Is he for real: The Modi question? In Uttar Pradesh, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has put all its eggs in the Modi basket. Much like the Congress which pins its hopes on only Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, for the BJP it is only Narendra Modi and Narendra Modi; of course with his ‘Man Friday’ Amit Shah playing piper.
For the Congress it is a simple matter of sycophancy like always, but for the BJP in Hindi heartland’s largest state, the twin force of Modi and Shah is a reality. The duo, which secured the party a historical victory in the Parliament polls, has infused fresh life in an otherwise dormant BJP state unit.
The state leadership, it seems, quietly accepted its incompetence and surrendered before this new leadership that emerged in the form of the Modi-Shah combine at the centre.
Two recent examples which only go to amplify these points are one — The nomination of Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar from Uttar Pradesh for the Rajya Sabha. There was not a mew from any of the UP leaders.
The other — Modi and Shah left the state leaders to their own devices for the 12 assembly seat by-elections which followed the Lok Sabha wipe-out. Ironically, out of all these seats earlier held by the BJP nine were out of its hands in the by-poll. A telling comment on the state’s leaders!
“Minus Modi, the party is nothing. If the BJP had to contest the Lok Sabha without Modi, it would be back to 10 seats that it won in the last Parliament,’ says a party insider with no qualms.
During the Parliament elections in May, the BJP cornered 42 per cent share of the vote and won 71 seats in UP an unheard of performance. This miracle took 15 years to shape after it managed to bag 57 seats in 1998, its highest ever.
In January 2014, when Modi began addressing election rallies, the Uttar Pradesh unit of the BJP was caught in a bind — there was an environment of despair and a severe dearth of good candidates. The party seemed to have no agenda and no leadership at all at the state level.
Eventually, tickets were handed out to even turncoats and criminals – be it Jagdambika Pal (who deserted Congress to join Modi) or Sakshi Maharaj (facing serious charges including rape and murder); and all won except those fighting against the Yadav or Gandhi family.
The state unit of the BJP had not even dreamt of such a victory. However, the ground reality is such that even today the state unit has no clear agenda, no strategy, and no leadership. The state president Laxmi Kant Bajpai is a hard working lieutenant of the party but does not possess any pan leadership qualities or appeal. He is simply following the diktat he receives from the top.
It goes without saying the at the state unit is putting all its eggs in the Modi basket for 2017 Assembly elections and winning UP will change the whole complexion of the Modi game.
A huge membership drive has been launched without much verification: “Give a missed call, and become a member of the BJP”, is what people are being bombarded with everyday but with little follow up action.
The party has so far been able to induct about 42 lakh into the party fold. However, the most ironic results being from Lucknow and Varanasi, constituencies of Rajnath and Modi where the party has been able to recruit less than 3000 members as per reports appearing in sections of media.
“We have given notices to low performing districts. Nonetheless, we still have time as the target is to recruit 1.5 crore members by March,” the report confirmed Swatantra Dev Singh, in-charge of the membership drive.
However, a close scrutiny of its expanding membership explains that the BJP – the party of elders with an urban base – is now trying to metamorphose itself into ‘a party of the youth and villagers.
‘One booth, five youth’ and ‘one booth, hundred voters’ are its new slogans that are driving the new found enthusiasm. The task before party men is to make 100 ‘primary members’ at each of the 1.40 lakh booths in the state, of which at least five should be young.
To achieve this target the party plans to select one voter from each page of the voter list and apprise that person of the priorities and ideologies of the party, hoping that the person will help take the message forward.
In fact, the party wants to penetrate to the last voter, which comprises Backward and Dalit communities in villages – the same voters swept it to this never dreamt of numbers.
Entering the panchayat poll fray would be one of the strategies to complete the above tasks. For the first time in the state’s history, BJP leaders are burning the midnight oil in preparation for the Panchayat elections scheduled next year.
Despite all efforts, the road to success is not going to be an easy one for the BJP. Frustrated with a dissipating Congress-led government at the Centre, the people opted for the BJP as the only alternative. But then Modi sold the nation a dream which prove too big to realise.
The victory has surely created a testing ground for the party, based on which, history could be repeated again. The party can expect more seats only if Modi is able to maintain his credibility till the elections and if he brings some real development to the state.
Some of the party overt efforts to woo Dalits such as the ‘Samta Bhoj’ with Dalits could boomerang as it could lead to the upper castes moving away.
