The Bharatiya Janata Party won 2014. Or, to put it more accurately, Narendra Modi won 2014. Those two words, Narendra Modi, have always meant many different things to different people and yet that fact remains the same: no matter how you look at it, Modi won the year.
He is prime minister. His party has an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. The only other serious national contender, the Congress, is still wandering around in the wilderness after the shellacking it received in the national elections. The BJP has picked off state after state following the national elections, with campaigns built entirely around Modi’s name. Everyone else on the political stage defines themselves in relation to the BJP and to Modi. Primus inter pares doesn’t not apply here.
How does that play out in 2015? The aftermath of the General Elections in 2014 at least had the intrigue of further elections in fairly important states, and almost at regular intervals. Soon after the Lok Sabha polls came the by-polls in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, which gave some succour to the anti-Modi forces. But this was followed up by BJP sweeps of Haryana and Maharashtra and later a saffron win in Jharkhand and a momentous second-place finish in Jammu and Kashmir.
In contrast, 2015 has only two states going to the polls: Delhi and Bihar. Both of those are likely to see the BJP succeed, even if the Aam Aadmi Party, in the capital, and the Janata Parivar in Bihar manage to make a dent in their margins. After those two states, the most interesting electoral battle happens to be municipal and local council elections in Kerala ‒ not exactly stuff that excites the national pundits, even though it will be an interesting battle.
Where, then, will all the political intrigue come from?
It’s not going to come from the Congress, unless it’s a reference to the party finding it even harder to handle 2014’s terrible results. The party has done badly at every election over the year, coming fourth-place in the last two, and is unlikely to end in even second-place in either Delhi or Bihar.
It’s not going to come from the Left, which is still debating decisions about their approach that were made in the 1970s and 1980s. The Left might be ideally placed to form the opposition to the BJP, but their entire lack of reinvention has made them seem even more disconnected from the people than the Congress.
It’s not going to come from civil society, which, more than being under attack from the government, has lost a lots of currency on the ground.
It’s unlikely to come from the Aam Aadmi Party, even if it posts modest gains in Delhi, because the BJP has effectively taken over all of the AAP hallmarks, down to literally appropriating the jhadoo symbol.
It’s also unlikely to come from the still nascent Janata Parivar. The various factions might have realised that their back is against the wall, but that doesn’t mean egos, from Mulayam Singh Yadav to Nitish Kumar to Lalu Prasad Yadav, will suddenly disappear.
So where will the politics actually happen then?
To take a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical playbook, they will come from the 3Ps:
Parliament: Where those standing in the BJP’s way in the Rajya Sabha have shown that they can use stalling tactics without earning the ire of a public that is used to legislators generally yelling and doing little else anyway.
Primetime: Television will continue to find something to outrage about, and it will push ministers and partymen to respond, even if Modi has asked them to remain inconspicuous.
Parivar: Not the Janata Parivar formulation that is setting up in Bihar and possibly across the Hindi belt. Instead, here it is the Sangh Parivar, which forms the backbone of the cadre-based BJP, that will continue to flex its Hindutva muscles and “divert” attention from Modi’s development agenda.
In each of these three cases, the potential for intrigue lies almost entirely in the BJP’s hands, or at least with the Parivar. It wasn’t until Ghar Wapsi and Nathuram Godse became national topics of discussion that the Opposition had something to jump on in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP has also been very savvy at dealing with television ‒ Swacch Bharat, for example, has been a perfect example of a made-for-TV event with little actual effort put in by the government — and so any primetime trouble will only happen if this run of clever media management comes to an end.
So the real question for 2015 is, to some extent, a follow-up to the questions that were asked of the BJP in 2013 and 2014: what does the party stand for? And who does the party stand with? It’s too easy to build a binary between the RSS’ Hindutva cause and Modi’s development. Yet that is how the narrative will play out, and Modi, who clearly isn’t opposed to Hindutva, will not object to this dichotomy.
It's easier to say that "fringe elements" are attempting to divert issues, but the matter remains, whether the BJP wants to go down the Hindutva road ‒ which helped it come to power and will be needed to remain in power ‒ or whether it will manage to control the narrative the way it did in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls.
