Opinion His Centre, his state

Modi’s political strategy for the states is daring. For now, his opposition also makes it look irresistible.

October 20, 2014 12:08 AM IST First published on: Oct 20, 2014 at 12:08 AM IST

The “Modi wave” that had announced a reorganisation of the political centre in the Lok Sabha polls in May is now pushing against states’ shores. At the Centre, it brought decisive single-party control for the first time in three decades. In the process, it seemed to stall and even reverse the phenomenon of the regionalisation of the Centre that had strengthened in the decade of the 1990s, after the end of Congress dominance and the onset of coalitions. Now, by taking Haryana and Maharashtra in the manner that it has — by boldly shrugging off allies and going it alone in states where it has only ever been the junior partner, never the dominant force — the Modi-led BJP has signalled a new form of federal politics. At the centre of this new politics is the same package of promise and persuasion that had won the BJP the Lok Sabha polls, in which Narendra Modi was successfully projected as the symbol of hope and change from a discredited Congress model of politics and governance.

But it also involves the reshaping of the pact between the Centre and the state by the national party. In both Haryana and Maharashtra, the BJP did not project its state leadership, the spotlight remained only on Modi. And throughout his campaign, while cleverly playing upon local symbols and issues, Modi mainly sought to reach out to the state by inviting it to be part of his national project at the Centre. In other words, after a de-regionalisation of the Centre, the Modi-led BJP could well be attempting a renewed centralisation of state politics.

It is still too early to say whether this change will endure at the Centre and in the states. Modi’s experiment may well turn out to be bold and shortlived. Yet, it is possible to say two things. One, in the breadth of its ambition and in its risk-taking, the Modi-led BJP has already scored.

And two, that it has shown up the near-absolute lack of ideas and gumption in its opposition. By all accounts, the Congress seems incapable of even remaining in the political argument, much less rising to Modi’s challenge. In both Haryana and Maharashtra, states regarded as its bastions, it has been trounced by the BJP and overtaken by the regional party.

The regional parties, on the other hand, give the appearance of waiting and hoping that the BJP will trip on its own overreach. When they have seized the initiative, as in the Bihar bypolls recently, it has only been to undertake an exercise in political arithmetic that is vulnerable to being defeated by its own

unadorned cynicism. For now, therefore, despite the multiple complexities in a diverse polity, the “Modi wave” would seem to have a
strikingly untrammelled flow.