India: BJP grapples with internal strife and external challenges
Maharashtra, Haryana, and Jharkhand elections could redefine India’s political landscape
Let me put my head over the turret and make a very bold prediction: the third term Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government will be a lame duck government beset with the typical problems of gerontocracy.
Narendra Modi has tried to convey the impression of business as usual by repeating the big names in his Cabinet. However, the full spectrum dominance of Parliament — when Bills were rammed through and there was a lack of any meaningful opposition in Parliament — is now history.
The BJP no longer commands a simple majority in the Rajya Sabha, so one-sided legislation making will not happen anymore. With Rahul Gandhi taking his place as the Leader of the Opposition (LoP), expect aggressive opposition to every BJP move.
Gandhi has, in a totally new development, started setting the agenda politically, pushing the BJP government into a reactive mode, which it has no muscle memory for. With Gandhi sitting in all committees officially to decide sensitive postings, expect fireworks as a matter of course.
Genesis of the crisis
The BJP’s unease with Gandhi and his new political avatar is evident in the fact that fake news was widely planted on BJP handles claiming he had left for a holiday abroad. This was a standard BJP playbook to make Gandhi look like a non-serious politician. However, the speed with which it was debunked showed that such tactics had hit their sell-by date.
Politics and the real state of the Modi government will come to a head with the next round of elections slated for Maharashtra, Haryana, and Jharkhand later this year.
Let me stick my head over the turret again and say that I expect the opposition to do extremely well in all three states, further enfeebling Modi’s political capital, much like the recent by-election results did. The opposition won ten out of the 13 seats contested.
Now, let’s see the state of play in the three states, the most critical of which is Maharashtra, and how the crisis facing the BJP and its self-styled master of politics, aka “Chanakya,” is self-inflicted.
The genesis of the crisis is that Uddhav Thackeray, chief of the original Shiv Sena, felt slighted by the Modi BJP and broke the 25-year-old alliance with the BJP, which had allowed it to grow in Maharashtra.
Vendetta politics
A livid BJP then turned clean and moral politics on its head and tried every dirty trick in the book to bring down the Thackeray-led Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government. This after BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis took an oath with Ajit Pawar at 6am in Raj Bhavan for a government that barely lasted six hours.
The BJP unleashed the politics of smash and grab, money, and vendetta, sending in the investigative agencies and breaking two parties — the Shiv Sena and the NCP — to form a government with the rumps.
Eknath Shinde, who leads the Shinde Sena, and Ajit Pawar, who leads the NCP rump, are widely unpopular and expected to ensure that the BJP tanks in alliance with these partners in the Maharashtra elections. Thackeray is widely viewed with sympathy as a man done in by vendetta politics, with Maharashtra still appreciating his pandemic handling and communication.
Worse, two Congress defectors had told BJP leadership that they would break the Congress in Maharashtra. The Congress today is thriving and back in the reckoning, with the defector who was widely associated with filthy politics now a political outcast.
Voters have had enough
In Haryana, the BJP tried the politics of harnessing all castes against the dominant Jats. It might have worked, but then Manohar Lal Khattar, a former pracharak (RSS full-timer) who used to work with Modi, was made the Chief Minister. Khattar had no administrative experience, and the Haryana bureaucracy ran rings around him.
From a well-governed state, Haryana turned into a trouble spot. Because of Khattar’s proximity to Modi, he continued despite the warning signals. By the time he was replaced by Nayab Singh Saini, another nonentity, the voters seemed to have had enough.
The BJP also gave the Congress enough time to regroup and set its Haryana house in order, with the father-son duo of former CM Bhupendra Hooda and Deependra Hooda in complete command of the fractious state unit.
The Jat voters this time around talk of teaching the BJP a lesson it won’t forget. It’s not good politics to set castes against each other to suborn one caste.
In Jharkhand, the BJP jailed popular CM Hemant Soren as preparation for its assembly elections. The political calculation was that the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha’s (JMM) partners in the government, the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), would fall apart and dump him, and the JMM would be riven with factional rivalry.
Instead, Soren got bail, his partners rallied around him, and he is widely expected to coast to a victory on a sympathy wave created by the BJP.
As I write this SWAT analysis, I know if I go wrong (politics can change in a nanosecond), I will be shredded by the trolls, but I have to be honest with my readers. Watch this space.