A quagmire of castes and relative identities make the project of uniting the Hindus a daunting task for anyone. Former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Kalyan Singh used to often rue that “the day Hindus unite, no power on earth can stop BJP from winning.” That day had come to pass in 2014. The Hindus had merged their caste identities into one civilisational entity and had chosen a leader to rule over the nation with near unanimity. For ten years, it looked as if we had finally buried the ghosts of our past disunity and had taken a giant leap of faith to assert the rise of a new Bharat.
Shift in the Largest State
This is why the results of 2024 in Uttar Pradesh came as a bolt from the blue. Two of the holiest places of Hindu pilgrimage had shockingly reversed the trend of the previous decade. In Kashi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s margin was reduced to a mere 1.5 lakhs even as the Congress party’s Ajai Rai had managed to secure 4.6 lakh votes. In Ayodhya, just months after Pran Pratishtha of Ram Mandir, which put the city on the global map, BJP was actually defeated by over 54,000 votes. These two results symbolise the shift in the ground in the largest, most populous State of India. It was strange because there was no palpable anger in the State, unlike say in Haryana or Maharashtra, where the Jats and Marathas had turned against the BJP quite vehemently.
The Uttar Pradesh vote share to SP-Congress alliance without any mass anger and despite high popularity of the Prime Minister and the State Government was essentially a chain of localised rebellions by caste groups that metamorphosed into a mandate of its own. It was a micro-realignment in individual Parliamentary constituencies that created a ripple effect across the State and dented the overall BJP vote-share by over seven per cent – the BJP and its allies had secured 50 per cent votes in 2019 which has now come down to about 43 per cent (including RLD, Apna Dal (S) and the NISHAD party.
Factors That Slowed BJP’s Ascent
Localised anti-incumbency against non-performing sitting MPs completely cancelled out the popularity of the State and Central Governments. Had BJP made wholesale changes in at least 40 seats, the results could have been substantially different. In fact, we witnessed this in Delhi, where the BJP had changed six of the seven sitting MPs and instead of parachuting star candidates, had instead given tickets to local karyakartas which managed to trounce even the mighty alliance of AAP and Congress. Just why the party did not apply the same logic to Uttar Pradesh remains unknown.
The campaign by Congress-SP about BJP wanting to change the Constitution had a palpable impact among the Dalit voters, who abandoned their traditional party, the BSP and voted for the I.N.D.I. Alliance. In the last ten years, we have seen that Dalits of UP, when they moved away from Mayawati due to the political decline of the BSP, almost always move towards BJP’s larger caste coalition as they are antagonistic to Yadav power in their villages. For the first time, the reverse happened as Dalits moved to protect “their reservations”, temporarily ignoring their inherent Yadav antagonism.
When Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost in 2004, it was essentially a loss in Uttar Pradesh. BJP had won a paltry ten seats in UP back in 2004. Had the party even repeated its performance of 29 seats, secured in the previous 1999 edition, then Vajpayeeji would have once again become the Prime Minister. And thereby lies the silver lining of 2024. Despite the losses, BJP along with its allies still have a strong contingent of 36 MPs from Uttar Pradesh so it could not be trounced in the National Elections.
The Verdict’s Silver Lining
The enormity of BJP as a political party in Bharat is so big today that it can easily cover its losses from one region with another. BJP rose in Odisha to power on its own for the first time and became the single largest party in Telangana. Yes, Congress outperformed everywhere compared to what the polls were showing. This was completely unexpected, perhaps even from the party itself, despite all the bravado put up by them in public. For instance, in Maharashtra, Congress has become the single largest party with 13 MPs although it has not increased its vote share at all (which has remained static at just under 17 per cent). Essentially, Congress has benefited from its allies in Maharashtra and BJP has been hurt by its alliance partners’ underperformance as BJP has secured almost the same vote-share as 2019 (around 27 per cent), its alliance partners simply couldn’t get the Maratha votes and stem the tide.
In the Eastern State of West Bengal, BJP has more or less maintained its vote share with a marginal decline from 40 per cent to 39 per cent but has suffered big losses in terms of seats from 18 to 12. This is primarily because Congress and West Bengal have further collapsed from about 13 per cent in 2019 to ten per cent this time round. The entire vote share has gone to Mamata Banerjee. It is pure consolidation of anti-BJP and minority votes with just one objective of preventing a third term for Narendra Modi.
Globally, winning a third term is always considered as a herculean task as democracy by its very nature creates pockets of anti-incumbency against the ruling party in about eight to ten years. In that context, Narendra Modi becoming the first Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to win back-to-back three terms is a phenomenal achievement despite the disappointments of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. To give him and the party the due credit, the party has broken its own record of becoming the party with the highest votes in the history of global democracy. The party had secured 22 crore 90 lakh votes in 2019 and has now secured 23 crore 60 lakh votes. Despite a greater number of votes, it has secured fewer seats which is a sign that BJP is not merely a growing party anymore but it has now transformed into a party of expansion. This augurs well for its future as it expands beyond its core geographies and becomes an even more formidable force to reckon with.
