Orissa may have rung the death knell for the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Losing an old ally, the BJP has managed to sew up others but not enough to produce the magic numbers to catapult it to power in 2009. And party in-fighting only makes matters worse.
There is a joke doing the rounds of Delhi’s political grapevine – that in the Congress there is a `maara maari’ for tickets, while in the Third Front the fight is over who will become Prime Minister; but in the BJP the fight is over the next party president.
Leaders are already talking about who should lead the party after the elections, to prepare for the next round. Some are already rooting for Narendra Modi. The BJP may put up a brave face about emerging as the single largest party in May 2009, but party circles are far from upbeat.
The Rajnath Singh-Arun Jaitley spat over the appointment of businessman and Pramod Mahajan confidante Sudhanshu Mittal as one of the co-convenors of north eastern states is being viewed against this backdrop.
Though a rapprochement has ostensibly taken place between Rajnath Singh and Jaitly – he boycotted two meetings of the party’s election committee with pictures splashed on front pages showing him sulking at another meeting – after Jaitly went to Rajnath Singh’s house. But Mittal’s appointment had not been revoked till the time of writing.
Jaitley, who opposed Mittal’s appointment on the grounds of probity in public life, found himself isolated. His rivals in the party turned around the issue to criticise his boycott as a challenge to presidential authority and party discipline, coming as it did on the eve of elections. They argued that Rajnath Singh had made the appointment after consulting LK Advani and RSS leaders.
When Jaitley took a tough line on Mittal in the hope of having the decision revoked, which would have made his position in the party invincible, he may not have anticipated the kind of support Mittal and Rajnath Singh would get from other senior leaders in the party such as Sushma Swaraj and Murli Manohar Joshi.
Some see the episode not just as a tussle between Rajnath and Jaitley but also between Sushma Swaraj and Jaitley. They suspect that Jaitley struck after Sushma Swaraj had successfully managed to stitch up alliances with the AGP in Assam and with the INLD in Haryana — states under her charge — and she is believed to have done so with the help of Sudhanshu Mittal. Chandan Mitra, on other hand, could not save the alliance in Orissa and he was a special envoy of LK Advani.
Whatever the explanation for the move and the countermove, clearly the BJP’s GenNext leaders are jockeying for position for a post poll scenario, apprehensive that the BJP may not be in a position to form a government.
Officially, party leaders dismiss all this as idle speculation and durbar talk, which titillate wags and a thousand people in the five sq km area of Lutyens’ Delhi, something that is not going to affect the party’s chances in the coming elections. It may or may not have a bearing on the party’s prospects, but it is bound to affect the cadre’s morale in the run-up to the elections.
The BJP’s travails began with its defeat in Delhi, and that too soon after 26/11.That was a double disappointment since terror had been the BJP’s main plank and the party expected Mumbai to give its poll prospects a fillip. Then comes Bhairon Singh Shekhawat’s salvo virtually taking on LK Advani as the BJP’s Prime Minister-in-waiting. This was followed by the exit of Kalyan Singh, another setback, since the Lodhs do matter in UP from Bullandshahr to Hamirpur. Varun Gandhi’s hate-filled speech in Philibhit from which the party had to distance itself put the BJP on the defensive. The Arun to Varun controversies has showed up the inner tussle within the party.
But it was Orissa which created a sense of despair in the party psychologically that it might not make it in May 2009. The coming polls are all about arithmetic and if there is a development which has dealt the BJP a grievous blow, it is Orissa. The BJP has lost a time tested ally in the BJD and 18 Lok Sabha seats (11 held by the BJD and 7 by the saffron party). While the BJP maintains that it will get a couple of Lok Sabha seats on its own, both the BJD and the Congress are writing it off in Orissa. The Congress is expected to get 7 to 8 Lok Sabha seats while the BJD may mop up 13 to 14.
