 77. In a state where politics was once all about Left ideology, the BJP has come up as the single opposition party. The Left and the Congress have been decimated. It’s an achievement for us,” Vijavargiya tells Outlook.
He doesn’t think the BJP lost any political capital by failing to wrest Bengal from the two-time incumbent, despite the high-pitched, even vitriolic campaign led by the Modi-Shah duo—one that had even been criticised for its singular focus. As Covid cases surged in India, the prime minister addressed 20 public rallies, the home minister all of 50, and party president J.P. Nadda another 40. It was a true blitzkrieg: even senior cabinet ministers like Rajnath Singh and Dharmendra Pradhan campaigned extensively, as did Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath. None of it bore fruit. Yet, Vijayvargiya doesn’t believe the results will have any bearing on national politics, or on the next round of assembly elections in February-March 2022. That’s when UP— politically, India’s most significant state—will go to polls, along with Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur. Other states, including Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, will also see polls later in 2022. The BJP is nothing if not a party perennially primed for battle, and recouping losses with the next victory has been its wont. Witness only the stunning 2019 Lok Sabha results after the assembly setbacks in late 2018.
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Still, not everyone in the BJP is as optimistic—some believe the Bengal elections may well be a turning point for the national polity. “The BJP invested a lot of political capital in these polls, especially in Bengal, and the result isn’t commensurate with the effort,” says a senior party leader. “And Mamata Banerjee’s victory against the full might of the BJP’s behemoth of an election machinery and its ruthless campaign will surely inspire other parties.” Badri Narayan, professor at Allahabad’s Govind Ballabh Pant Social Science Institute, says the “invincible” image of the BJP has been badly dented. “The message to voters is that if the Opposition is strong, the BJP can be defeated. The next assembly elections will be fought in that atmosphere,” he says. According to him, the real damage to the party is in terms of perception.
Also, the single-minded focus of the party on fighting elections has also drawn sharp criticism from the Opposition and also from within. “The image of the government has taken an almost irretrievable beating because of mismanagement of the Covid second wave and total collapse of the healthcare structure,” says a party general secretary. Images of the PM addressing huge public rallies and the sea of pilgrims at Kumbh Mela—even as Covid ravaged through India, leaving no more place to cremate the dead—will remain entrenched in people’s minds. Another national office-bearer of the BJP says, in hindsight, it’s unimaginable how the leaders went through with the rallies at that time. “Like they say, ‘vinaash kale viprit buddhi’ (the mind fails you in the wake of impending disaster). It seems the time has come. Perception management may not help at this stage,” he adds.
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The BJP’s usual political gameplan too is under scrutiny—seeing the diminishing returns it fetched in Bengal. The BJP had pinned its hopes on polarisation of Hindu votes and consolidation of Dalit votes, including from the Matua sect, and the ethnic Rajbongshis. During his visit to Bangladesh, Modi had even offered prayers at a Matua temple in Orakandi on March 27, the day Bengal voted in its first phase. It didn’t seem to have worked: the Matuas largely went with the TMC. Mamata was constantly taunted with chants of ‘Jai Shri Ram’, but the polarisation helped her. The Muslims put their weight behind her, while rejecting the Congress-Left, knowing it was she who could defeat the BJP. And the Dalit consolidation in favour of saffron did not happen either.
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Resurgent with hope, opposition parties are citing the Bengal result to say the BJP’s playbook can fail in UP and elsewhere too. The demographics of Bengal may be unique enough to forestall such easy analogies, but political analyst Manisha Priyam agrees the BJP will be strongly challenged in the next round of assembly elections. “A conclave of chief ministers has emerged—Mamata, Pinarayi, Stalin—that feels strongly about federalism. The Centre will find it difficult to sustain its old narrative and use central agencies to target the Opposition like before. It won’t be accepted anymore,” she tells Outlook. According to Priyam, there was no need for the BJP to pull out all stops for Bengal. “It’s not the most populous state, nor the richest. What has the BJP gained even if it went from three to 77? One can understand this kind of an effort for UP that sends 80 MPs to Parliament, but not for Bengal,” she says.
