#dnaEdit: BJP’s bypoll check

Bharatiya Janata Party’s euphoria of May when it had won 73 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh has been diffused somewhat with the setback in the by-elections to 11 assembly seats, almost all of them in the communally tense western part of the state. The Samajwadi Party (SP), which is in power in the state has staged a comeback by winning eight seats. The BJP had to content itself with three. Even in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had played the mascot for the party across the northern and western states, the BJP won six of the nine seats, but it was not a sweep that it had expected because the party had won all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state in summer. The BJP got a beating in Rajasthan, where it is the ruling party, winning only one out of five with the Congress getting the rest. BJP spokespersons are trotting out the predictable excuse that these should not be seen as a comment on the 100 days plus old government of Modi. It is the BJP’s fault — that the results are being seen as judgment on its hero because had the bypolls gone the party’s way, then the Modi courtiers would have imputed the success to the charisma of their hero. 

Bypolls are bypolls and the results almost always go against the ruling party. The result in UP should have gone against the SP. Instead it has gone against the BJP. The party will have to consider whether its strategy of polarising the electorate on the Hindu-Muslim lines, which brought such a rich dividend in the Lok Sabha elections, had backfired this time. The intemperate comments by BJP leaders Yogi Adityanath, member of Lok Sabha from Gorakhpur, who led the campaign, and those of Sakshi Maharaj, harping on the love jihad issue, which was a barely concealed assault on the Muslim community, seemed to have left the voters cold. It would be inaccurate to interpret the result in UP as a Muslim veto against the majoritarian politics. The hard fact seems to be that the intermediate castes, and UP is the cockpit of caste politics in the country, who seemed to have voted for the BJP in the parliamentary elections, have gone in favour of SP. It will be a matter of curiosity about Dalit votes because the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) did not contest in these bypolls.

It is unwise to make sweeping inferences from the results of these bypolls. It is not exactly a rebuff to the BJP and an endorsement of SP in UP. What seems apparent is that politicians should not take the voters for granted and that is indeed the magic of democracy. Parties and leaders have to be on their feet, and they should be able to sense the mood of the people from every poll, big and small. The lesson for the BJP from the by-elections, especially in UP, Rajasthan and Gujarat, where the party is in a dominant position, is quite clear. It cannot harp on developmental rhetoric and play the communal card simultaneously. Of course, the BJP will not be able to give up its own version of Hindu-Muslim politics in the aftermath of a bypoll setback. Its view of the minority Muslims is part of its ideological texture. The most that party strategists led by president Amit Shah would do is recalibrate the developmental agenda on the one hand and majoritarian rhetoric on the other.