The Diwali rockets have come flying, not from Pakistan, but from the old guard of the Bharatiya Janata Party, who have no doubt ruined whatever remained of party president Amit Shah’s Diwali. LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha and Shanta Kumar are not individuals who can be ignored just because they have been sidelined in the Modi era. These were the people who built the BJP after its formation in 1980, they know how to widen the fault-lines, and they are furious.
Their statement demanding accountability for the Bihar rout and suggesting that the BJP has been emasculated and forced to kow-tow to a few individuals is a rallying call for many who do not like the way the party works these days. Bihar MPs have also begun to speak up to say that the prime minister should not have spoken in the manner that he did during the campaign.
The abrasive tone of its national leadership is not something the BJP would want to discuss in its its internal assessment of the rout in Bihar. But there is little doubt that the aggression of the top leadership could not have won over the hearts and minds of potential voters in a region where there is a lilt in the language, where dollops of humour and light irony is used even to make scathing political attacks.
The traditional BJP leadership in Bihar, from the hapless Sushil Modi, to Rajiv Pratap Rudy and CP Thakur, may campaign hard but do not usually speak in the outright rude and divisive manner. Sushil Modi did remark that this election was between those who eat beef and those who do not, but the local BJP is sympathetic, claiming the usually sober Bihari Modi was just trying to keep pace with his Gujarati namesake.
False flags
Such rhetoric also did not work with voters as there was a failure of the BJP’s “False Flag” operations in Bihar, a term used to describe operations intended to deceive in such a way that it appears they were carried out by entities or groups other than those who actually planned and executed them. In the case of the BJP, such operations inevitably involve creating or increasing the intensity of a potential or existing communal divide. It works when the government is in your hands, such as in the laboratory-like situation in Gujarat where as chief minister Narendra Modi first allowed a conflagration to consume the state and then moved in to hold the peace.
It also works when a riot, like the one in Muzaffarnagar, has already polarised the state, as it had during the 2014 general election when the BJP swept Uttar Pradesh. For several months before the Bihar campaign actually began, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar would meet a few journalists during visits to Delhi to speak with concern about the orchestrated attempts to create small riots and clashes. A national daily also did an excellent series of ground reports on how the process of manufacturing communalism was operating in Bihar.
So when Amit Shah made his remarks about crackers bursting in Pakistan or when Narendra Modi raised the false bogey of quotas for Muslims, it is entirely possible that they were imagining a ground reality that did not exist on the scale that would have worked for them.
Grand delusions
What is also clear is that unlike the state leadership of the BJP that was uncertain of the outcome, the national leadership genuinely believed things would work for them. This is the sort of grand delusion that takes place when you pour in money but people are afraid to give you genuine feedback.
That is the most significant thing that has changed in the BJP since Narendra Modi and Amit Shah took control of the party. In the age of Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP was a voluble party in which people spoke their minds and competed for power. It was more democratic in its inner functioning than parties that are built around an individual or a family. The attempt to make the BJP a cult around a leader has certainly stifled voices and spirits within the party. Those who speak out, such as Arun Shourie or Shatrughan Sinha or now the old guard are individuals who have calculated that they have little left to lose anyway.
The question now is will the Bihar verdict change anything in the BJP? Big parties do not respond to defeat by immediately sacking the party president. Besides, Shah is in every sense Modi’s man. Since the prime minister is not known to trust many people, it would be a huge move for him to fail to extend Shah’s term as BJP president without accommodating him in some significant position. But following the letter sent off by the veterans, there is every possibility of a section of the RSS also adding pressure to end Shah’s innings as president.
Talent deficit
The problem that Modi faces is both a trust deficit and a talent deficit. On the one hand he does not trust the veterans with an institutional memory of working in government. But during the decade of United Progressive Alliance rule, the BJP did not grow organically. Along the way, the party had become strong in the states even as it diminished at the national level. It was only after Modi decided to declare himself prime ministerial candidate that a talent pool gathered. It included many NRIs worked for the campaign. But many of the people who contributed to a campaign that literally rode on crores of rupees were loyal to Modi and not to the BJP per se.
There are a few smart and capable people in the Modi government but they are over stretched managing ministries plus putting out political bush-fires lit by their more intemperate colleagues. Aside from these few individuals, today it would be fairly accurate to say that the average ability of those manning the Modi council of minister is lower than that of those who were part of the first BJP dispensation led by Vajpayee. The council of minister at that time included several alliance partners – for instance, both Nitish Kumar and Mamta Banerjee were ministers in the first National Democratic Alliance regime.
Moreover, Modi is not the sort of figure who will nurture a second rung in the manner in which Advani once did. The only figure he seems to have nurtured is Amit Shah and he is today seen to be at the crux of the problems in the party. This isn’t really surprising: it’s what happens when a political party is compelled to build a cult around a figure that is presented with the proportions of a demi-god.
Since he entered electoral politics in Gujarat, this is just the second time after the Delhi elections that Modi has been confronted with a crushing defeat. It serves to remind him of the limits to his powers.