The saffron party is trying to console itself that while it has lost one ally, it has gained three new ones – Ajit Singh’s RLD and Jats are a factor in a dozen constituencies in western UP and the Jat-upper caste combination has known to click in the past; with Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam which could give the alliance an advantage since the Congress has not tied up with the Muslim front AUDF; and Om Prakash Chautala’s INLD in Haryana.
Unlike the Congress whose alliances have run into rough weather, the BJP leaders express satisfaction that, barring the BJD they have managed to stitch up alliances with their old allies. The JD(U) was asserting itself but took only one more seat compared to the 2004 division, taking 25 and giving the BJP 15, instead of 16 last time. With the Shiv Sena, it’s the old formula in place, with the BJP getting the larger share in the Lok Sabha election. There have been no major glitches with the Shiromani Akali Dal, at least not till the time of writing.
The BJP claims it is better placed than the Congress because it has a pre-poll alliance in place and an agreed agenda for governance. It also has alliances in the country’s two largest states – UP and Bihar – whereas in both these places, the Congress has not been able to stitch up alliances and “was offered only 9 out of 120 seats by its allies, which only goes to show where it stands.”
The truth is that it is an uphill struggle for the BJP today. Even if one were to go by the best case scenario being envisaged by its leaders, the party would more or less stand where it was in 2004 – with 138 seats. This figure had come down to 113 in the 14th Lok Sabha with disqualifications and defeats.
According to this best case scenario, the BJP will get 20 seats in UP (up from the present 10), 9 in Bihar (out of 15 it is contesting), 20 in Madhya Pradesh (it had peaked in 2004 with 25), 6 in Chhatisgarh, 8 in Jharkhand, 12 in Rajasthan, 22 in Gujarat (from the 14 it had), 13 in Maharashtra again, 18 in Karnataka again, 6 in Assam, and say another 4-5 in smaller states, which will add up to 138-139. This if everything goes according to the party’s expectation in the states where it has a presence.
Now coming to its allies, it they get around 50 seats (say Akali Dal 6, Shiv Sena 14, JD(U) 18, RLD 4, AGP 5 and INLD 3), this would make for just under 190 seats. Theoretically speaking the BJP can get the support of regional parties which were one time allies but deserted it over the years.
But for that to happen, it would have to emerge as the single largest party and be invited by the President to form a government. Who will emerge as the single largest party is the critical factor for the next election. And for that to happen the Congress tally would have to be much lower than the around 140 figure that the BJP is expecting.
Suppose that does happen, and Jayalalitha, Mamata Bannerji and Chandrababu Naidu, who are expected to do better than last time, decide to join hands with it, it would still need the support of a party like the BSP. There are too many ifs and buts in this scenario.
The BJP’s problems arise from three factors. One, it is still not present in large parts of India. It has hardly any presence in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal.
This can also be said about the Congress today but it is better off than the BJP in terms of its geographical spread. Also, the BJP had virtually peaked in the “BJP states” in 2004 and will find it difficult to improve on that number, even though it retained Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh in the recent Assembly polls.
Secondly, the party is being pulled in different directions, buffeted between the emotive issues that brought it numbers at one state and the more basic themes of bijlee-sadak-paani which also paid rich dividends in the 2003 winter Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland.
This time the BJP was by and large sticking to good governance, development and security as issues to flog, sensing that people were wary of anything that was extreme given the challenge that the country faces both on the economic and the security fronts. Varun Gandhi’s statements struck a discordant note.
While LK Advani is the accepted prime ministerial choice of the BJP and the NDA, he does not enjoy the kind of authority that he used to wield at one stage when his word was considered final. The Rajnath-Jaitley spat would have been unthinkable on the eve of elections earlier. Besides, Vajpayee had an Advani to deal with the nitty gritty of party management and for conflict resolution at various levels. Though in Vajpayee’s position today, Advani of today does not have the equivalent of Advani of yesterday to assist him, and that too is part of the problem. Jaitley has tried to slip into that role but is not accepted by the entire party. Recent developments have only underscored it.