It is inevitable that people will read the victory of the Grand Alliance in accordance with their ideological inclination. It will be seen as a vote against aggressive Hindutva politics and a blow for preserving with the liberal ethos of the country. It will be viewed as the Bihar electorate’s thumbs up for the performance of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and as an indicator of a dip in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity. It will be celebrated, in some quarters, as a rearguard action of subaltern caste groups, including the Dalits, to thwart the upper caste from capturing power.
Yet electoral outcomes, as most events in life, are a consequence of multiple factors. Generalisations ought to be eschewed. Had one of the factors not been in the mix – for instance, Kumar’s good governance quotient or Lalu Prasad Yadav’s successful rallying of Other Backward Classes – we might have had a very different result. This profound truth the Bharatiya Janata Party failed to grasp last year, leading it to mistake the 2014 Lok Sabha mandate, based on 31% of the vote, as a licence to implement its Hindutva agenda.
For all those located between the Left and Liberal-Right on India’s ideological spectrum, the only comfort to draw from the Bihar result is that they have been saved from the ignominy of the BJP calling them rootless elites cut off from the masses. It is indeed impossible for anyone to be sure whether Biharis consciously voted for liberalism and tolerance.
But what we can be certain is that the Bihar election result will prompt the BJP and the Opposition to review its strategies for pushing their agendas, or competing visions of the kind of Indian society they envisage. This doesn’t mean they will dilute their agendas; only the method of communicating and selling their ideas to the people is bound to change.
The big fight
So it is that the battle between Hindutva and liberalism will continue to rage. Many might hope that the defeat in Bihar would lead to a rethink in the Sangh Parivar, prompting it to at least rein in the Hindutva hotheads.
But it is quite likely the hardliners in the Sangh will argue that the BJP lost Bihar because it did not concertedly try to consolidate the Hindus to paper over the caste contradictions. They would say the party woke up too late to Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav exploiting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement on reservations to turn the battle in Bihar as one between forward and backward castes.
It was not until the Dadri beef lynching at the end of September that BJP leaders began to articulate Hindutva through the furious debate on the cow-slaughter issue. While it is true media debates have nationwide resonance, yet it might have had quite a different impact if Dadri had happened in Bihar. No doubt, Modi tried to exploit the debate on Dadri to stoke the sentiments of Yadavs. But, the hardliners would argue, it was perhaps already too late.
It would thus seem the Sangh hardliners will want an aggressive Hindutva strategy to be pursued in each state scheduled to go for the Assembly polls over the next two years. This strategy will be designed to suit the unique political context of each state.
RSS resolution
The harbinger of this grim possibility came to us even as Bihar was preparing for its last round of election. On October 31, the RSS passed a resolution at its Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal in Ranchi. The resolution said that “vast differences in growth rates of different religious groups, infiltration and conversion” have caused “religious imbalance of the population ratio, especially in border areas”, which may threaten “the unity, integrity and identity of the country”.
The resolution is indeed a blueprint for preparations for the elections in Assam and West Bengal, two of the four states that are to have their Assembly elections next year. Infiltration and differences in the population numbers of religious groups in border districts are hot-button issues in West Bengal and Assam, where the Congress will also suffer the disadvantage arising from triple incumbency. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP will try to rake up the Ram temple issue, apart from ideas such as ghar wapsi, illegal cattle-slaughter and love jihad, in preparation for the 2017 Assembly election there.
Prepare for another round of furious debates on tolerance and intolerance, Hindutva and liberalism, in a couple of months.
But this doesn’t mean there will not be countervailing pulls on the Sangh to rein in its hotheads or opt for a less confrontationist approach in pushing its Hindutva line. For one, furious debates and conflicts convey an unseemly picture of socio-political instability. It would belie Modi’s promise of ushering in good governance.
It would further alienate sections of the influential middle class, which has been till recently the prime minister’s most vociferous supporters. The protest of writers was as much about individual anguish as it was about expressing the creeping disenchantment of their class. Though the middle class still does not constitute a substantial electoral vote-bank in most parts of India, the influence they wield as opinion-makers is enormous.
View from abroad
Socio-political instability will certainly scare away foreign investors. This is indeed quite evident from the worries the Moody’s Analytics expressed recently, asking the prime minister to restrain his party members or risk India losing credibility. For a prime minister who barely conceals his delight in hobnobbing with world leaders, and has tried to embody India’s quest to be recognised as a global power, social friction and intolerance would seem a poor advertisement for him.
