Narendra Modi towers over rivals, Congress clings on: What the 2017 poll results mean for India

The results of five state Assembly elections on Saturday highlights three important political trends. To begin with, it has become clear that Prime Minister Narendra Modi towers over all his political rivals and India could well be entering into an era of Bharatiya Janata Party dominance. The only possible way the Opposition can vanquish the BJP is to forge an alliance of the kind it stitched together in Bihar, but that process is both cumbersome and messy.

Two, the Congress survives – but only just. By winning Punjab, the Congress has ensured it has not lost its status of being the first among equals in the Opposition. It will continue to front an alternative to the alliance that the BJP leads.

Three, the Aam Aadmi Party’s national ambitions have been temporarily undermined. The party had attempted to create a national narrative for itself in the hope of springing a surprise in Punjab. That narrative has been jeopardised, suggesting limits to a new style of politics overcoming the traditional process. It also throws a question mark over whether AAP will contest the Gujarat Assembly elections later this year, and whether it can win the municipal polls in Delhi, due in April. Already in a tussle with the Central government, AAP will certainly be more vulnerable to onslaughts.

Modi’s dominance

Before these five states went to the polls, they were projected as a test of Modi’s popularity. In such a situation, many other leaders in his place would have shied away from raising their personal stakes in the contest. But not Modi, who demonstrated warrior-like qualities, campaigning in Varanasi for three days towards the end of the election. The BJP’s victory is certainly his, and his party is dependent on him for its electoral glory.

It implies Modi will not only loom large over India but also over the BJP. Modi invests heavily in state elections because the degree to which his authority remains unchallenged depends on the victories he can notch up for his party. He believes in centralising power to himself. As long as he keeps scoring victories for the BJP, there will not be any murmurs of protests from inside the party nor pressure on him to share power with others.

India’s political narrative for the next two and a half years will be built around the polarising personality of Modi. At one level, the polarisation will be built around the ideas of nationalism, security and Hindutva – all three seamlessly stitched together under Modi’s leadership. Any kind of polarisation was attempted through the November 8 demonetisation announcement, which sought to pit the poor against the rich, the honest citizen against the corrupt one.

Political pundits will debate interminably about whether demonetisation or the communal polarisation that Modi and BJP president Amit Shah resorted to in the third leg of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections explains the party’s overwhelming success in the state. It could very well be argued that because the BJP sensed the Muslims votes in west Uttar Pradesh were being split between the Congress-Samajwadi Party alliance and the Bahujan Samaj Party, it waited until the election bandwagon moved eastward to impart a communal twist to the polls.

Shifting Right

Apart from these debates, it is sure that those who have been battling Hindutva notions of nationalism, patriotism and culture will not have any respite from the Modi government. They will find the political mainstream become increasingly sceptical of those who argue against conservative views and prick conservative Hindu sentiment. From this perspective, Indian politics is likely to lurch to the Right.

But this lurch to the Right will not be confined to the socio-cultural realm. This lurch will be pronounced in the economic sphere as well. Demonetisation hurt the poor severely. Even though the precise impact of it will be known in the months to come, the March 11 results emphasise the importance of messaging. As long as people are convinced of the good intentions of the policy, they will be forgiving of the hardships inflicted on them by this episode of economic adventurism.

Yet the heavier Modi looms over Indian politics, the more Opposition parties will feel compelled to unite in order to survive. This is what prompted Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav to align in Bihar. And this might prompt both Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati to embrace each other, decimated as both have been.

For all the daring he demonstrated in rebelling against his family elders and building a cross-caste appeal, Akhilesh Yadav will now come under pressure because of the abysmal performance of the Samajwadi Party. Might he not think of returning to the older, supposedly surer way of his father? Might he not reach out to Mayawati?

Mayawati’s future

Mayawati and her Bahujan Samaj Party, it’s clear, face a grim future, and the resurgent BJP will closely scrutinise her party’s collection of funds. Already, media stories have spoken of the money her brother deposited in bank accounts after demonetisation. The deplorable performance of the Bahujan Samaj Party is terrible news for the Dalit movement. She needs to reinvent herself and her party.