There already runs an undercurrent as most of the upper caste leaders are already feeling neglected. Kalraj Mishra, Varun Gandhi and Murli Manohar Joshi are just a few. Then there are many senior leaders in the state whose identities have been completely subsumed such as Vinay Katiyar, Hukum Singh or Om Prakash Singh. The party needs to bring its own house in order before it can deliver the hopes of people.
Meanwhile, the RSS and its multifarious arms, in the aftermath of the Modi victory, have started to flex its muscle in the state only causing embarrassment to the party with their out and out communal statements; be it Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Sakshi Maharaj or even the party state president, Bajpai.
Issues – such as communal violence (in which fundamental Hindu forces were found to be involved at times), Love Jihad (raised by the state president during the last national executive, and on which the party later backtracked), and now forced conversions (for which Hindu outfits are taking responsibility) – could damage the party but then the BJP and the Sangh are known to play different tunes as suits the occasion.
The BJP could well be attempting to change its hardcore Hindu image party to that of being all-inclusive. But political analysts feel that if hardcore RSS hands are given a free run to polarise votes could only harm the party in the long run.
So will Modi’s magic once again keep the vital Hindi heartland state under its spell during the next round of local elections? Difficult to predict!
Modi effect on SP
The Modi swept the Samajwadi slate almost clean in the general election with only the Yadav clan managing to survive.
The party’s morale took a severe beating and has made workers nervous after the sheer scale of BJP’s victory. The party is losing the confidence after its smooth sailing in the 2012 Assembly elections I.
To make things worse, the young Akhilesh government proved to be a complete non- starter. Mulayam Yadav made way for son Akhilesh hoping to cash in on the aspiration of the youth. But the young man failed to live up to people’s expectations. Even party’s chief, Senior Yadav has been critical of his son’s ways of functioning.
Off late, Akhilesh is trying to pull up his socks, concentrating on announcements and inaugurations of much awaited schemes. But it all seems to be too little too late. The majority of schemes are for re-branding the state and luring investors to UP.
It seems quite clear that none of these schemes is going to win back the Yadav and Muslim community voters, who obviously deserted the SP during the Parliament elections, leaving the party with only five seats from the 22that it held.
But Netaji remains unfazed and is putting all behind setting up local alliances and even a Third Front in a new avatar. But his own party remains in a state of confusion and turmoil because of its leaders blowing hot and cold with the BJP.
Having played the guardians of the ‘vulnerable’ Muslims for long, the party is gradually losing its grip and appeal with them. The party cut a sorry figure among Muslims by celebrating a grand Saifai Mahotsav in Mulayam’s hometown even as children and women were dying in Muzaffarnagar refugee camps.
Angry with ‘Mulla Mulayam’, Muslims are closely watching Mulayam’s political moves. The community has developed mistrust with the SP due to its government’s indifferent attitude to communal violence which have engulfed the state since the SP government has come to rule. Also, controversial statements from the party’s Muslim face Azam Khan claiming that the money spent on Mulayam’s birthday at Saifai had come from the Talibanis.
Muslims apart, even its core voters, the Yadavs, are still disillusioned with the SP. The community’s been blaming Mulayam for looking after only his own clan rather than working for the community as a whole. In this Parliament, these two core-voting groups are going to pose a big challenge for the SP and could well decide its future.
To make matters worse, Akhilesh’s wife and MP Dimple Yadav has started interfering in the day to day governance of the state to put forward her image of being a development oriented MP. The latest being the ‘Mission 300’ scheme, Dimple’s brainchild under which she wants to counter Modi’s ‘adopt a village’ scheme for all MPs from Uttar Pradesh.
However, the scheme is driven totally by government officers. All District Magistrates (DMs) and Chief Development Officers (CDOs) of all 75 districts have been asked to adopt two villages in their respective districts aimed at eliminating malnutrition among women and children.
“While Modi’s scheme will benefit only 80 villages in the state, Dimple’s scheme will benefit 300 villages”, prides Rajendra Chowdhary, senior leader of the SP. Akhilesh or Dimple have started doing, is not expected to make a drastic change in the status of the party’s image among voters. But such gimmicks by the husband and wife duo are not going to cut much ice in the state or give it the necessary image makeover.
What the government really needed to do in order to give its image a positive boost was to take control of the law and order situation in the state, it being the weakest link in the Samajwadi Party. Eve teasing, rapes, looting, robbery, and even murders are on the rise. People l do not feel safe under the Samajwadi Party. Even the party’s own MPs and MLAs have become a threat to the common person, due to their arrogance, despite Mulayam constantly advising them show restraint.