As pragmatism clashes with ideology, the debate in the Sangh Parivar will sharpen, as will the divide among groups endorsing different positions. The hardliners in the Sangh are impatient, having interpreted the 2014 General Election mandate as their chance to turn transform India into a Hindu nation. Perhaps they will trigger a localised, controlled social tension.
But considering the media scrutiny the BJP is under, even a localised incident is likely to often acquire national salience – and the BJP will be asked to respond. The fury over Dadri, for instance, was fanned also because Modi remained silent on the lynching of a Muslim there for more than a week.
More than the Bihar result, it was the election campaign which diminished Modi. He attempted to communalise the election through his false allegation that the Grand Alliance in power would slice out 5% from the Dalit and OBC reservation pie for Muslims. Till then, over the last 17 months, he had chosen to remain largely silent on the intemperate rhetoric of his party members, regardless of whether or not he personally subscribes to the idea they espouse.
Perhaps it was pragmatism that had had made Modi court silence earlier. What made him opt for a voice which doesn’t behoove a person occupying the office of prime minister?
Modi's standing
Perhaps it was because of his sense of what he stood to lose if his party were not to win Bihar, given the time and energy he had invested in the campaign – that his authority in the Sangh would stand diminished, that his clout is directly proportionate to his ability to win election for his party, that a defeat in Bihar, months after the debacle in Delhi, could inspire rivals to demand diffusion of power which he has centralised in his office. In this context, what Bhagwat’s intent was in making the controversial remark on reservations will remain a matter of intense debate.
Nevertheless, the defeat in Bihar might make Modi and the BJP to revise their electoral strategy they have pursued after their stupendous success in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Since then, but for Delhi, the BJP didn’t announce a chief ministerial candidate in any of the states which had Assembly polls. It was Modi versus the Opposition chief minister, as was the case in Bihar well.
To win a state on the strength of his charisma and popularity undoubtedly enhances his power – it is a model Indira Gandhi too followed. But, in turn, Modi must also face the blowback – losses in Delhi and Bihar is bound to reinforce the popular perception that he is losing his magic. Might not Modi want to desist from playing for high states in every election? He can do this only if he doesn’t hanker after complete domination of Indian polity and appropriating more and more power for himself.
His idea of power has driven Modi to opt for a confrontationist approach in politics, thereby alienating his opponents. This is why his government will fail in eliciting cooperation in passing Bills in the Rajya Sabha, where his party is woefully short of the majority. The defeat in Bihar makes it impossible for the BJP to cobble a majority in the Upper House before 2019, which is when Modi’s five-year term expires.
The Bihar election is yet another proof that the era of alliance hasn’t ended. Parties will combine to thwart the BJP to return Indian polity to the bygone era of one-party dominance, as the Congress used to once. The BJP would not have lost had Nitish, Lalu and the Congress failed to unite. It is, therefore, possible Bihar will inspire parties to forge alliance in Assam and West Bengal. But, as of now, this seems unlikely to happen in Uttar Pradesh, where elections will remain a quadrangular contest, unless the BJP’s communal mobilisation gains ground there.
The Grand Alliance
Bihar is decidedly the triumph of Nitish-Lalu, not the Congress’. Its only consolation is that it manoeuvred to ensure Nitish led the Grand Alliance. In the process, though, it has alienated Lalu through its marked reluctance to share the stage with him. Even 2016 is bound to be tough for the Congress – it suffers from triple incumbency in Assam, will be an also-ran in West Bengal unless it cobbles an alliance, does not matter in Tamil Nadu, and it is its turn to lose in Kerala, where the baton of power alternates between the Congress and the Left.
Therefore, despite his thundering speeches and description of the BJP as a fascist force, as he did recently, Rahul Gandhi will have to wait for much longer to become the face of opposition against the Sangh. That honour, as of now, belongs to Nitish-Lalu and Arvind Kejriwal, who might get some respite from the pinpricks from the Central government now. Kejriwal’s open rooting for Nitish is an early hint of the contours of Opposition politics. Will Kejriwal now share the stage with Lalu?
