The message in the bandobast
SABA NAQVI
THE Bihar elections will likely have a significant impact on the shape of national politics in India. Here are some consequences of the state election for the BJP, as the defeat will shadow the party and Narendra Modi government for some time to come.
The handsome win of the mahagathbandhan reinforces the argument that the key to challenging the growth of the BJP lies in the index of opposition unity. The coming together of Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar turned out to be a watershed moment in the history of coalition politics. Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the fact that other states present rather different challenges. The BJP will, for instance, be the primary pole of politics against which the regional players will construct their strategies when Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls in early 2017. However, it is hard to imagine the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) coming together, even if there are no permanent friends and enemies in politics. The potential of specific alliances on the national stage, thus, remains uncertain. Nevertheless, Bihar has shown that former rivals can unite to beat a common enemy.
For the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Bihar election turned out to be a disaster for a variety of reasons. First, it exposed the ineptitude of party president Amit Shah. Post the 2014 Lok Sabha win, Shah was hyped up and credited for achieving many things that likely would have happened anyway because of the extraordinary Modi campaign and the anti-incumbency that the UPA faced after ten years in power in addition to the image of having become ‘scam tainted’. Many people decided to vote for Narendra Modi more because they liked the idea of a ‘decisive’ leader and not because Shah was a great manager of Indian elections. What he was and continues to be is Modi’s henchman, a fellow Gujarati, trusted both as advisor and executioner. Shah has even been photographed touching Modi’s feet, and that perfectly captures the relationship between the two men.
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he Bihar verdict has diminished the image and standing of Shah within the BJP and larger Sangh parivar. He began the campaign by projecting himself in posters and billboards alongside Modi. It was widely felt that the ‘backroom fixer’ was deluding himself into believing he had become a mass leader. Shah addressed rallies besides authorizing the release of campaign material prominently showing him with Narendra Modi. As it turned out, for two Gujaratis to be projected in Bihar at a time when two prominent and charismatic Bihari leaders had united, was counter-productive. As the campaign progressed, Shah also made the most overtly desperate and communal statement about ‘crackers bursting in Pakistan’ if the BJP was defeated.Unfortunately for Shah, the strategy of raising communal ‘false flags’ in Bihar failed. False flags is 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. They work when the government is in ones control, 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. They also work when a riot, like the one in Muzaffarnagar, has already polarized the state, as happened 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 raise concern about the orchestrated attempts to create small riots and clashes. A national daily carried an excellent series of ground reports on how the process of ‘manufacturing communalism’ was operating in Bihar. Consequently, 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 possible that they were imagining a ground reality that did not exist on a scale that would have worked for them.
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he Bihar elections also illustrated the manner in which the larger Sangh parivar can, both wilfully and inadvertently, torpedo the best laid plans of the BJP. There is little doubt that the remarks of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, that the reservation policy should be reviewed, were damaging for the party. Though politically foolish, it was not a communal remark in the manner in which many comments from the BJP leadership were. Possibly Bhagwat was only being open about what he thinks should happen. It is useful to remember that the ‘beyond caste’ philosophy of the RSS was applied in Haryana and Maharashtra after the BJP won both states in October 2014. Although Brahmins had not occupied political office for many years, a young Brahmin, Devendra Phadnavis, was chosen as chief minister of Maharashtra. Similarly, a Punjabi Khatri, Manohar Lal Khattar, was chosen chief minister of Haryana, a state where Jats have long dominated the political narrative. Both decisions bear the imprint of the RSS leadership working in consensus with Narendra Modi. The fact that the BJP in Bihar chose not to project its own former deputy chief minister, Sushil Modi, who is categorized as OBC in his home state, but instead rely on the national leadership in the course of the campaign, suggests that along with the RSS, the BJP too had come to believe that an overarching personality driven campaign can paper over traditional social divisions.
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ven as the BJP got ‘caste, chemistry and strategy’ all wrong, on the other side the credibility of Nitish Kumar, now a three-term chief minister of one of the country’ poorest states, helped his alliance hit the right stride. Nitish Kumar is an organized, methodical leader who has won a place in the Indian imagination as being both reform minded and corruption free. He is not whimsical or difficult the way so many state leaders are. He takes measured steps and demonstrates a method to both his politics and governance. Simultaneously, he has displayed an uncanny ability to adapt to changing circumstances, an important marker of political savvy. For instance, Nitish has worked both with the BJP and against it. He is presently working with Lalu Prasad Yadav although he has spent a fair portion of his political life working against him. He was generous in granting seats to the Congress because he saw them as being of strategic importance in the future (although they were clearly the tail of the alliance in Bihar).After the victory, Nitish has re-established himself as one of the few leaders who bucked anti-incumbency. He has also won against a more expensive campaign launched by the country’s pre-eminent political party. It is significant that the individual who led his campaign strategy was Prashant Kishore, who had earlier worked for the Narendra Modi national campaign in 2014. Indeed, it was often said that the Bihar campaign was a grudge match between Amit Shah and Kishore, who had apparently abandoned Modi because of differences with the new BJP president.
