How the vote was lost

The BJP’s supreme confidence surfaced only after its sweeping victories in the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh last December. Ironically, the very reasons why the BJP was voted to power in these states would be the ones which would unseat the NDA at the Centre. But the voters’ message that they were looking for change seems to have been lost on the party’s whiz kids.

The fickle Indian voter is usually propelled by a strong anti-incumbency sentiment. Sadly, in this frame of mind the voter makes only a slight distinction between performing CMs like Chandrababu Naidu or S.M. Krishna and those who have been total failures at governance like Amarinder Singh or Arjun Munda.

The overriding theme of the 2004 parliamentary poll results is dissatisfaction with the state governments and not about who rules Delhi. The pattern is more clear-cut in the south where the people in Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have voted overwhelmingly against the party in power at the state level. Elsewhere in the country, it is a similar trend but the result not as obvious because disillusionment with a state government takes a while to set in and caste loyalties are more pronounced. Some states like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh are still in the honeymoon period. The anti-incumbency trend has been clearly bucked mainly in Bihar, Orissa and West Bengal. And this may be less a tribute to the quality of governance there than to the tolerance and patience of the voter and clever caste alliances. Small wonder all three states are among the least developed regions in the country.

Filled with the hubris that comes with power and buoyed by commissioned polls highlighting the wide disparity in the popularity ratings of Vajpayee and of Sonia Gandhi, the BJP’s campaign managers seem to have ignored the elementary rules of the election game in India. The way to tackle the incumbency disadvantage did not lie in vulgar campaign expenditure stressing how good the voter feels at the height of summer. It lay in ruthlessly axing non-performing MPs since they are the visible targets for voter resentment in a parliamentary system. Jayalalithaa did comprehend this and knocked off 10 of her 12 sitting MPs. It did not help because she replaced one set of lamp posts with another. The BJP changed less than a dozen sitting MPs and paid the price. Significantly, 90 of the BJP’s 180-odd sitting MPs lost and the percentage of failure would have been far higher but for the large number of successful incumbents from Rajasthan and MP.

The party’s choice of candidates was totally cynical. Instead of looking at the CVs and standing of individual candidates in the region, it gave in to the pressures of squabbling caste leaders and the VHP and RSS, who often plumped for lumpen who emerged during the Ayodhya movement and had little connection with their constituencies. The BJP, which once prided itself on its talented, committed youth cadre thrown up during the Emergency struggle, has done nothing in recent decades to attract young blood.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now fashionable to claim that it was only the yuppie in the city who felt good and that the toiling peasant in the field voted against the party. In fact the BJP, considered an urban-centric party, lost in most cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Calcutta, Chennai and Chandigarh. I suspect the city voters were particularly put off by the same old faces and the constant din of a Shining India. Another theory making the rounds is that it was the campaigning of the younger Gandhis which changed the whole tide of the election. If this were so, then the Congress’s vote share in UP should not have come down from 14 to 13 per cent and Satish Sharma should not have come third from the Gandhi pocket borough of Sultanpur and sitting MP Ratna Singh would not have lost from nearby Pratapgarh — even though Rahul Gandhi campaigned in Sultanpur.

The BJP this time ignored the compulsions of electoral arithmetic. Breaking old alliances with the AGP and INLD, it practically pushed Ram Vilas Paswan out of the party, forgetting his dalit vote bank in Bihar. It spurned Pawar’s proposal for a seat sharing arrangement and was complacent over the DMK threat of departure, confident it could always tie up with Jayalalithaa instead. The refusal to remove Modi was not just a grave moral failure, in practical terms it effectively placed 12 per cent of the voters firmly on the side of its political opponents.

The BJP arrogantly believed that the Vajpayee chemistry would override the electoral arithmetic of caste and communal loyalties, a miscalculation of Himalayan proportions.