This question is important because Indian politics continues to see a contest between caste and religious consciousness. This election underlines the loneliness of those upper castes who pin their hopes on the politics of religious identity to re-establish their hegemony of the past. But this, in turn, also triggers caste mobilisation which, a deft politician such as Lalu, manages to consolidate. It might, therefore, be said that India still searches for a brand of politics which articulates, and addresses, its social and economic inequalities in an idiom that doesn’t fan social conflict and divisiveness.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
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Yet electoral outcomes, as most events in life, are a consequence of multiple factors. Generalisations ought to be eschewed. Had one of the factors not been in the mix – for instance, Kumar’s good governance quotient or Lalu Prasad Yadav’s successful rallying of Other Backward Classes – we might have had a very different result. This profound truth the Bharatiya Janata Party failed to grasp last year, leading it to mistake the 2014 Lok Sabha mandate, based on 31% of the vote, as a licence to implement its Hindutva agenda.
For all those located between the Left and Liberal-Right on India’s ideological spectrum, the only comfort to draw from the Bihar result is that they have been saved from the ignominy of the BJP calling them rootless elites cut off from the masses. It is indeed impossible for anyone to be sure whether Biharis consciously voted for liberalism and tolerance.
But what we can be certain is that the Bihar election result will prompt the BJP and the Opposition to review its strategies for pushing their agendas, or competing visions of the kind of Indian society they envisage. This doesn’t mean they will dilute their agendas; only the method of communicating and selling their ideas to the people is bound to change.
The big fight
So it is that the battle between Hindutva and liberalism will continue to rage. Many might hope that the defeat in Bihar would lead to a rethink in the Sangh Parivar, prompting it to at least rein in the Hindutva hotheads.
But it is quite likely the hardliners in the Sangh will argue that the BJP lost Bihar because it did not concertedly try to consolidate the Hindus to paper over the caste contradictions. They would say the party woke up too late to Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav exploiting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s statement on reservations to turn the battle in Bihar as one between forward and backward castes.
It was not until the Dadri beef lynching at the end of September that BJP leaders began to articulate Hindutva through the furious debate on the cow-slaughter issue. While it is true media debates have nationwide resonance, yet it might have had quite a different impact if Dadri had happened in Bihar. No doubt, Modi tried to exploit the debate on Dadri to stoke the sentiments of Yadavs. But, the hardliners would argue, it was perhaps already too late.
It would thus seem the Sangh hardliners will want an aggressive Hindutva strategy to be pursued in each state scheduled to go for the Assembly polls over the next two years. This strategy will be designed to suit the unique political context of each state.
RSS resolution
The harbinger of this grim possibility came to us even as Bihar was preparing for its last round of election. On October 31, the RSS passed a resolution at its Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal in Ranchi. The resolution said that “vast differences in growth rates of different religious groups, infiltration and conversion” have caused “religious imbalance of the population ratio, especially in border areas”, which may threaten “the unity, integrity and identity of the country”.
The resolution is indeed a blueprint for preparations for the elections in Assam and West Bengal, two of the four states that are to have their Assembly elections next year. Infiltration and differences in the population numbers of religious groups in border districts are hot-button issues in West Bengal and Assam, where the Congress will also suffer the disadvantage arising from triple incumbency. In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP will try to rake up the Ram temple issue, apart from ideas such as ghar wapsi, illegal cattle-slaughter and love jihad, in preparation for the 2017 Assembly election there.
Prepare for another round of furious debates on tolerance and intolerance, Hindutva and liberalism, in a couple of months.
But this doesn’t mean there will not be countervailing pulls on the Sangh to rein in its hotheads or opt for a less confrontationist approach in pushing its Hindutva line. For one, furious debates and conflicts convey an unseemly picture of socio-political instability. It would belie Modi’s promise of ushering in good governance.
It would further alienate sections of the influential middle class, which has been till recently the prime minister’s most vociferous supporters. The protest of writers was as much about individual anguish as it was about expressing the creeping disenchantment of their class. Though the middle class still does not constitute a substantial electoral vote-bank in most parts of India, the influence they wield as opinion-makers is enormous.
View from abroad
Socio-political instability will certainly scare away foreign investors. This is indeed quite evident from the worries the Moody’s Analytics expressed recently, asking the prime minister to restrain his party members or risk India losing credibility. For a prime minister who barely conceals his delight in hobnobbing with world leaders, and has tried to embody India’s quest to be recognised as a global power, social friction and intolerance would seem a poor advertisement for him.
As pragmatism clashes with ideology, the debate in the Sangh Parivar will sharpen, as will the divide among groups endorsing different positions. The hardliners in the Sangh are impatient, having interpreted the 2014 General Election mandate as their chance to turn transform India into a Hindu nation. Perhaps they will trigger a localised, controlled social tension.
