In politics, winning is everything. In the recent case of the Delhi elections, it became very clear that the major three parties — BJP, AAP and Congress — were engaged in a battle of attrition. Blatant as well as subtle attacks by each party against the other became the order of the day. It took sloganeering to new heights in India’s electoral history.
On the heels of BJP’s gruesome defeat, the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah, rightly said that “goli maaro” and “Pakistan match” were slogans used by some of his party’s campaigners may have cost them the elections. Also calling the reigning CM, Arvind Kejriwal, a “terrorist” was a fatal mistake. The “terrorist” jibe at Kejriwal may have given added support to the AAP and may have cost valuable votes to the BJP.
Aligned with his “bijli-paani” pitch as well as the freebies announced to the public, such as free public transport to women, free units of electricity and litres of water to Delhiites, and a pinch of “soft Hinduvta”, visiting Hanuman temple to offer pre-poll and post-victory prayers Kejriwal played his cards well. With a barrage of attacks from BJP stalwarts, Kejriwal faced them all with cool candor.
It was the barb by Manoj Tiwari, the Delhi chief of BJP, that Kejriwal is a “nakle bakht”, a fake devotee, and MP Anurag Thakur’s rousing call to the gathered crowd, “desh ke g******* ko, goli maaro s***** ko”, was the undoing of the BJP’s fight to dismantle AAP in the capital city. This battle cry backfired on the BJP, as it crashed to third successive defeat to the AAP. Snatching victory again was no easy task for AAP, a party that was born out of the anti-corruption movement launched by Gandhian Anna Hazare.
It’s not that the AAP hasn’t had internal rifts, with some leading lights such as Anand Kumar, who was expelled from the National Executive along with Yogendra Yadav, Prasant Bhushan and Ajit Jha started the Swaraj Abhiyaan movement. Later, there were some more prominent members of the party who walked out or crossed over to other parties. Kumar Vishwas was one who severed his ties, and the latest is Aashutosh Gupta, who served as the spokesman for the AAP, a TV news anchor who appears occasionally on TV news channels as political analyst.
Kejriwal has survived internal revolts and this third victory should give him good political muscular power to counter the loudmouths of the BJP. The constant friction between the AAP and BJP in Delhi won’t end but it will definitely blunt the BJP attacks. The AAP stood its ground on its broad nationalist approach instead of the rabid and ultra-rightist nationalism that the BJP, with its power at the Centre, has unleashed across the land.
Hopefully, the BJP will have its review session on what caused its defeat and seek a way forward. This rude shock comes in the wake of the party losing some key States, such as Maharashtra, where it engaged in a political sword-fight with its partner, Shiv Sena, before Sena discontinued its alliance with BJP and embraced the National Congress Party (NCP), a party launched by Sharad Pawar after his fallout with the Congress. The Maratha strongman stitched the coalition government of Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress that gave the Thackeray family its first CM in Udhav, a reluctant leader of the Shiv Sena founded by his father Bal Thackeray (Thakre), a cartoonist who worked for my old newspaper, Free Press Journal. Bal Thackeray was a powerhouse behind Maharashtra politics but never assumed any electoral position.
There are lessons to be learnt from the drubbing of BJP and Congress by the energising win of the AAP. Will the local AAP in Goa be an alternative to the BJP is the moot question. The nascent Goa wing faced defeats in the parliamentary seats, with even its chief Elvis Gomes, losing in South Goa, which has a large Catholic population, in the last general elections. The North Goa seat seems an insurmountable task with the Maharashtra Gomantak Party (MGP) holding sway. As the BJP will do a review of its poor showing in Delhi, the AAP is also faced with the formidable job of gaining a foothold on the electoral map of Goa. Elvis Gomes will have his hands full and would possibly need a slick army as in Delhi to march ahead in Goan politics.
The BJP seems to be feeling tremors under its seat with the Speaker of the Assembly sitting tight on the disqualification notice to the 10 MLAs who jumped from the Congress into the BJP. This power-grabbing by stealth is undermining Goa’s political ethos. This cloak-and-dagger method of the BJP has been roundly criticised as giving Goa a bad name in the ethics of democracy. As I said at the start that winning is everything, BJP subscribes to this view more avowedly than the others in the State. Now that the kingpin of BJP, Manohar Parrikar, is no more, I, for one, believe his legacy must be put to rest, as is done in the case of Goa’s first chief minister, Dayanand Bandodkar, whose MGP has been reduced to a rump.
The talk of ex-CM Digambar Kamat re-joining the BJP seems shallow. But one isn’t sure what a politician will do when a carrot is dangled at the end of the stick. He may jump, as did Vishwajit Rane and Mauvin Godinho, and the 10 others who later crossed the floor from the Congress to BJP. It’s a national joke on social media that even those on death row will certainly go free if they are willing to join the BJP. Bharat Mata Ki Jai or Amen to that!
(Eugene Correia is a senior journalist)
