Opinion Wilting lotus

The drubbing in the by-elections should serve as a wake-up call for the BJP. Though the Congress managed to wrest seats from it in Rajasthan and Gujarat, the big story of the by-elections is UP. Riding high after its near-sweep of Lok Sabha seats in the state in the 2014 general election, the BJP leadership expected to do well in all 11 seats in UP that went to polls. Instead, the Samajwadi Party, which has been facing flak for running an ineffective government, won eight seats, including Rohaniya, which is part of the Varanasi parliamentary constituency, represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Local factors influence by-elections and the SP may have been helped by the BSP’s absence from the fray. Consolidation of opposition votes, unlike in the Lok Sabha election, which featured multi-cornered contests, may have led to the BJP’s poor performance. But more than all these, the results may be an indictment of the party MPs’ recent communal campaigns.

Perhaps UP’s BJP leaders misread the general election result. A consolidation of Hindu votes helped the party overcome caste and class divides and win 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state. But the UP voter didn’t go to the polling booth to keep the communal pot boiling: she voted BJP because its prime ministerial candidate advocated governance. Voters in UP — and elsewhere — were charmed by Modi’s promise to bring down the prices of essentials and create jobs; he certainly didn’t speak of “love jihad”. But the BJP campaign led by Gorakhpur MP Adityanath focused on whipping up communal hatred. Constant social tension and the atmosphere of fear have crippled daily life, including economic activities, in the state. The losses, it is to be hoped, will make the BJP realise the limits of the Hindus-under-siege propaganda. The party must go back to the drawing board and rethink the strategy of depending on hate agendas to fight elections.

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The results from Rajasthan and Gujarat — states that the party had swept in the general election in May — must also worry the BJP. The Congress has done well and won six of the 13 seats that went to polls after BJP MLAs quit to fight parliamentary elections, as it did in the recent by-elections in Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Clearly, the grand old party, though rudderless at the Centre, is in the reckoning in the states. And the BJP, which had come to power promising solutions for all of India’s ills, has embarrassed itself by pursuing communal politics along with the development agenda.