If the prime minister is in the mood for some genuine reflection, he must ponder whether his party president is up to the task of understanding the social realities of parts of India where politics may require something other than lots of cash, thousands of cadres and a few doses of communal polarisation.
Saba Naqvi is an author and journalist who lives in Delhi.
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Their statement demanding accountability for the Bihar rout and suggesting that the BJP has been emasculated and forced to kow-tow to a few individuals is a rallying call for many who do not like the way the party works these days. Bihar MPs have also begun to speak up to say that the prime minister should not have spoken in the manner that he did during the campaign.
The abrasive tone of its national leadership is not something the BJP would want to discuss in its its internal assessment of the rout in Bihar. But there is little doubt that the aggression of the top leadership could not have won over the hearts and minds of potential voters in a region where there is a lilt in the language, where dollops of humour and light irony is used even to make scathing political attacks.
The traditional BJP leadership in Bihar, from the hapless Sushil Modi, to Rajiv Pratap Rudy and CP Thakur, may campaign hard but do not usually speak in the outright rude and divisive manner. Sushil Modi did remark that this election was between those who eat beef and those who do not, but the local BJP is sympathetic, claiming the usually sober Bihari Modi was just trying to keep pace with his Gujarati namesake.
False flags
Such rhetoric also did not work with voters as there was a failure of the BJP’s “False Flag” operations in Bihar, a term used to describe operations intended to deceive in such a way that it appears they were carried out by entities or groups other than those who actually planned and executed them. In the case of the BJP, such operations inevitably involve creating or increasing the intensity of a potential or existing communal divide. It works when the government is in your hands, such as in the laboratory-like situation in Gujarat where as chief minister Narendra Modi first allowed a conflagration to consume the state and then moved in to hold the peace.
It also works when a riot, like the one in Muzaffarnagar, has already polarised the state, as it had during the 2014 general election when the BJP swept Uttar Pradesh. For several months before the Bihar campaign actually began, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar would meet a few journalists during visits to Delhi to speak with concern about the orchestrated attempts to create small riots and clashes. A national daily also did an excellent series of ground reports on how the process of manufacturing communalism was operating in Bihar.
So when Amit Shah made his remarks about crackers bursting in Pakistan or when Narendra Modi raised the false bogey of quotas for Muslims, it is entirely possible that they were imagining a ground reality that did not exist on the scale that would have worked for them.
Grand delusions
What is also clear is that unlike the state leadership of the BJP that was uncertain of the outcome, the national leadership genuinely believed things would work for them. This is the sort of grand delusion that takes place when you pour in money but people are afraid to give you genuine feedback.
That is the most significant thing that has changed in the BJP since Narendra Modi and Amit Shah took control of the party. In the age of Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP was a voluble party in which people spoke their minds and competed for power. It was more democratic in its inner functioning than parties that are built around an individual or a family. The attempt to make the BJP a cult around a leader has certainly stifled voices and spirits within the party. Those who speak out, such as Arun Shourie or Shatrughan Sinha or now the old guard are individuals who have calculated that they have little left to lose anyway.
The question now is will the Bihar verdict change anything in the BJP? Big parties do not respond to defeat by immediately sacking the party president. Besides, Shah is in every sense Modi’s man. Since the prime minister is not known to trust many people, it would be a huge move for him to fail to extend Shah’s term as BJP president without accommodating him in some significant position. But following the letter sent off by the veterans, there is every possibility of a section of the RSS also adding pressure to end Shah’s innings as president.
Talent deficit
The problem that Modi faces is both a trust deficit and a talent deficit. On the one hand he does not trust the veterans with an institutional memory of working in government. But during the decade of United Progressive Alliance rule, the BJP did not grow organically. Along the way, the party had become strong in the states even as it diminished at the national level. It was only after Modi decided to declare himself prime ministerial candidate that a talent pool gathered. It included many NRIs worked for the campaign. But many of the people who contributed to a campaign that literally rode on crores of rupees were loyal to Modi and not to the BJP per se.
There are a few smart and capable people in the Modi government but they are over stretched managing ministries plus putting out political bush-fires lit by their more intemperate colleagues. Aside from these few individuals, today it would be fairly accurate to say that the average ability of those manning the Modi council of minister is lower than that of those who were part of the first BJP dispensation led by Vajpayee. The council of minister at that time included several alliance partners – for instance, both Nitish Kumar and Mamta Banerjee were ministers in the first National Democratic Alliance regime.
Moreover, Modi is not the sort of figure who will nurture a second rung in the manner in which Advani once did. The only figure he seems to have nurtured is Amit Shah and he is today seen to be at the crux of the problems in the party. This isn’t really surprising: it’s what happens when a political party is compelled to build a cult around a figure that is presented with the proportions of a demi-god.
Since he entered electoral politics in Gujarat, this is just the second time after the Delhi elections that Modi has been confronted with a crushing defeat. It serves to remind him of the limits to his powers.
If the prime minister is in the mood for some genuine reflection, he must ponder whether his party president is up to the task of understanding the social realities of parts of India where politics may require something other than lots of cash, thousands of cadres and a few doses of communal polarisation.
Saba Naqvi is an author and journalist who lives in Delhi.