Narendra Modi’s third term may not be substantially different from the previous ten years as most political commentators are now suggesting because BJP still has 240 MPs and the Government will be stable because finding another 30-odd MPs, even if some of the allies ditch the NDA in due course of time, will not be very difficult. This will be the primary reason why Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar would want to stay on the right side of Narendra Modi rather than go against him.
In some ways, Modi’s third term will also be different, as the Opposition, especially the Gandhi family-led Congress party, will be a much larger and a much stronger grouping. Protests will become more contagious as the Opposition feels that it is the only way to put Modi in trouble. Of course, India will have to find ways to combat the economics of competitive freebies that is bound to find even larger mind-space than before and is a sure-fire way of going into decadence like Western Europe and the US, who have acquired mammoth debts running into several trillion dollars due to profligate spending. Yet, primarily there are four challenges before Modi.
The immediate challenge is electoral. In the next seven months, BJP will face three very tough State elections, Maharashtra, Haryana and the national capital of Delhi. As of today, BJP is struggling in all three States and if the party manages to lose all of them, there would be a massive narrative built about an anti-BJP environment in the country. This scenario needs to be avoided, no matter what the cost. In Haryana, BJP has to tactfully build a powerful non-Jat coalition of all other castes and bring Dalits on board which can give the party a solid fighting chance. At this point of time, Jats are a group that have completely divorced themselves from the BJP, so there is no point in wasting energy to woo them back. So instead appealing to other groups for consolidation is the only way forward and Dalits must be educated using all means that their reservations are not in danger by any means. In Maharashtra, BJP needs to rebuild coalitions to reach out to the Maratha voter even if it means going back to the Shiv Sena and the Thackerays. The current experiment is simply not working on the ground. Delhi is actually the easiest. There is considerable anti-incumbency against the AAP after ten years of rule, so all BJP needs to do is set its own house in order and it can reap rich dividends. Bringing together all factions of Delhi BJP and using the Lok Sabha model of giving tickets to long working Karyakartas for assembly elections are the twin strategies that can win Delhi for BJP. Even if BJP wins 2 out of 3 of these states, the entire narrative shift towards Modi will be enormous.
Secondly, the leadership has to once again start listening to workers and supporters in the state. Remember, before the 2014 election, Amit Bhai Shah spent many months simply listening to the local voices in UP which changed the course of elections for BJP that was struggling to win even ten seats and went on to win 73. UP is always key to the saffron fortunes and it has to be fixed with alacrity.
The third challenge is technological. One of the common feature of this election from Mumbai to Gurgaon to Lucknow was the talking points that the youth would blurt out about Adani-Ambani, electoral bonds, unemployment and misuse of investigation agencies, which were all totally similar and felt like they were all tutored by some common teaching institution preparing them for some kind of competitive examination. Welcome to the world of social media influencers. YouTube, Instagram, Google, WhatsApp, Twitter all played a huge role in creating this environment in Bharat that was antagonistic to Modi and BJP. As a sovereign state, we have absolutely no authority over these tech platforms and they can virtually shadow ban whomsoever they dislike and amplify others that they prefer. BJP, which had a huge first mover advantage ten years ago due to thousands of nationalist volunteers, has lost the tech war in 2024. This is a very alarming situation that the BJP leadership should have worked to rectify long ago. Imagine this, these big tech giants make hundreds of billions of dollars of profits from the data that they generate using 100 crore Indians on their services and platforms and then have the audacity to alter India’s politics at their whims and fancies. So far India only has piecemeal approach to this mammoth problem whereas it should start to act on the first principles to bring about real change. The time has come for India to enforce data nationalisation, anything short of that is virtually irrelevant.
The fourth challenge is geopolitical and geoeconomics. The world is transforming fundamentally in the long cycle as the rules based world order created by the West is nearing its end and a new world order is being built. Modi had deftly positioned India at the centre of this changing dynamic, but now with a coalition Government in place, the pulls and pressures of external influences will have a completely different dynamic and how Modi negotiates these changes will largely decide India’s place in the world. As a nation we truly have a chance of emerging as the economic superpower, in the next five years, as the world of debt-based FX reserves is undergoing a sea change and the rise of gold which has highest ownership in the world by Indian households can transform us at the grassroots level. At least, for this one fundamental change India needs a stronger Modi in the next five years who can withstand the pressures of global powers, military might and the assorted set of powerful bankers.
For all humans, lived reality always has greater connotations than a reading of history. In the grand scheme of things though, 2024 was merely a minor blip and unlike 1192, we are not mortally wounded as a civilisation, just suffered a minor setback but still emerged on top. The onus is now on the winners of 2024 to not let the gains of the previous decade go in vain, to ensure that the awakened civilisation of Bharat reaches her true destiny.
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