FOR the Bharatiya Janata Party, the best bit of news to arrive in a long, long time was its performance in the Uttar Pradesh civic polls. It won eight of 12 mayoral seats when the most it expected to win was five. The October 2006 windfall, coming after a long drought, stunned the BJP. The party which held sway over UP through the Ram mandir frenzy, retaining its base even when the movement lost its fizz, had bitten the dust in three successive elections in the state – the 1999 Lok Sabha election, the 2002 Assembly election, and the 2004 Lok Sabha election. Pushed to the third spot, hit by low morale and poor credibility, and fighting to retain its core vote, the BJP seemed headed for another rout in the 2007 Assembly election. The mayoral victory broke the jinx as it were.

The Hindutva party seized the opportunity as only it can. Eight mayoral seats in a predominantly rural state amounted to little in electoral terms. For a reality check, consider the fact that the BJP has a strong urban base and held six mayoral seats previously. Yet the message from the party – relayed tirelessly from any platform that came its way, press meet, party meet, Parliament, in-house journals – was that the mayoral verdict was a teaser-trailer for bigger things to come. In an editorial titled ‘Lotus Blooms Again’, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mouthpiece Organiser said: ‘The BJP is back with a bang in UP. With the Assembly election only three months away, the BJP has made handsome gains, winning eight of the 12 mayoral seats. … Mulayam Singh was clearly mangled, BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party), though it put up only independents, performed better, and the Congress hopes of reviving its fortunes on a sectarian, communal plank received a debilitating setback.’

The party leadership has obviously psyched itself into believing it is winning the Assembly election. Atal Bihari Vajpayee sounded the bugle at the December 2006 meeting of the BJP’s National Council: ‘The road to Delhi is via Lucknow.’ On the strength of its showing in the UP civic polls, the BJP was claiming twin victories – in UP and at the Centre.

 

A lot of this is bluster. Among all Indian political parties, there is none that can use propaganda as astutely and as persistently as the BJP. Nonetheless, the civic poll boost has had one positive outcome: It has undeniably energized the cadre, which had become inconsolable after the BJP’s May 2004 Lok Sabha defeat. The image of the BJP in the past two and a half years has been of a party caught in a civil war: incessant quarrels in the second rung; raging battles between Lal Krishna Advani and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh; Rajnath Singh’s doubt-dogged presidential tenure; Uma Bharti’s televised rebellion; Pramod Mahajan’s murder by his own brother; Rahul Mahajan’s embarrassing drug problems – the party seemed to have lost its get-up-and-go. As Uma Bharti triumphantly announced: ‘The BJP is an empty shell. The bird, which was its soul has flown, leaving behind a soiled cage.’

With the civic poll bounce back, the party appears to have regained its famed killer instinct, which is half the battle won in a state crowded with contestants, and where every vote must be seized – by means fair or foul; in today’s fragmented UP, constituencies can be won and lost by a few hundred votes, which says something for what an astute poll manager can achieve. It is in this context that the psychological transformation within the BJP must be viewed.

Rajnath Singh, who started on a shaky note thanks to Advani’s looming shadow on his presidency, has won a mandate for three years. Without any doubt, this gift from the RSS owes to the UP election. The BJP chief is an experienced UP hand (he was chief minister during the last Assembly election) known especially for his tod-phod rajneeti (manipulative politics). His brand of politics is bound to be welcomed by the party’s state unit, listless from repeated defeats. By himself, UP BJP leader Kalyan Singh may not be a force – the hero of the Ayodhya movement is today a shadow of his once formidable self. However, it is significant that he is the BJP’s consensus chief ministerial candidate in a party bristling with ambitious state leaders.

The Kalyan-Rajnath team effort speaks for a new determination and cohesion, which ought to lend sharpness and credibility to the BJP’s campaign. Indeed, contrary to speculation that Rajnath Singh will undermine the Sangh’s prodigal son, he seems to have understood that Kalyan Singh must have a free hand if he is to make a go of UP.

 

This is where the problem begins. Making a go of UP is unlikely to be easy considering the odds stacked against the BJP. In UP, the BJP’s growth is on a downward curve. Its once rock-solid upper caste-OBC vote base is under attack, and given the multiplicity of players in the state, each looking to add a few more castes to its base, there is no guessing how the votes will splinter. Besides, there is only so much Rajnath Singh and Kalyan Singh can do. The Rajnath magic could not prevent the BJP from losing the 2002 Assembly election – and from going further downhill thereafter.

