BJP forfeits its trump card; no longer `party with a difference’

There are three factors relating to the BJP’s rule in Delhi that will weigh heavily against them this time:
One, the string of crises that plagued Delhi in the run-up to the polls — the near-anarchic price spiral, the mustard oil-dropsy scare, the chronic power-water shortage.

Two, equally important, the perceived insensitivity of the ruling party to public anger on these counts — the fact that its responses to crises were invariably marked more by conspiracy theories than effective control measures.

Three, the all-too-visible cracks in the facade of discipline and unity the BJP bandies about. The last-minute change at the top, and the spectre of unhappy leaders — Mandan Lal Khurana, Sahib Singh Verma, Rajendra Gupta — which threatens to fracture the broad social base it cobbled up last time and spawn re-runs of the Vaghela episode.

All these — coupled with the impression that Congress rule, for all its faults, lent a general stability in the past — means that the BJP is going into this poll having more or less forfeited the trump-card of being a `party with a difference’. It stands bereft of the psychological edge it enjoyed till last time.

Though it is fraught with risk to predict a low turnout, an anti-incumbency mood and abstentions are likely to play their part. Those who don’t vote will play as decisive a role as those who do. Interestingly, abstention may even extend to core support areas. Take Kishen Kumar, a 26-year-old autorickshaw driver from Outer Delhi’s Khanpur area. He conceded that his family — migrants from Uttar Pradesh — was “all Sanghi” and he himself attended the neighbourhood shakha.

Questions about the the BJP’s track-record brought out the genuine dilemma facing Kumar: “Everyone in my family votes BJP… but this time perhaps I won’t vote”.

This was clearly not some affluent, urban ennui against the political process. Otherwise devoted to the `cause’, Kumar is wavering in the moment of electoral choice.

A middle-aged Punjabi working woman, a few years short of retirement and very far from Kumar in the social hierarchy, echoed the mood. “My son and daughter-in-law are both busy with their work. Somebody has to buy the vegetables.” Thus, for weeks on end, she found herself spending a frustrating two to three hours a day in one of those infamous `onion queues’.

Again a committed anti-Congress voter for most of her life, the lady says this time she’s left with no energy or conviction to go out and cast her vote. “Not just me, everyone in my department has decided against voting this time”.

The general slump in the economy has all but converted another group — the traders, hitherto the party’s main base. “The BJP was our party… it did nothing much to help us,” said a grain trader in Chadni Chowk.

Onion, he complained, is now only a metaphor for an all-round disaster on the price front. The fiasco saw traders being described as the villains of the piece, but they claim the slowing economy has pushed them off the deep end like everyone else. “A few scattered hoarders may have made money, but the general trend of things is quite inimical to our interests”.

There is one common dilemma across the spectrum. The Congress was discredited and tainted in many ways, and the BJP was the agent of deliverance. But perceptions have changed. With the BJP riding the wave after Ayodhya with comforting talk of Ram Rajya, the people invested their hopes and optimism for a `new order’ in the party — this buoyancy has now been deflated.