Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah was not content to simply talk about Tripura on the day that his party had pulled off a historic victory in the state. That win, as well as the BJP’s successes in Nagaland and Meghalaya where the party will be part of the ruling coalition, was taken by many as proof that it can take on the Left and stamp its presence on elections outside the Hindi belt. Yet Shah was not content to rest on this laurel, saying this cannot be called the BJP’s best-ever performance nationally.
“Karnataka we will win anyway,” he said, referring to elections in the southern state that are expected before May. “[But] you cannot call it BJP’s golden period until we are in power in Odisha, West Bengal and Kerala.”
Shah picks his words carefully, and so this response was telling not only for what he chose to say but for what he kept out also. The BJP president did not bring up the Lok Sabha elections that are due next year. He did not mention Tamil Nadu or Mizoram, two other states where the BJP has never won, with the latter even expecting elections by the end of this year. Instead, he chose to mention Odisha, West Bengal and Kerala.
Analysts have spoken for some time now about how the BJP cannot expect to win back all of the seats it notched up in the Hindi belt in 2014, when central India from Rajasthan to Jharkhand seemed like a sea of saffron. The presumption is that both in the 2019 elections and beyond, the BJP will hope to pick up a sufficient number of seats from other places where it has less of a presence – so that it can continue to sell itself as a fresh alternative, and thereby nullify the unhappiness that may have set in elsewhere.
Could those three states be the answer? And is Tripura, where the BJP ended 25 years of Left rule, a model for how its campaign in those states might work?
Tripura
It has now become amply clear that the BJP’s victory in Tripura was not necessarily due to the downfall of the Left. Certainly, the Communists, having been in power for 25 years, saw their vote share drop, but, as the graph above shows, the BJP’s victory almost neatly coincides with a massive fall in support for the Congress. If one takes into account the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura, a tribal party that gave its support to the BJP, the combined vote share climbs to above 50%, but the bulk of the voters continue to be those that in the past would have gone to the Congress or, briefly in the last election, to the Trinamool Congress.
This is crucial because it means the BJP did not have to dislodge the Left, a complex task in a state that had been ruled by Communists for 25 years. It simply had to offer those hankering for a real Opposition party an alternative. Of course, the actual result is more complex than that – the party turned its campaign into a genuine ideological battle against the attitude and violence of the Left – but the template is clear: Prop up opposition to an entrenched power and ensure that it unites under one banner.
Where else might this work?
Odisha
Naveen Patnaik has been chief minister of Odisha since 2000, with two of those terms involving an alliance with the BJP. Meanwhile, the Opposition Congress has been steadily losing support, despite the anti-incumbency that should have come after nearly two decades of having the same leader and party at the helm. Patnaik, and the bureaucrats that are said to actually run the state around him, seem to have a firm hand on politics within the state.
Yet, if there is any place that is calling out for a more effective Opposition, it is Odisha, where the Congress came in a distant third-place in by-polls held in February, behind the BJP. Few expect Patnaik to be in danger in the upcoming elections, which are due around the same time as the Lok Sabha polls in 2019. But in the longer run, Odisha appears to be the sort of state where the BJP can become a player simply by more effectively eating into the Opposition space rather than having to dislodge the ruling party.
Kerala
Though the Tripura election was won for the BJP by scooping up Congress voters, the battle also was explicitly sold as one that was between the Left and the Right, the only place in India where the BJP directly competed with the Communists. Both Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke after the results had become clear of how much this meant to them, building on an older trend of Hindutva leaders both admiring the Left for its ideological discipline while also hating Communists for their ideas of atheistic, rational class revolution.
The BJP has spent the last few years making loud noises about the violence of the Communist cadres in Kerala, while also trying to turn the matter into a communal one by alleging connections between the Left and pro-terror groups. Kerala also is home to the most number of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Shakhas in the country, a detail that has led many to believe it would be prime territory for the BJP to expand into, if only the party can find the right leaders.
Yet despite these conditions, in state elections in 2016, the BJP was just about able to win one seat – its first ever – and register a small increase in vote share. While there may also be a constituency of upper-caste Hindus unhappy with the allegations of corruption and ineffectiveness that dogs both the Congress and the Left, which have traded power every five years in the state for the last two decades, there is no sleepwalking party whose vote base the BJP can simply grab. To contend in Kerala, it would need to build genuine support while also being seen as the party that offers change.
West Bengal
In West Bengal, it may have a chance to do exactly that. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is massively popular and has seen her support reach remarkable heights in a short time, but that has been coupled with the complete undermining of the Left, which ruled the state for three decades prior to her. This has led to a situation where the Left is seen as an ineffective Opposition, with its vote share steadily dropping in every consecutive election. Its loss next-door in Tripura does not help.
Banerjee, like Patnaik, is unlikely to be dislodged anytime soon. But her approach to politics, building a party entirely around her own personality, also leaves it vulnerable to the same sort of criticism that she herself levelled against the Left through the 2000s. As with Kerala, here too the BJP has been playing on communal sentiments, accusing Banerjee of appeasing minorities and disregarding the demands of Hindus. As with Kerala, elections are not due till 2021, and Banerjee is likely to see tremendously positive numbers in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. But the continuing decline of the Left and the irrelevance of the Congress in the state means there is a voter base for the BJP to grab – so Banerjee cannot take the 2021 state polls for granted.