#dnaEdit: The BJP poll machine

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah is in the mould of a captain of a cricket team, whose sole aim is to fight all the action with utmost dedication and fervour, and to win as many elections as possible. Even if the party has to taste defeat as it did in the Delhi and Bihar assembly elections, it does not slip into a depression. Rather it focuses on the next election. Even as the BJP is busy fighting the assembly elections in Assam, West Bengal. Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala, and excepting in Assam there is no realistic chance of the party scoring a big win, Shah showed that his eyes are already fixed on the assembly elections due in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka. He has announced the appointment of the state party leaders. They have been given about a year’s team to prepare the party for the next round of big battles.

There has been considerable analysis of the men chosen to lead the state party units, about their caste background and their commitment to the party’s core ideology of Hindutva. The decision to bring back BS Yeddyurappa to head the Karnataka unit is indeed raising eye-brows because of the corruption controversy that surrounded the influential and doughty Lingayat leader. Despite its anti-corruption rhetoric and insistence on the clean image of its leaders, the party turned to Yeddyurappa for pragmatic reasons. He is the man who is capable of delivering victory for the BJP in Karnataka. The BJP is as opportunistic as any other party in the country, with its eyes firmly set on who is a winnable leader.

More than Karnataka, the BJP considers Uttar Pradesh as the big catch as it were. Shah, who was in charge of the state during the Lok Sabha election and who has engineered an incredible tally of 73 out of the 80 seats, wants to transfer the Lok Sabha vote that the party had gathered to the assembly. If the Lok Sabha result is to be extrapolated to the assembly contest, then the BJP should be winning a massive three-fourths majority in the most populous state in the country. But the arithmetic would not be so straightforward and simple. This was seen in Delhi and Bihar, where the BJP scored impressive victories in the parliamentary elections, but it could not win in the assembly  contest. 

The choice of Keshav Prasad Maurya as the BJP chief in UP is a clear attempt to woo the substantial Dalit votes in the state. It seems a weak wager because it is a well-known fact that Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati commands the loyalty of the majority of Dalits in UP even when the party does not win a majority of seats. Of late, Shah and Narendra Modi have been making frantic attempts appropriate the image of Dalit icon, Babasaheb BR Ambedkar. It is a strategy that may not have the desired electoral fallout in the UP assembly elections. But there is no doubt that the BJP is aggressively attempting to make inroads into the Dalit vote across the country, and even if projecting Maurya as BJP’s UP chief may not pay dividend, the party will continue with its larger strategy of expanding its voter base.

The BJP has been trying for nearly a quarter century to shed its image of being an upper caste Hindu party. It has successfully projected Other Backward Class (caste) leaders Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati, Vinay Katiyar and the successful Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. It has also been successful in building a base among the Scheduled Tribes constituency in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It is now attempting to attain a toe-hold in the elusive Dalit constituency.