The recently held Legislative Assembly elections of 2017 in five states amply demonstrated that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has replaced the Congress as the principal national party in the country. The party won massive victories in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and emerged a big player in Manipur and Goa, wherein it also formed the governments.
In Goa, though the party failed to muster the required majority number, it remained the single largest party in terms of vote share – receiving 32.5 per cent support of the electorate, as against the Congress’ 28.3 per cent, and as a result, it gained an overwhelming support from other smaller regional parties and Independent MLAs to form the government. The only disappointment is Punjab where the party was routed along with its senior partner Shiromani Akali Dal after ruling the state for 10 years.
The election results in Uttar Pradesh (UP) have a special importance, if for no other reason than the sheer legislative numbers the state brings to the national polity – 80 seats in the Lok Sabha, 31 seats in the Rajya Sabha and an important say in determining the presidential elections. The BJP and its allies won 325 out of 403 seats in the 2017 Assembly elections, a strike rate of 81 per cent. This is the largest number of seats won by any party / coalition in UP since the Janata Party in 1977.
In retrospect, the analysis of this extraordinary feat is remarkably straightforward. It is almost a repeat of the national elections in 2014, when UP was in the grip of the ‘Modi wave’.
The aggregate vote share of the BJP and its allies was 41.4 per cent in this elections, a hair less than the 43.6 per cent it received in 2014. Even the party’s performance over the seven phases of this elections closely mirrors its performance in 2014. The party had a strike rate of 90% in phase I (93% in 2014), 71% in phase 2 (73%), 80% in phase 3 (82%), 83% in Phase 4 (77%), 85% in phase 5 (85%), 67% in phase 6 (88%) and 80% in phase 7 (100%). With 41.4% of votes and 75.7% of the seats, the BJP scored the best performance in UP not only by Janata Party in 1977, but also tops the Congress’ 1985 Vote share (39.3%) as well as Indira Gandhi’s seat share when she returned to power in 1980 (72.7%).
The 2017 elections have indeed consolidated the BJP’s dominance in the country’s political space. The once-in-a-generation results, more specifically in UP, have established what can be described as a new normal in the Indian politics. That new normal is this; the BJP under the charismatic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the master organizational flair of Amit Shah, has established itself as the pre-eminent political party of India. The party, which earlier always unabashedly appealed to the ‘Hindu’ vote and was wisely known for its traditional social base predominantly of upper caste, has now revamped its electoral strategy focused on widening its appeal by stitching together multi-caste coalitions. In fact, in order to increase its support base, the BJP has built an electoral machine of its own at the local level in the form of caste-based coalitions.
Most political analysts are of the opinion that the spectacular political triumph has made Prime Minister Modi an unprecedented phenomenon in the annals of popular politics. He has reduced his competition to minions fighting over scraps. He has managed to make other parties look like tired, corrupt, negative emblems of the past; people have reposed faith in him as the energetic, clean, dynamic, hopeful repository of the future. He has succeeded in creating a profound connect with the people of India, who are willing to trust even the hardest decision taken by him as beneficial for the country and the common citizen. It is not only his simplistic charisma – this connect flows from an abiding belief that what PM Modi says is delivered. One could find a palpable connect between the poor and the prime minister – he is our man, our welfare is central to him, felt the common citizen.
Not only the forward, backward and most backward castes, large numbers of young people of all castes and communities have found solace in the BJP under PM Modi. With the latest election results, 13 states, including some of the biggest states of India, are having a BJP chief Minister. It is also a part of coalition governments in Jammu and Kashmir, Nagaland and Andhra Pradesh. The BJP’s vote share in West Bengal and Kerala has increased lately, while it is resurgent in Odisha. All this, according to political analysts, only by sheer hard work, good governance, profound organizational presence and leadership of PM Modi, who has a vision to make India a truly great country.
Political pundits point out that the country has entered a new era of extraordinary dominance by the BJP. There has been, since 2014, a new political language and aspiration in the making, whose full contours no one has quite grasped. It has elements of populism, but not of a conventional kind that merely panders to popular comfort zones – after all, PM Modi asked the people to bear with him while he inflicted hardship on them. And they responded. It has elements of nationalism, patriotism and majoritarianism. But it also fuses these with elements of progressive hope that makes it more than reactionary.
What should worry the opposition is that Prime Minister Modi has managed to outmaneuver them on every fault line of politics. He always had the nationalism space. He gradually gained social dominance after transforming his party’s social base with an unprecedented depth and breadth, negating ossified logics of caste arithmetic to win over substantial numbers of OBCs and Dalits in addition to upper castes. Now, he has occupied the anti-corruption space more credibly by demonetization and the projection of his image. More remarkably, he has also managed to occupy the pro-poor narrative that parties like the Congress and the BJP thought were their natural territory – the opposition is simply not finding an issue on which to outflank him.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
