Some voices in television chat shows, after the rout of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the September Uttar Pradesh by-elections, insisted that Hindu women had voted with such vengeance against the BJP that it had lost nine out of the 11 seats. While figures are not yet available to back such claims, I do suspect that Hindu women indeed bristled at the “Love Jihad” rhetoric of the BJP, charging Muslim men with seducing and marrying Hindu girls with the sole objective of converting them to Islam! The right-wing campaign presumed that Hindu women were so foolish and gullible that they could be easily deceived and duped and certainly did not know what was good for them — giving BJP the licence to meddle in their personal lives. Naturally, they revolted against BJP’s attempt to curb their freedom and voted en masse against the male chauvinistic and patriarchal party.
The women’s resounding slap seems to have taught the BJP a timely lesson: It gave its “Love Jihad” campaign a quiet burial. A chastened BJP did not demonise Muslim men as sexual predators in the run-up to the October 15 elections in Maharashtra, India’s richest province and the first state to go to the polls after the watershed general elections in May, which swept the BJP to power at the Centre.
The BJP did not harp on “Love Jihad”, but ‘divorces’ dominated the poll landscape in Maharashtra, home to financial capital Mumbai and Bollywood. BJP split with its far-right regional ally, Shiv Sena, after 25 years. Call them comrades-in-arms or partners in crime — the BJP and Shiv Sena cadres had jointly razed Ayodhya’s Babri Mosque in 1992. Similarly, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance that had ruled Maharashtra for 15 years, collapsed. The splits over seat-sharing made the Maharashtra elections the most confusing and complex in a very long time. At stake were 288 state legislative assembly seats in a traditional Congress bastion — Sonia Gandhi’s party enjoys the distinction of winning 10 out of the 12 elections in the state since 1960. A regime change is, however, likely as the polling took place after a vicious, no-holds-barred campaign. Friends-turned-foes went for each others’ throats, but what was exceedingly gratifying was the back-stabbing and abusive exchanges in the Hindu Right after BJP and Shiv Sena fell out over how many seats they would contest.
The most noteworthy feature of bitter personal attacks were the insults Shiv Sena heaped daily on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sena supremo Uddhav Thackeray, once a die-hard Modi fan, called him a traitor for addressing election rallies in Maharashtra instead of dealing with the Pakistani army shelling India. Thackeray thinks that as a son of the soil, it is his divine right to rule Maharashtra. But Modi threw a spanner in his works. So Thackeray branded Modi a modern-day version of Afzal Khan — the Muslim general who tried to overrun Maharashtra during Mughal rule. Modi is allergic to all things Muslim — so one can imagine his discomfiture at being called Afzal Khan by another Hindu zealot!
Maharashtra elections are very crucial for Modi. After the string of defeats in bypolls in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Gujarat, he has to prove that the historic victory in May was no flash in the pan and the Modi ‘wave’ had not receded. Maharashtra is one of the biggest prizes in Indian politics any way. Gains in the western state would increase the BJP’s representation in Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of the parliament, where the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance is in a minority, forcing it to cut deals with opposition and regional parties to pass key economic reforms.
Bookies love to fish in electoral waters. And Mumbai bookies — which even a hard-nosed business daily like Economic Times takes very seriously — have predicted that BJP would win 110-115 seats to emerge as the single largest party when votes are counted tomorrow and its tally may even touch 145. BJP’s good fortunes are being attributed to voters’ faith in Modi. Bookies’ prediction for Congress is 40-50 seats and 40-45 for NCP and Sena each. Interestingly, nobody seems to know the vote-share of the four biggies — BJP, Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP — in the previous elections. Not even the parties themselves! BJP and Sena admit that as they fought elections in partnership for 25 years, they have no idea of their individual vote-share in any seat. The picture is no different for Congress and NCP whose marriage recently broke.
Before the BJP and Sena parted ways and started attacking each other, I thought that the Congress was staring at defeat. Now I feel — contrary to bookies’ prediction and opinion polls — that the Congress may spring a surprise. Even in the last provincial polls, Congress had a presence across Maharashtra. This streak can prove to be a clincher in a four-cornered contest — unless Marathis plump for the party in power at the Centre. Like the bookies, BJP is cocksure of romping home, but the atmosphere is so vitiated by scathing attacks and counter-attacks by friends-turned-foes that in the event of a hung assembly, parties will find it very difficult to sit across the table and talk after votes are counted. The post-result scenario promises to be as engrossing as the canvassing for votes.
S. N. M. Abdi is a noted Indian journalist and commentator.