If the party fails to give back people a sense of security, its chances of winning a decent number would be low.
It’s also high time the party realise that merely giving out freebies are not going to help it politically. Before the Parliament polls, Akhilesh Yadav had distributed laptops to students of Class XII with no dividends. The irony being his father Mulayam sarcastically pointed out that all those given laptops by the party in fact went and voted for the BJP because of its strong media campaign.
The road ahead for Akhilesh and Mulayam looks tough. Unless they come up with some concrete political or development plans in order to win back its lost voters among the Muslims and Yadavs (the so-called impregnable M-Y combine). It’s a tough call.
BSP returns to basics
The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) seems to be worse off. It’s Iron Lady, Mayawati, who, after failing to even open her account in the general elections, has largely been a mute spectator. Her great social engineering seems to have gone bust.
Now she is going back to the basics. She has sent Dalit members Rajaram and Veer Singh from eastern and western UP to the Rajya Sabha, instead of an Upper Caste like Satish Mishra or Akhilesh Das.
She is depending more on people like RK Chowdhary or Jugal Kishor, Dalit leaders who have been with the BSP since Kanshi Ram’s time. Having learnt her lesson of playing across castes, she is now showing more faith in the BAMCEF (Backward and Minority Community Employees’ Federation) than the novices who have joined the Bahujan Samaj in the recent years.
Her moves have irked people like Akhilesh Das, who now has left the party and is contemplating a new organisation.
Unperturbed by such rebels, Mayawati is slowly trying to regain her lost empire with regrouping her core voters, the Dalits, who drifted from the BSP in the last election and surprisingly went with Modi.
The community has felt cheated because they feel their leader has gone about erecting her own statues instead of focussing on Dalit welfare. Dalits have been waiting for long for some real development to come their way.
Mayawati had the golden chance when her party came to power and formed the majority government in the state, but she lost the initiative by ignoring any real development. Today her party is at a dead end but Mayawati is not one to give up but waiting for the right moment to strike back.
Doomsday for Congress
The BJP’s aim is to wipe the Congress from the face of the country and become India’s only national party. Going by the state of the Grand Old Party in the state it does seem very far-fetched for Modi’ s dream to come true, earlier than maybe imaginable. In Uttar Pradesh the Congress for sure is on a ventilator.
Even the media, used to going into a tizzy each time a member of the Gandhi family decided to visit their pocket borough, is no longer paying any attention to such superficial ‘high-profile’ visits. In fact the last two visits of the Gandhi family to Rae Bareli and Amethi largely went unnoticed. None of the big media reps from the state capital showed up except for a little mention in the local media.
The situation has reached the extent that even the party leaders have started mocking their leadership – “We will be getting 400 seats and Rahul Gandhi will become our Prime Minister”, says a party member ridiculing the delusion in which the Congress party is living at the moment.
Yet the party leaders on the face of it maintain certain bravado. “There may appear to be a lull in the Congress but the moment the BJP government touches the hornet’s nest in the form of the Land Acquisition Bill, the whole Congress will once again be standing tall and strong behind the our leader Rahul Gandhi”, Congress Spokesperson Surendra Rajput claims. But even with all the brouhaha over the land bill the Gandhi heir seems to be missing in action with no clue as to where he is in his deep meditative state.
The reality is far from such claims. The morale of the Congress worker is at an all-time low. The party is invisible in the state. And the fear of exodus looming large!
Senior leader Neeraj Bora, from a staunch Congress family, has already left the party and found place in the BJP. A few others are also lining up though keeping their cards close to their chest.
“Not everyone is looking for a post in the party. Sometimes people leave an organisation when they feel suffocated and find some breathing space and a respectable place in another organisation”, explains someone close to Bora.
Rumours have also been doing the rounds for some time now that some senior Congress leaders were planning to form a parallel organisation – the Rajiv Congress– before the Assembly polls. These are the same people, who have given up on Rahul baba’s leadership and have been crying hoarse to bring in Priyanka to resurrect the party. This faction has also raised its resentment to the Gandhi family’s only concern for Rae Bareli and Amethi.
Yet there are those who are awaiting a miracle.
“The Yadav, Muslim, Backward and Dalit vote that used to get split among regional parties but this time the same vote went to BJP. Now with the regional parties slowly getting eliminated, a part of this vote is likely to drift towards the Congress party,” hopes Virendra Madan, spokesperson of UP Congress Committee. Hope doesn’t cost mush effort and for the Congress Party it is eternal