Politics in UP is typically characterised by the rise and fall of parties. In 1989, the Congress tumbled headlong from its high pedestal, never to recover from the fall. The Grand Old Party found its once sure-fire Brahmin-Muslim-Dalit vote base preyed upon by rivals who grew exponentially at its expense. The BJP’s decline has been faster, and inevitably so in an era dominated by assertive caste parties. The identity politics that brought the BJP unimaginable glory has also been responsible for its decline, with the power of Hindutva challenged by the power of Dalit and OBC politics. Today it is a game played by all. In UP, each day throws up a new caste or sub-caste party. A new coalition under Vishwanath Pratap Singh is ready to tap into the undercurrent of anger and resentment among the poor and the farmers.

 

Who will be the winners in this race? The BJP’s story is illustrative of the dangers of growing too big too soon. Rewind to the 1989 Assembly election. This was the beginning of the lotus’ meteoric rise in India’s most coveted political state. In a House of 425, the BJP won 57 seats for a vote share of 11.61 per cent. Hardly impressive but the statistics do not tell the full story. In the same House in 1985, the BJP had won 16 seats for a vote share of 9.83 per cent. The additional 41 seats four years later came virtually for free – against a vote share increase of just 1.78 percentage points. The quantum jump in seats owed to the party’s shrewd seat sharing arrangement with the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal.

More crucially, the triumph was pulled off in the backdrop of the swiftly enlarging Ramjanmabhoomi movement. The run-up to the election was marked by frenetic Ram shila (bricks for the Ram temple) pujans, Ram shila processions across the state and the Rajiv Gandhi government’s surrender on the shilanyas (foundation for the Ram temple) ceremony. The BJP needed a respectable victory to push the Ram momentum to greater heights and a firm base on which to build its future successes; the 1989 miniature triumph provided precisely this fillip.

 

Advani’s 1990 Ram rath yatra left a bloody trail across the state. And with it came a surging, panting Hindu fan-following that catapulted the BJP to an emotional high (51 of 85 seats) in the 1991 Lok Sabha election – and to the seat of power in the Assembly election that followed. The party took a Hanuman leap from its 1989 perch to win 221 seats for a vote share of 31.45 per cent. Through the election, the saffron-awash state resounded to just one strain: Mandir wahin banayenge.

The temple was not built. But the December 1992 decimation of the Babri masjid and the Kalyan Singh government’s dismissal ensured that the party was firmly imprinted in the Hindu mind: Kalyan Singh would go to prison, defy the Constitution, do anything for the Hindu cause. The BJP would lose a government to save the kar sevaks from bullets. The Hindu community had finally found a political voice that powerfully, vocally, and dramatically argued its case.

The 1993 Assembly election was an unexpected setback. Given the circumstances of its dismissal, the BJP had reason to expect to romp home on a sympathy wave. Instead the party, which finished with 177 seats, found itself done out of power by the SP-BSP combine. The BJP’s saffron surge was checkmated by an astute Muslim-Dalit combination. Yet for all that the SP-BSP (109 seats + 67 seats) outsmarted the BJP, the latter was far from being the loser that the media portrayed it to be. The BJP’s share of votes was 33.30 per cent – nearly two percentage points more than the 31.45 it commanded in 1991. Not just this. The BJP quickly wrested the advantage from the SP-BSP combine by splitting the alliance and following it up by backing Mayawati for office. The BJP-BSP alliance in turn proved shortlived.

 

The July 1996 Lok Sabha election confirmed the BJP’s stranglehold on the Hindu vote. The party won 52 of 84 seats for a magnificent vote share of 33.44 per cent. Amazingly, the 1996 Assembly election produced a hung House – with the three main contenders returning with seats identical to what they held in 1993. The BJP bagged 174 seats to the SP’s 110 and the BSP’s 67. It was as if no election was held.

Mulayam Singh and Mayawati once again blocked the BJP, though by this time they were sworn enemies. How did this happen? The SP and the BSP each grew in the same way as the BJP had in 1989. The BJP used its short term support to the state government to expand its base. The SP and the BSP similarly harnessed office to carve out distinct constituencies for themselves – from 1993 to 1996, the vote share of the SP jumped from 17.96 per cent to 21.84, and of the BSP from 11.12 per cent to 19.64 per cent.