The loss also brought another kind of erosion: the idea of Modi as the arch-symbol and trumpcard, which the BJP plays in state after state. Has that run its course? “The PM was over-exposed in these elections. ‘Modi versus Didi’ equated him with a chief minister. If there was a wave for the BJP after 2019, what was the need to expose the PM so much?” asks Priyam. “It keeps eroding the considerable political capital he has mobilised for the party.” Now, self-doubt on that question is what the BJP will take to its coming battles, not a happy situation. Anyway, after its 2019 win, the party has been distinctly shaky in all assembly elections. It lost power in Jharkhand, was foiled in Maharashtra, routed in Delhi and forced to settle for a coalition in Haryana. The only saving grace was its win in Bihar, where the BJP won more seats than its coalition partner JD(U). The BJP’s last big solo assembly win, in fact, was Tripura in early 2018. Thereafter, it lost power in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh—it managed to wrest back Bhopal in 2020 only with the engineered resignation of 22 sitting Congress MLAs.
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The BJP may, therefore, regard the battle for UP with more diffidence than it would have imagined—especially after how Covid ravaged through Yogi’s realm, and the way farmer anger bled into its western districts. The party had swept the state in 2017, winning 312 of its 403 seats and dethroning the Samajwadi Party (SP). Coming on the heels of demonetisation, those results were seen as a referendum on PM Modi. The party had also managed to stitch together a rainbow coalition of castes—besides its old dominant caste base, large numbers of non-Yadav OBC groups and non-Jatav Dalits were drawn into the Hindutva umbrella. From a voteshare of 15 per cent in 2012, when it came a distant third, the 2017 sweep came on the back of a 41 per cent voteshare—a significant feat of social engineering.
Buoyed by Bengal, opposition parties in UP feel they will be able to defeat what they believe is a much weakened BJP. Even insiders agree in private. “The Yogi government’s performance has been a disaster,” says a BJP leader from the state. “How long can he run the state based on intimidation and communal laws? The new farm laws have brought about a rapprochement among the Jats and Muslims in western UP. The winds have changed.” He cites the recent panchayat results where the BJP has been left far behind the SP; the latter won seats even in saffron strongholds.
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Kiranmoy Nanda, a former Left Front MLA from Bengal and now national vice president of the SP, believes it’s time for a change in UP. “The massive verdict for Mamata in Bengal has shown that the people voted for secularism and strengthening of democracy. UP too will throw out the communal BJP government and elect Akhilesh Yadav as CM,” he says. The Congress may be another loser here, like it was in all four states that went to polls. The SP will not forge an alliance with the Congress this time, like it did in 2017, Nanda says categorically. “The people will give a decisive mandate in the SP’s favour,” he adds. However, his party is open to a national alliance of opposition parties with Mamata as leader. “After UP, all opposition parties will come together in support of Mamata,” he tells Outlook.
Danish Ali, BSP MP, is also upbeat in the wake of the Bengal results. “The euphoria about a ‘Chanakya’ who can win anything is gone,” he says, alluding to Shah. “It’s clear voters didn’t like the way the PM and the home minister campaigned in the state. Hitting below the belt doesn’t work every time, nor does polarisation. The myth is gone. The way they are handling the pandemic will destroy them. Neither the Centre nor the UP regime has done anything to alleviate people’s suffering,” he says. He wholeheartedly supports Mamata as the Opposition’s rallying point. “She has shown her mettle,” he adds.
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However, forging Opposition unity is a fraught game, and easier said than done. A national general secretary of the BJP says they are also looking forward to the UP battle. “It will be clear whether the Opposition can come together. If the SP, BSP and Congress can’t come together to fight the BJP in UP, can you imagine all the disparate parties coming together at the national level in 2024? And do you think the Congress will subsume itself under an umbrella leadership of Mamata? There are too many contradictions,” he says.
Priyam, though, believes these usual contradictions will be forgotten in the face of Covid mismanagement. “No human being will be able to forget the tragic scenes that are unfolding. No spin doctor will be able to spin a narrative. The best-case scenario for the BJP would be if the PM manages to turn 2024 into a one-issue election. What that issue will be, nobody knows,” she adds.
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