But considering the media scrutiny the BJP is under, even a localised incident is likely to often acquire national salience – and the BJP will be asked to respond. The fury over Dadri, for instance, was fanned also because Modi remained silent on the lynching of a Muslim there for more than a week.
More than the Bihar result, it was the election campaign which diminished Modi. He attempted to communalise the election through his false allegation that the Grand Alliance in power would slice out 5% from the Dalit and OBC reservation pie for Muslims. Till then, over the last 17 months, he had chosen to remain largely silent on the intemperate rhetoric of his party members, regardless of whether or not he personally subscribes to the idea they espouse.
Perhaps it was pragmatism that had had made Modi court silence earlier. What made him opt for a voice which doesn’t behoove a person occupying the office of prime minister?
Modi's standing
Perhaps it was because of his sense of what he stood to lose if his party were not to win Bihar, given the time and energy he had invested in the campaign – that his authority in the Sangh would stand diminished, that his clout is directly proportionate to his ability to win election for his party, that a defeat in Bihar, months after the debacle in Delhi, could inspire rivals to demand diffusion of power which he has centralised in his office. In this context, what Bhagwat’s intent was in making the controversial remark on reservations will remain a matter of intense debate.
Nevertheless, the defeat in Bihar might make Modi and the BJP to revise their electoral strategy they have pursued after their stupendous success in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Since then, but for Delhi, the BJP didn’t announce a chief ministerial candidate in any of the states which had Assembly polls. It was Modi versus the Opposition chief minister, as was the case in Bihar well.
To win a state on the strength of his charisma and popularity undoubtedly enhances his power – it is a model Indira Gandhi too followed. But, in turn, Modi must also face the blowback – losses in Delhi and Bihar is bound to reinforce the popular perception that he is losing his magic. Might not Modi want to desist from playing for high states in every election? He can do this only if he doesn’t hanker after complete domination of Indian polity and appropriating more and more power for himself.
His idea of power has driven Modi to opt for a confrontationist approach in politics, thereby alienating his opponents. This is why his government will fail in eliciting cooperation in passing Bills in the Rajya Sabha, where his party is woefully short of the majority. The defeat in Bihar makes it impossible for the BJP to cobble a majority in the Upper House before 2019, which is when Modi’s five-year term expires.
The Bihar election is yet another proof that the era of alliance hasn’t ended. Parties will combine to thwart the BJP to return Indian polity to the bygone era of one-party dominance, as the Congress used to once. The BJP would not have lost had Nitish, Lalu and the Congress failed to unite. It is, therefore, possible Bihar will inspire parties to forge alliance in Assam and West Bengal. But, as of now, this seems unlikely to happen in Uttar Pradesh, where elections will remain a quadrangular contest, unless the BJP’s communal mobilisation gains ground there.
The Grand Alliance
Bihar is decidedly the triumph of Nitish-Lalu, not the Congress’. Its only consolation is that it manoeuvred to ensure Nitish led the Grand Alliance. In the process, though, it has alienated Lalu through its marked reluctance to share the stage with him. Even 2016 is bound to be tough for the Congress – it suffers from triple incumbency in Assam, will be an also-ran in West Bengal unless it cobbles an alliance, does not matter in Tamil Nadu, and it is its turn to lose in Kerala, where the baton of power alternates between the Congress and the Left.
Therefore, despite his thundering speeches and description of the BJP as a fascist force, as he did recently, Rahul Gandhi will have to wait for much longer to become the face of opposition against the Sangh. That honour, as of now, belongs to Nitish-Lalu and Arvind Kejriwal, who might get some respite from the pinpricks from the Central government now. Kejriwal’s open rooting for Nitish is an early hint of the contours of Opposition politics. Will Kejriwal now share the stage with Lalu?
This question is important because Indian politics continues to see a contest between caste and religious consciousness. This election underlines the loneliness of those upper castes who pin their hopes on the politics of religious identity to re-establish their hegemony of the past. But this, in turn, also triggers caste mobilisation which, a deft politician such as Lalu, manages to consolidate. It might, therefore, be said that India still searches for a brand of politics which articulates, and addresses, its social and economic inequalities in an idiom that doesn’t fan social conflict and divisiveness.
Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist in Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, has as its backdrop the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