For the saffron party, consolation came by way of its own 32.52 per cent vote share. The BJP’s vote base was almost intact, though not for long. The BJP’s thirst for power once again propelled it towards the BSP, a party inimically opposed to the BJP’s Hindutva ideology. In office Mayawati relentlessly pursued her Dalit agenda, erecting statues to Ambedkar and arresting those falling foul of The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

The BJP’s upper caste voters were not amused by their party’s capitulation before an ally who delighted in bashing them. The questions that were whispered during the previous BJP-BSP alliance grew louder: Why was the BJP allowing Mayawati to strike at its core beliefs? The BJP-BSP alliance was not just unnatural, one cut the other. Hindutva needed the Hindu vote to consolidate. Dalit and OBC politics hinged on a division of the Hindu vote.

 

The effect was not immediately felt. So convinced was the BJP of its invincibility that when in September 1997 Mayawati reneged on the power-sharing agreement, it went for the kill. Aided by Rajnath Singh’s tod-phod rajneeti, it broke the BSP and the Congress and formed a government with all the defectors accommodated in a jumbo cabinet. The audacious move eventually recoiled on the BJP.

But just prior to that, in the 1998 Lok Sabha election, the BJP scaled new heights – it won 57 seats for a vote share of 36.49 per cent. This was the BJP’s best moment. It had a government at the Centre and a government in the state. And the overconfidence began to show. Groaning under the weight of its oversized ministry, and unable to meet the unceasing demands of the defectors, the state government lurched from crisis to crisis, producing three chief minister in three years – Kalyan Singh, Ram Prakash Gupta, and Rajnath Singh himself.

By this time the damage was done. The BJP’s descent from the Himalayan heights of power and glory had begun. In 1998, the BJP had 57 seats for a vote share of 36.49 per cent in the Lok Sabha. In the 1999 Lok Sabha election, the BJP won more seats than its rivals but its seat and vote share declined to 29 seats and 27.64 per cent. Ominously, the SP was close behind with 26 seats and a vote share of 24.06 per cent. In the 2002 Assembly election, the downward trend firmed up. In the by now reduced House of 403, the BJP with only 88 seats and a vote share of 25.31 per cent, crashed to the third spot, behind the SP and the BSP.

 

The BJP ought to have introspected on the defeat. It was evident that the party’s voters felt betrayed by its cavalier attitude to their interests; worse, the ‘party with a difference’ could go to any lengths – break any party and ally with any party – just to be able to stay in power. In retrospect, the BJP’s claim to have sacrificed a government for the Hindu cause seemed hollow. The much promised ‘magnificent Ram temple’ remained a promise. In the long time the party was in power at the Centre and the state, all it had ever done was to push rath yatras and renew the call for building the temple on every election eve.

Also evident was a pattern. The core vote of a party was not easily destroyed. It stayed with the party even after a perceived betrayal. This egged on the party to become more adventurous, resulting finally and inevitably in core constituency disenchantment. Once this happened, the core constituency was rendered vulnerable to poaching – a process hastened by the expansionist ambitions of rival parties. In the early ’90s, the Congress’ Dalit-Muslim-Brahmin base was poached by the BSP, SP and the BJP respectively. The BJP added OBCs to its base upper caste vote and emerged a winner. Today the process is being imitated by the BSP and the SP – they are both no longer one caste parties, each wanting to enhance its vote share through the addition of more and more caste groups.

The BJP ought to have heeded the message. It didn’t and the result was a third alliance between the BSP and the BJP – ostensibly to break the impasse produced by the 2002 Assembly election. But the BJP’s opportunism did not stop here. With the alliance predictably souring again, the party, in September 2003, facilitated government formation by the SP – by definition the BJP’s principal enemy, its ideological opposite. The move backfired: In the 2004 Lok Sabha election, the party that only six years earlier had a landslide 57 seats, finished with 10 of 80 seats – just one seat ahead of the down and out Congress.

 

The BJP’s attempts to outgrow its Brahmin-Bania image, and to somehow, anyhow, stay on in power, had damaged its core constituency. The BJP wanted to expand fast, and saw expedient alliances as a means to achieve this. But the more it aligned with forces opposed to its ideology, the more it was shown up as a charlatan to its own voters. Worse, the party’s partner exploited the alliance for its own advancement. The greatest irony is surely the spectacular growth of the BSP during the time it aligned with the BJP. Between 1991 and 2004, the BJP’s Lok Sabha seats from UP declined from 51 of 85 seats to 10 of 80 seats. Between 1991 and 2002, its Assembly seats declined from 221 of 425 seats to 88 of 403 seats. In the same period, the BSP’s seats went up from just one to 19 in the Lok Sabha and from 12 to 98 in the Assembly. As the BJP went down, the BSP went up – and along the way the BSP overtook the BJP.