What is also noteworthy is that Kishore worked out a very different campaign for Bihar. With minimal spending on print and TV advertising, the focus was more on small rallies where crowds ranged from 4-15,000. It was also ensured that both Nitish and Lalu separately campaigned in each constituency on different dates. There was a certain cohesion to the exercise and RJD leaders would check dates and schedules with the JD(U). In a very different arena, the Bihar campaign was similar to the one mounted by the AAP in Delhi earlier in 2015. In both instances, the bigger and more expensive campaign was defeated by what might be called the indigenous craft of a gritty, ground campaign.
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here are other aspects of Nitish’s persona that cannot be ignored. He carries little negative baggage and is fundamentally perceived as a figure that tried to work for vikas as opposed to just jaat. And there can be no argument that law and order did improve in the state during his reign. He must, therefore, be now seen as a potential prime ministerial candidate. That, of course, is presuming that regional parties will play a role in future coalition arrangements, something that seems very much in the realm of possibility in 2019.
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et, let there be no doubt that the real fightback at the level of the election campaign was spearheaded by Lalu Prasad Yadav. He must remain one of the most significant players on the Indian political stage. On the issue of secularism and fighting the BJP/RSS, he has been uncompromising. He seized many moments during the Bihar campaign and took the fight to the BJP, eventually forcing them on the backfoot.Here, I recount some personal anecdotes as I have covered many of Lalu Yadav’s campaigns and known the man for a couple of decades. In the course of the recent assembly elections, I met Lalu one night at his Patna residence after he had returned from the campaign trail. Dressed in a vest and dhoti, with his feet up on the chair, he said that the big opportunity came when he heard of RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s remarks. In his words, ‘I jumped up.’ Subsequently, in every interview, he appeared with a copy of RSS ideologue and former chief M.S. Golwalkar’s book, Bunch of Thoughts, to highlight the anti-reservation mindset of the Sangh parivar. Attacking the RSS as a bunch of ‘communal fascists’ became a central part of the campaign. He was relentless: ‘They are against lower castes and minorities. Don’t be fooled by anything else.’
Lalu also revealed that he had advised the state’s Muslims not to make a display of overt religiosity. That, he felt, would only turn it into the sort of polarizing campaign that the BJP wanted. In other words, he recognized the tactical importance of playing down a certain idiom and vocabulary, even as he hammered home his views on the BJP and RSS.
Lalu does not speak down to his electorate; he conducts a dialogue with them. In 2004, I vividly remember him going to every rally during the national election with an electronic voting machine (EVM) in his hand. He would crack his usual Bhojpuri jokes and take pot-shots at the ‘pheel good’ that the then Vajpayee regime was talking about. But because this was the first election where the EVMs had entirely replaced the paper ballot in Bihar, Lalu gave his own demonstration on how to use the machine. His instructions would go something like this: ‘Tum button dabao aur machine bolega peee! Aur hum bajadenge BJP ka teee (You press the button and I’ll take care of the rest)!’
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n that campaign, he played the ‘pee tee master’. The thrust of his effort was to demonstrate the use of the EVM on his dummy machine. ‘Agar machine peee nahin bolta to dal mein kuch kala hai. Tum phir se harmonium wala button push karo...darna nahin machine se (If the machine doesn’t go peee, there’s something wrong. Press the button again. Don’t be afraid of it).’Fast forward to 2015 and Lalu went again like the local masterji clutching a copy of ‘Bunch of Thoughts’. ‘Be afraid,’ he kept repeating, ‘be very afraid of these people. The RSS is the "politburo" of Brahmins and they have brahminical designs.’ Fascist is the other word that Lalu Yadav has internalized and mixes up with his Bhojpuri and Hindi. Love him or hate him, one can’t argue with the fact that he knows his state and his people and when he hits the right stride he runs a most entertaining campaign.
That is how Bihar was both lost and won in an election involving some of the most fascinating personalities in Indian politics. Besides the star acts mouthing thundering dialogue, there was colour, drama and emotion. In every sense it was a potboiler that had a riveting climax.