He is prime minister. His party has an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha. The only other serious national contender, the Congress, is still wandering around in the wilderness after the shellacking it received in the national elections. The BJP has picked off state after state following the national elections, with campaigns built entirely around Modi’s name. Everyone else on the political stage defines themselves in relation to the BJP and to Modi. Primus inter pares doesn’t not apply here.
How does that play out in 2015? The aftermath of the General Elections in 2014 at least had the intrigue of further elections in fairly important states, and almost at regular intervals. Soon after the Lok Sabha polls came the by-polls in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, which gave some succour to the anti-Modi forces. But this was followed up by BJP sweeps of Haryana and Maharashtra and later a saffron win in Jharkhand and a momentous second-place finish in Jammu and Kashmir.
In contrast, 2015 has only two states going to the polls: Delhi and Bihar. Both of those are likely to see the BJP succeed, even if the Aam Aadmi Party, in the capital, and the Janata Parivar in Bihar manage to make a dent in their margins. After those two states, the most interesting electoral battle happens to be municipal and local council elections in Kerala ‒ not exactly stuff that excites the national pundits, even though it will be an interesting battle.
Where, then, will all the political intrigue come from?
It’s not going to come from the Congress, unless it’s a reference to the party finding it even harder to handle 2014’s terrible results. The party has done badly at every election over the year, coming fourth-place in the last two, and is unlikely to end in even second-place in either Delhi or Bihar.
It’s not going to come from the Left, which is still debating decisions about their approach that were made in the 1970s and 1980s. The Left might be ideally placed to form the opposition to the BJP, but their entire lack of reinvention has made them seem even more disconnected from the people than the Congress.
It’s not going to come from civil society, which, more than being under attack from the government, has lost a lots of currency on the ground.
It’s unlikely to come from the Aam Aadmi Party, even if it posts modest gains in Delhi, because the BJP has effectively taken over all of the AAP hallmarks, down to literally appropriating the jhadoo symbol.
It’s also unlikely to come from the still nascent Janata Parivar. The various factions might have realised that their back is against the wall, but that doesn’t mean egos, from Mulayam Singh Yadav to Nitish Kumar to Lalu Prasad Yadav, will suddenly disappear.
So where will the politics actually happen then?
To take a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical playbook, they will come from the 3Ps:
Parliament: Where those standing in the BJP’s way in the Rajya Sabha have shown that they can use stalling tactics without earning the ire of a public that is used to legislators generally yelling and doing little else anyway.
Primetime: Television will continue to find something to outrage about, and it will push ministers and partymen to respond, even if Modi has asked them to remain inconspicuous.
Parivar: Not the Janata Parivar formulation that is setting up in Bihar and possibly across the Hindi belt. Instead, here it is the Sangh Parivar, which forms the backbone of the cadre-based BJP, that will continue to flex its Hindutva muscles and “divert” attention from Modi’s development agenda.
In each of these three cases, the potential for intrigue lies almost entirely in the BJP’s hands, or at least with the Parivar. It wasn’t until Ghar Wapsi and Nathuram Godse became national topics of discussion that the Opposition had something to jump on in the Rajya Sabha. The BJP has also been very savvy at dealing with television ‒ Swacch Bharat, for example, has been a perfect example of a made-for-TV event with little actual effort put in by the government — and so any primetime trouble will only happen if this run of clever media management comes to an end.
So the real question for 2015 is, to some extent, a follow-up to the questions that were asked of the BJP in 2013 and 2014: what does the party stand for? And who does the party stand with? It’s too easy to build a binary between the RSS’ Hindutva cause and Modi’s development. Yet that is how the narrative will play out, and Modi, who clearly isn’t opposed to Hindutva, will not object to this dichotomy.
It's easier to say that "fringe elements" are attempting to divert issues, but the matter remains, whether the BJP wants to go down the Hindutva road ‒ which helped it come to power and will be needed to remain in power ‒ or whether it will manage to control the narrative the way it did in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls.
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