Today the BSP has ambitions that go far beyond its Dalit base. In the years since Mayawati broke up with the BJP, she has single-mindedly wooed the BJP’s upper caste vote. Her aim is simple: Rather than have power delivered to her through unstable alliances, why not expand her own base? Rather than depend on the BJP to deliver the Brahmin vote, why not reach out to the community directly?

Whatever the long-term implications of this strategy – if the BJP came to ruin because it took its voters for granted, how long before the same thing happened to Mayawati? – it appears to have made the necessary short-term impact. Mayawati is no longer anathema to upper castes, who until recently abhorred the BSP, indeed spurned the BJP because it dared to align with the BSP. Not just this, for a small section of upper castes she is a better alternative to the BJP; today Mayawati’s recall value is for the ‘good administration’ she ran, not for her Brahmin bashing.

For the BJP, which experienced a negative shift of eight percentage points each in its Brahmin and Thakur support in the 2004 Lok Sabha election (source: National Election Study 2004, Economic and Political Weekly), all this does not augur too well.

 

Of course, there is little to suggest that the upper caste attitudinal change towards the BSP is a result of a genuine change of heart. The biggest enemy of the Hindu upper caste voters is Mulayam Singh, and no prizes for guessing why: He ‘panders to Muslims’, he harbours ‘Muslim goondas’ and so forth. Earlier the BJP was the natural and ideological answer to Mulayam Singh and his ‘appeasement’ politics. Today the logic is that if anyone can take on the muscle of the SP supremo, it is Mayawati with her strong base vote and a network of committed cadre.

 

For the BJP, the way to counter this assault is through Hindutva, through hate politics of the kind that earlier polarized votes between the BJP and the SP. This is a game that admirably suits Mulayam Singh. He needs the BJP bogey to keep his Muslim votes. The October 2005 Mau riots were in fact an effort in this direction. The conflagration saw a direct confrontation between the SP-supported independent MLA, Mukhtar Ansari and the BJP MP, Yogi Adityanath. Roop Rekha Verma, former acting vice-chancellor of Lucknow University and secretary, Saajhi Duniya, studied the riots in some detail, and later coauthored a report with Nasiruddin Haider Khan. The report, ‘Communal Riot in Mau’, attributed the flare-up to the administration’s deliberate inaction: ‘Mau remained under open violence for more than 72 hours. Total lack of will on the part of the state was clearly visible.’

Significantly, the communal divide did not help the BJP. For a good section of Hindu residents of eastern UP – Gorakhpur, Allahabad and neighbouring districts – Mayawati, rather than the BJP, was the answer to the ‘Muslim communalism’ of Mulayam Singh. As Verma observed: ‘Mayawati has gained because the Hindus perceive the BJP as weak and opportunistic. However if the BJP’s prospects do improve, Mulayam will be the happiest.’

Indeed, so. Today with the Assembly election just months away, sectarian fires are once again being stoked – this time in Gorakhpur, the familiar playground of who else but Yogi Adityanath. In recent months, the BJP has played the Hindu card to the hilt. Almost any issue the party has taken up has centred on the theme of ‘Muslim appeasement’. From Mohammad Afzal, through Saddam Hussein, the Sachar report, affirmative action, infiltration, terrorism, internal security and Pakistan, the Muslim factor has determined how the party will react.

The party’s National Council session saw the return of previously taboo subjects: Ayodhya temple, Uniform Civil Code and Article 370. This was also where Kalyan Singh rediscovered his Hindutva form. Urging the delegates to create a Hindutva ‘volcano’ that would ‘burn’ and ‘kill’ Muslim appeasement ‘forever’, he said, ‘Let us not be shy of saying that all terrorists – those who attacked the Akshardham temple, Raghunath Mandir and Parliament – were Muslims.’ Further, ‘Not one Hindu gave shelter to any of these terrorists who came from Pakistan. Who do they come and stay with? Where do they find shelter?’ The answer: ‘Muslims.’

 

The BJP obviously sees its limited municipal victory as a window of opportunity to push Hindutva, and regain its alienated Hindu vote. In the party’s calculation, Mayawati has peaked too early, and the entry of the V.P. Singh-led Jan Morcha can only damage Mulayam Singh. With the Congress nearly comatose, who can gain but the BJP? Maybe the BJP is right. An aggressive, hate-spewing BJP may succeed in luring back the aggrieved upper caste voter. But there is an equal chance that the strategy will be seen as a cynical experiment in vote bank politics.

As Gorakhpur burnt, a popular Hindi news channel ran the following viewer comment on its ticker: ‘We must understand that what is happening in Gorakhpur is a pre-meditated political game. We must save ourselves from these leaders.’