Lesson from Kairana: How Voltaire can help PM Modi take on united Opposition in 2019’s Game of Thrones

If Game of Thrones is your poison and you are no Jon Snow, then you are likely to find a curious similarity between Westeros and post-2014 India. 

Just like Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Tyrion Lannister and every other major character rendezvoused at King’s Landing to warn Queen Cersei about the impending arrival of the Night Walkers and talk about a grand front of the living to counter the dead, the BJP has every major political party banding together to survive.

For the first time in Indian politics, a non-Congress party is setting the agenda which has forced every party worth its salt to re-evaluate their ideologies. They claim it's a 'secular' front, but it's really more about survival. 

Communists, communists-who-sided-with-China, socialists, socialists-who-claim-to-be-secular, regional satraps trying to remain relevant, leaders who have conquered their own lands and are eyeing the top prize, and what’s left of the Congress came together to celebrate in Bengaluru. The JD(S) and Congress managed to hold off the BJP in Karnataka, and all talk was of a united Opposition taking on BJP.

The first proper test of Opposition unity was Kairana where the RLD candidate, a former SP MP (whose son is an SP MLA) whirred home with more than 40,000 votes. She was backed by BSP, SP and Congress.  It was a fascinating triumph of social engineering, as former CM Akhilesh Yadav pointed out.

In the 2018 by-poll, BJP was always in for a tough battle given the caste matrix at play in Kairana. The Lok Sabha seat has 16 lakh voters of which 5.5 lakh are Muslims. They also have 1.5 lakhs Jats and 2.5 lakh Dalits, most of them Jatavs, who unerringly vote for Mayawati’s BSP.

Other communities are the Kashyap (2 lakh), Gujjar (1.4 lakh) and Saini (1.2 lakh), along with some Brahmins, Rajputs and Banias who tend to back the BJP.

To understand the significance of BJP’s challenge we’ve to understand that it was never a traditionally strong BJP seat, like Gorakhpur. BJP have only won twice in Kairana, in 1998 and 2014.

 The RLD have won there twice, before BSP emerged victorious in 2010.

The 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots saw the RLD voter-base of Jats and Muslims splinter. Anger against the Akhilesh government, along with the Kairana ‘exodus’ story saw the Jat vote go to BJP while the Muslim votes are likely to have transferred to BSP. 

This saw Hukum Singh win with 50% of the vote-share in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, a remarkable feat given that 33% voters are Muslim.

The Kairana Lok Sabha constituency consist of five Assembly seats – Nakur, Gangoh, Kairana, Thana Bhawan and Shamli. The BJP romped home in all of them in the 2017 Assembly elections except Kairana where Tabassum Hasan’s son Nahid is an MLA from SP.

Despite, the odds stacked against them, BJP lost but that needn't have been the case.

Ganna vs Jinnah

In quite an evocative fight, RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary, the latest political scion on the block, pitched it as a battle between ganna and Jinnah. He was referring to the recent hullabaloo at Aligarh Muslim University over the presence of Pakistan founder and proponent of two-nation theory Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s picture.

The sugarcane issue is the most burning one in this part of Western UP. As this report on India Today points out, the Adityanath government has failed to keep its promise of paying farmers within 14 days of selling their sugarcane to factories. The state’s sugar mills owe Rs 12,000 crore to farmers, and the six sugar mills in Kairana owe Rs 1000 crore.

If the BJP had managed to woo the sugarcane farmers, many of whom are Jats, they could've have still gotten home.

The BJP fared terribly in the two assembly segments represented by UP cabinet ministers. Suresh Rana, infamous for salty utterances about the Kairana ‘exodus’ and MoS Cane Development and Sugar Mills, saw the party get 16,000 less votes than the RLD candidate.  Nakur, another assembly constituency of minister Dr Dharam Singh Saini also conceded by a huge margin.

The RLD will be celebrating the re-emergence of Kisan politics and a post-2013 Muzaffarnagar riots scenario where their core voters – Jats and Muslims – aren’t split.