But she could also decide to return to the brand of politics that was symbolised by her mentor Kanshi Ram’s slogan of “tilak, tarazu aur talwar, maro joote unko chaar” – Brahmins, Banias and Rajputs, hit them with shoes. She could also think of bringing back lower Other Backward Class leaders who have deserted the Bahujan Samaj Party or were chased out. On the other hand, Modi will hope that his assiduous wooing of Dalits will convince them to desert the Bahujan Samaj Party and come to him.

The Muslim paranoia of the BJP will only grow. It is only to be expected that the Hindutva hardliners will become more brazen in their assertion, not least in continuing with their divisive projects such as cow vigilantism. This will make Muslims more insecure, perceiving, rightly or wrongly, the BJP’s victory as an outcome of communally divided state. As in the Lok Sabha in 2014, Muslim representation in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly will witness a sharp dip.

Lessons for the Congress

The takeaway for the Congress is its resounding success in Punjab. It is of great significance that it has won a triangular contest – and beat back the Aam Aadmi Party’s challenge. Since 2004, the Congress has pursued a strategy of making alliances in states in which contests are not bipolar. In states where the contest is genuinely triangular, the Congress, over time, has been relegated to third or fourth position. The Aam Aadmi Party had hoped that by turning the 2017 Punjab contest triangular.

In winning Punjab, the Congress, for a change, has won a genuinely triangular contest. More significantly, AAP is unlikely to become a headache for the Congress campaign in Gujarat, where the Assembly elections will be held later this year. As such, Gujarat is in a social turmoil – the powerful caste of Patel is in ferment, as are Dalits. Add to this the disaffection in rural Gujarat, where the Congress won more constituencies than the BJP in 2012.

AAP had hoped to capitalise on this affection, calculating that it would sweep to power in Punjab. From Gujarat, AAP had planned to hop into Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Some of its leaders had spoken privately of testing the political waters of Karnataka. Thus, an AAP victory in Punjab, or even a hung Assembly there, could have pushed the Congress into triangular contests in several states whose polity is bipolar.

That possibility has now ebbed. Rahul Gandhi and the Congress can breathe easy in Gujarat. But this isn’t to say that it will be easy for them to overpower Modi in his lair, not after he led his party to a sweep in Uttar Pradesh. Punjab should also convince Gandhi about the virtue of finding a strong state leader to lead election campaigns and giving him or her a relatively free hand in organising the campaign

AAP’s journey

As a debutant, AAP’s showing in Punjab would have ordinarily got a fair rating. But its performance is far below its own expectations and the media’s predictions. It desperately needed the victory in Punjab to sustain the national narrative it has built around itself. Its second rank, therefore, will not provide it comfort. And though it is hard to see AAP rescind its decision of contesting the Gujarat elections, its chances of creating a ripple there have plummeted.

Perhaps AAP’s outing in Punjab also testifies to the limits of a strategy that relies on intensive and prolonged campaigning, in the hope of overcoming the paucity of resources. Likewise, it is perhaps extremely difficult to persuade longtime voters of traditional parties to switch their allegiance over one election in states where the salience of class politics isn’t high.

No analysis of these five Assembly elections can be complete without cautioning against using them as the basis to make predictions about the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. For instance, the National Democratic Alliance under AB Vajpayee brought forward the Lok Sabha elections in 2004 in the hope of taking advantage of his party sweeping into power in three states – Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan – in the December 2003 Assembly elections. However, the BJP was voted out.

But then, it can be argued that Modi is no Vajpayee, nor is the BJP today what it was in 2004. Modi’s popularity and domination of the popular consciousness matches that of Indira Gandhi. At her peak, the Opposition’s only hope of defeating the ruling party and her was to unite and ensure that the vote would not be split. It is as true of Modi and the BJP today.