Two summers ago MJ Akbar, not yet the BJP wordsmith and still a journalist, wrote in his column in his paper, The Sunday Guardian, “The mortal danger before the second UPA government is not collapse, but acid erosion by caricature”.
Will the hand that wrote this, write it again to describe the rocking cradle of the fledgling government of his master Narendra Modi.
While the headlines will tell you that the BJP lost 13 of the 23 seats it held before these by elections, the story is actually told by this statistic. Of the 32 seats where by elections were held, a non BJP candidate won in 20, the BJP in 12. While Modi and his spin team can pass it off as one swallow that will not make any weary summers, does it have an anecdote to deal with a sudden virus which knocks you down for a bit. Remember we are a little over a month away from full-fledged elections in Maharashtra and Haryana and there are happy smiles, not just in the Congress but in the Shiv Sena camp as it will now deal with a chastised BJP President Amit Shah to decide on seat sharing, rather than a gloating one. Politics is all about perception and not numbers. And the virus is in the air.
There is a lesson in all this for our own Mr Parrikar. He has a brute majority in the assembly but not really in the perception matrix. If the mind of people can change so rapidly, when Modi has done nothing tangible really do warrant such a vote shift in the seats where by elections were held, Manohar Parrikar needs to do a quick pit stop to tighten up. Look at the reasons that some BJP leaders themselves are giving for these results. The isolation of veteran leaders like Advani and Joshi, the sidelining of grass root local leadership and filling them with Amit Shah stooges, and most importantly the communal card played where marriages of Muslim boys to Hindu girls were called “love jihad”, deeply angering not just Muslims but Hindus as well.
A smart politician knows that in a country like India, you don’t need to deliver to be relevant. You just need to let people be and make quiet progress when you can. So when you don’t know one notices and when you do, it comes as a delightful surprise. Digambar Kamat perfected this. He got up at 7, met people over tea in his drawing room in shorts and sauntered into work in Panjim, taking 50 calls on the way, on his mobile from a housewife to lineman, post noon. By the time he got to office, he had over a hundred people telling their neighbours and friends that they spoke to the CM.
Manohar Parrikar’s biggest lesson from the assembly by poll debacle of the BJP is that voters change their mood more than you can believe and the biggest anti incumbency happens when you are incumbent.
With two and a half years left, his reconnect with his people needs to be a big political project which will make or mar his chances of returning to power, even as he grapples to fulfill his promises. He may not end up doing the big things, but he cannot afford not to do the small things. His access to the people both literally and metaphorically needs to happen if he doesn’t want a shock in 2017.