Of course, the Opposition will also realise how hard it is to replicate Kairana’s unique variables in other parts of the country. Kairana saw voters of four different parties in play - BSP, RLD, SP and Congress. It also had a huge percentage of Muslim voters, naturally aligned to vote against BJP.  Such condition will be impossible to replicate against BJP in most parts of the country, where in many places it’s a direct shootout between the saffron party and Congress.

Also, the BJP in recent times have done badly in by-polls but in general or assembly elections managed to generate a Modi wave which sweeps them quite close to home. The PM showed first-hand what he can do as he managed to help BJP hold on to Gujarat despite massive anti-incumbency and huge anti-establishment movements. He almost managed a win in Karnataka, despite the language barrier.

Lessons for BJP from Kairana

On the other hand, there are important takeaways for BJP, who will realise that PM Modi’s unparalleled skill of wooing undecided voters late in the day won’t always take them home. They will have to work hard to get their voters to go out and vote with Kairana only recording 55% votes. In 2014, it was 73.08% and this gap appears to have cost BJP dearly.

In extremely narrow, overly simplistic terms, the BJP could’ve still won if the Jat vote hadn’t gone back to RLD. Sugarcane farmers chose karm over dharm, choosing to vote as sugarcane farmer over their religion.

Which brings us to what Voltaire, 17th century French philosopher who is often mistakenly quoted. 

Voltaire never said ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it', that was one his biographers, but he did write an exceeding amazing literary masterpiece called Candide or The Optimist which has a Forrest Gumpish protagonist whose mishaps across the world form the major part of the book.

In the end, the protagonist discards all epistemological philosophical outlooks to instead focus on a utilitarian one. He comes to the conclusion, ‘we must cultivate our garden’ or make the best of what you have after listening to a farmer who rejects a philosopher’s mutterings with the phrase: “That’s all well said, but I must now tend to my garden.”

The adage ‘cultivate your garden’ boils down to what the MBA-marketing like to call ‘WIIFM’ or what’s in in it for me?

For the average voter, all the Hindutva issues that the vocal minority of BJP supporters drone on about, online or offline, including Right to Education, Ram Temple and Article 370, are meaningless. 

Those that care about such things, despite their commiserations, will vote for BJP anyway. It’s not like they have any other option when the only non-BJP party still spouting Hindutva is the Shiv Sena, whose fate at this moment appear more indecisive than Schrodinger’s Cat.

If Hindutva was the sole-driving agenda, then the BJP would’ve won comfortably in 2004 and LK Advani would’ve been the PM instead of sulking in the Magdarshak Mandal.  That’s not to say that Hindutva doesn’t matter, and it probably does for a core vote base.

However, for a significantly more number of people, it’s not an ideology they will vote for but simple economics.  As Bill Clinton's campaign strategist James Carville once famously said, "It is the economy stupid.”

The working and the middle class will vote for those who they think will give them a better shot at life or in other words, those that they think will 'help them cultivate their garden'. And that’s PM Modi’s challenge.

In 2014, he convinced a lot of people that he was the best bet.  In 2019, he will have to do it all over again, and send out the message that we are better off with him than a motley group of politicians coming together under a flag which reads ‘secularism’, but actually stands for survival.

It appears that the Messrs Modi and Shah are aware of this with the advertorial focus on a host of pro-poor schemes like the Mudra Bank Yojna, Jan Dhan Yojna, the rural electrification project, Swacch Bharat, Ayushman Bharat to name a few. It hopes to demonstrate its reforms credentials by implementing GST, IBC among others.

Not all of Modi’s ideas have been quantified successes, some like demonetization have been downright disasters, but Modi has to convince voters across the country, that he is still the best captain to steer the ship. Even if 'Sahi Vikaas' didn't happen, he had 'Saaf Niyat'. That he tried his best, if only for a losing cause. It may still be enough to propel him over the finish line. 

To borrow a phrase from Littlefinger, ‘Chaos isn’t a pit, chaos is a ladder.’ And this chaos provides the BJP a ladder to come back to power in 2019.