By-election results should be wake–up call to Narendra Modi

In his Presidential address to the national council of the BJP, on August 9, Amit Shah had ascribed his party’s resounding victory in the Lok Sabha elections to the people’s belief that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “the most credible national leader who alone is capable of translating into reality the nation’s mounting aspirations for development”. “It is a mandate”, he went on to say, “for an all-round transformation".

If there is any message for the party in the vote count in 32 by-elections that is going on even as I write, it is that this mandate is in imminent danger of being withdrawn. As of noon on Tuesday September 16, the BJP had lost three out of the four by-elections in Rajasthan and was headed to lose eight out of 11 in Uttar Pradesh. Only in Gujarat was the party holding its own. What is more the BJP had polled fewer votes in 13 out of the 32 seats than it had in these assembly segments in the Lok Sabha elections. In the three crucial states that it considers its homeland, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, it polled fewer votes than in May, in 13 out of the 24 seats 
that it contested.

These results confirm the trend revealed by the 10 by-elections in Bihar last month, in which the BJP — LJP alliance's vote share fell from 45.3% in the corresponding assembly segments of the Lok Sabha polls to 37.3%, a drop of eight percentage points. In marked contrast, the combined vote share of the RJD, JD(U) and Congress increased in 8 out of the assembly constituencies. 

In all, the vote share of the ‘Rainbow Alliance’ had risen from 40.3% in April-May to 44.9% in the by-elections. From leading these parties
 by 5 points in May, BJP-LJP alliance is now trailing it by 7.6 percentage  points. Speaking on a TV talk show yesterday morning, the BJP campaign manager for UP, Laxmikant Bajpai, said that four months was too soon to judge a government. A few hours later another BJP spokesman RP Rudy said that the poll results reflected local factors, and could not be considered a national mandate. Both would have been right  had conditions in India been normal. But they aren’t normal: India’s economy has been in a tailspin for almost four years; its GDP is growing at half the rate it was five years ago; its industrial production has been stagnant for four years, and job growth paralysed. That was why, in an unprecedented burst of anger and disillusionment, the voters destroyed the Congress party. Modi had made a promise to them that they believed, so they voted for him. But in the last four months his government has not done  a single thing to redeem that promise. Instead it has refurbished the Congress’ anti-poverty programmes and continued with the macro-economic  policies that brought the Congress to disaster. 

To hide its lack of initiatives, the government clutched at straws to show that the economy has ‘turned the corner’. Share prices, it claimed on Modi’s 100th day in office,  had risen by 27%; industrial growth touched 3.9% in April to June, and the quarterly GDP data had shown a rise in growth from 4.7 to 5.7%. 

But the by-election results show that ordinary people have not been impressed. There has been no pickup in investment, no pickup in sales, and no improvement in job prospects. And they also understand something else that the BJP would have much preferred to have kept hidden: that it has  returned to Muslim-baiting and communal polarisation because it does not know how to govern. 

Nothing highlights this better than the BJP’s ‘love jihad’ campaign. At its root is a sordid but far from unusual story of entrapment of an innocent girl who was a local celebrity in Ranchi, by a pimp who almost certainly wanted to supply her to powerful local politicians for vast sums of money. The religious identity of the pimp is immaterial to the narrative because his sole objective was to incarcerate the girl and prevent her from going back to the family. 

The girl’s accusation required a straightforward criminal investigation but the BJP in UP chose to make it the centerpiece of its campaign in an election for a paltry 11 assembly seats because it wished to know whether arousing this most atavistic of fears and hate would enable it to consolidate the normally fractured Hindu vote behind it in the many state assembly elections that lie ahead. Hence the extraordinarily inflammatory speeches of the BJP’s star campaigner Yogi Adityanath who has spared no effort to depict Muslims as being the aggressors in communal riots, and has suggested that if one Hindu girl is converted to Islam, Hindus should try to convert a hundred Muslim girls in return. Even Bajpai has not been above making similar remarks and according to three videos in the UP police’s possession the BJP president Amit Shah has not hesitated to make such speeches either. 
The sharp rap that the electorate has given to the BJP, not only in UP and Bihar, but less forcefully in Rajasthan as well, shows that attempts to polarise communities on communal lines will not work. People voted for  Modi because they want a secure future. The crash of the economy robbed them of this dream when it seemed within their grasp. But an atmosphere pregnant with violence will do so even more effectively.

The UP, Bihar and Rajasthan bye elections are a wake–up call to Modi. He needs to crush the far right of the Sangh Parivar as Atal Bihari Vajpayee did and concentrate on reviving the economy. The first, and indeed only requirement for this is to bring down interest rates sharply. His first task must be to remove all obstacles that stand in the way of his doing so.

The writer is a political commentator