Hasanul Banna
NEW DELHI—As the country moves toward the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the results of the five legislative assembly elections are a lesson to the opposition parties in the country, especially the Congress, that there are no shortcuts to defeating the BJP, which is working hard without giving any loophole to its opponents in terms of tactics, campaigning and public relations. Along with this, the victory in Telangana and the defeat in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan were rooted in the belief of some opposition leaders that soft Hinduism is an antidote to the radical Hinduism promoted by the BJP with the support of the RSS. While the BJP has proved that they are fully prepared to face the 2024 general elections, the opposition has shown that they need to formulate strategies and action plans for the same.
The result of overconfidence
It was the third day after the polls in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh that the BJP held its annual media workers-only Diwali celebration at its central headquarters on Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg in New Delhi. Rajasthan assembly elections are less than a week away. Even though it was a mere celebratory event with no formal speeches except the Prime Minister’s speech, when they met Modi and Amit Shah, the only thing the journalists had to ask about was the elections to the five assemblies.
Amit Shah was asked by journalists what he expected after the polls in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, where the race had turned inch by inch by the last week, where the Congress was expecting a big victory when the elections were announced. Amit Shah replied that the overconfidence of the Congress was their salvation and would give the BJP an easy victory in not two but three seats. Congress workers will agree that overconfidence is the reason why the three states that won easily before the announcement of elections were lost to Congress.
States won by hard work
Through this election, the BJP has taught the Congress that they cannot win the election with the mere buzz created in the air through social media without working on the ground. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, which the Congress judged to have taken over, were won by the BJP, just as the Congress won Telangana through hard work. The election results in all these four states are giving the same message in a sense. The BJP won three places and the Congress one easily from where it was far behind in terms of chances of victory. We have seen that the opposition leaders, who are constantly complaining that the BJP is facing them with the omnipotence and all the mechanisms of the central government, forget all this when it comes to candidate selection and seat discussions.
The absence of INDIA alliance benefitted the BJP
This was the assembly election that came after the 27-party All India Alliance was formed to face the 2024 general elections. BJP has taken this election as the semi-final for the 2024 final. But Kamal Nath, Ashok Gehlot and Bhupesh Baghel felt that electoral alliance with other opposition parties is required only during the parliamentary elections in 2024, and not state assembly elections. With this decision accepted by the Congress national leadership, things became easier for the BJP. Despite leaders like Akhilesh Yadav publicly questioning the stance of Congress not going for an alliance with opposition parties in the assembly elections, the ‘Chief Ministerial’ faces of the ruling Congress were not ready to compromise. This time, the Congress leaders have paved the way for BJP’s all-time election strategy of dividing the opposition votes by fielding many opposition candidates against BJP candidates.
Leaders who raised caste census
The caste census was one thing Rahul Gandhi brought as an agenda within the Congress and the INDIA alliance to prevent the religious polarization of the BJP through caste polarization. With this, it was widely discussed that the equation will change in 2024. The caste survey results in Bihar were released and caste reservation was announced and one after the other, Congress states announced that they, too, would conduct caste surveys. The Congress had also started a campaign to lure away the OBC voters by calling for caste reservation by pointing out the injustice with OBCs regarding their low representation in various positions in the government. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has come forward to defend this.
But except for Rahul Gandhi’s speech in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, neither the chief ministerial candidates nor the state leaders were ready to turn this into an election debate. Due to this, the opposition is not even able to understand how the people will react to the caste census which is the agenda for the 2024 parliamentary polls.
Guarantees borrowed from Congress
When the Congress put aside its own agenda, the BJP did not hesitate to change its earlier words and adopt the strategy of the Congress. That’s how the BJP realized that they were behind when the campaign reached the halfway stage, and prepared to change the strategy and copy the freebies of the Congress and present it more magnificently. It is not wrong to say that the Congress has set the BJP’s agenda for this election. The same Prime Minister who warned that the freebies announced to hold power were dangerous, countered the Congress with freebies who presented the freebies as guarantees. The Prime Minister even had to say that the ‘assurances’ of the BJP were better than the ‘assurances’ of the Congress. To discard the bad habit of ‘freebies’, the BJP knocked on the doors of the Election Commission and the Supreme Court and put up colorful billboards of the freebies announced by the BJP with a picture of the Prime Minister asking them to eliminate them. BJP won in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh also in this free contest.
Hardline Hindutva agenda for majority vote
The results of these assembly elections will give impetus to the BJP, which has given rise to hardline Hindutva in national politics through the Ram Temple movement, to make it the main campaign weapon in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections as well. To retain Madhya Pradesh, the RSS has entered all the 230 assembly constituencies of Madhya Pradesh, presenting the Ram Temple in Ayodhya as a victory of the BJP. For this purpose, Swayam Sevaks and BJP leaders were specially called together by the ‘Prabhari’. By turning the election into an Israel-Hamas war, turning the Congress into a Muslim party and going ahead with an extreme Hindutva agenda of polarization among the common voters, the BJP took up the issue of Christian conversion in the tribal areas and kept the tribals with them.
Soft Hindutva is not enough to counter hardline Hindutva
But the calculation of Kamal Nath in Madhya Pradesh and Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh was that BJP’s hardline Hindutva politics can be countered by soft Hindutva approach. Kamal Nath showed the Hanuman Temple built in Chhindwada and the ‘Ram Van Gaman Path’ built by Bhupesh Baghel in Chhattisgarh and asked for votes. Kamal Nath also gave the credit of the Ram temple to the Congress by recalling the history of the Congress which opened the Babri Masjid for puja. They had abandoned the ‘Bharat Jodo’ message of Rahul Gandhi to the Congressmen by walking thousands of kilometers against communal politics from one end of the country to the other.
(The author is a senior journalist based in New Delhi. The article was first published in Madhyamam).
