When a win is not a win

Finally, the last ballot has been cast in the 2022 round of assembly elections to five states.

Exit polls, FWIW, predict achche din for the BJP (and for AAP in Punjab) and not-so-good news for the Samajwadi Party and the Congress (despite the latter party throwing its last remaining trump, Priyanka, into the mix). Splainer has a round-up of exit polls.

In recent days, a talking point has been doing the rounds on social media and on closed groups of journalists and opinion-makers; it finds public expression here:

A majority is still a majority no matter if it is diminished, and shows that despite a high inflation and a recovering economy, the BJP and Modi are still quite strong.

Akhil Bery

This line of thought — which by the way has been doing the rounds since the third round of polling in a seven-round election, indicating that the warning signs came early — indicates that the BJP is reconciled to a considerably reduced majority, as its best-case scenario.

That should alarm the ruling party — for one reason above all else. When the BJP scored a landslide in the 2017 assembly election in UP, the party’s top brass pulled a surprise when it installed Adityanath as chief minister.

The logic underlying the choice, according to the BJP, was that Adityanath would with his hard-right agenda further consolidate the party’s hold on the crucial state; that this, in turn, would free up Modi to concentrate on other heartland states where the party’s performance had begun to slide (think Madhya Pradesh, Bihar where it is virtually invisible, and Rajasthan where it lost to the Congress).

Adityanath has spent the past five years deepening and widening the fissures in UP society, all in the name of furthering the Hindutva agenda. From hosting the Maha Kumbh a year ahead of schedule because the dates for 2022 would fall outside the election cycle, to making a tamasha out of the Ayodhya temple construction, to pushing a very visible anti-minority agenda in governance, Adityanath has done exactly what the RSS/BJP needed him to do.

It follows then that if the BJP thinking was right, the party should in this election cycle have further consolidated its hold on the state. If, therefore, it slips below its earlier landslide numbers — and in doing so, allows the Samajwadi Party to get back in the game after being decimated five years ago — it is as clear an indication as you want that the Adityanath ploy hasn’t worked; that, in fact, the result of that ploy has been the opposite of what was hoped for.

And that is why “a majority is still a majority” is ok as a party talking point, but not a politically sound line of thinking in the long term. For why? Because:

• Cows, a centrepiece of the Adityanath government’s strategy, have come back to bite the party in the butt — so much so that in the latter rounds, even Modi was forced to address the “awara pashu” issue and to promise all sorts of schemes to solve a problem the farming community is taking seriously.
• The Ram temple issue is clearly past its use-by date — notice that during his frenetic campaigning, Modi made very little mention of it.
• There is just a little over two years left for the general election, and sweeping UP’s 80 seats is crucial for the BJP if it wants to retain power. Given that, the resurgence of the SP, and the erosion of the BJP’s hold, is as bad as news can get, at least for the ruling party. Because the only play it has is Hindutva, and if that doesn’t yield expected returns, what is left? The state’s economy and social indices have been sliding steadily through Adityanath’s tenure and given the state of the country’s finances, there is little the government can do to turn things around, to ensure that farmers get the doubled wages that was promised, and to provide employment to the youth.

Never mind the sophistry — it is crucial (and the BJP, internally, knows this) for the party to replicate the previous election results, if only to validate its thinking that a hard-line Hindutva regime is the only way to tighten its hold on a must-win state for 2024.

In the early days of the NDA government, Yashwant Sinha famously characterized the BJP as “Congress plus a cow”. Adityanath’s government has reduced itself to just a cow, period (while the state was in the grip of a pandemic and the banks of the Ganga were pockmarked with half-buried bodies, the CM was busy creating help desks in every district in the state — for cows. Remember?)

So, yeah — the results will be interesting, medium to long term, irrespective of whether the BJP returns to power. The only way the BJP really wins is if it replicates the 2017 landslide — anything else is very poor return on all the political capital Modi, the RSS, and Adityanath have invested in the state.

(I chose the cover image — courtesy The Hindustan Times — for a reason. This picture famously did the rounds on social media midway through the campaign. It was initially posted by BJP-affiliated handles to show the large turnout; within minutes, the image was outed as Photoshopped. And a very poor example of Photoshop skills at that — note that the crowd is turned away from the direction of the speaker. To my mind, that is the defining image from this year’s election campaign in the state, and a harbinger of the possible outcome).