If the good showing in the Uttar Pradesh mayoral polls and the Maharashtra municipal elections were stray indications of a long-awaited revival, the decisive victories in Punjab and Uttarakhand today have come as a huge morale-booster to the party. The results have convinced both the leadership and the rank and file that the BJP-led NDA is not only on an electoral “come-back trail” but has also succeeded in striking a chord with its traditional votebank on issues such as price rise, terrorism and “minorityism.”Today’s results, coming on the heels of the Quattrocchi issue that has put new life in the party’s anti-Congress campaign in and outside Parliament, is significant on many counts: ideological, organizational, political and personal.On the personal — or leadership — front, it has shown that Generation Next has come into its own and despite ego clashes among the younger leaders, collective leadership of a kind has delivered the victories. As party president who has been trying hard to get out of the shadows of L K Advani, the results have come as a shot-in-the arm for Rajnath Singh. If the BJP manages to wrest the Delhi municipal corporation from the Congress and improve its performance in Uttar Pradesh this summer — a distinct possibility in light of the euphoria in the BJP and the despondency in Congress ranks — Rajnath’s position will consolidate even further.But if Rajnath has reasons to crow, so does Arun Jaitley, who was not too happy with the party chief’s organizational reshuffle that was seen as an attempt to clip the wings of both Jaitley and his friend Narendra Modi. Jaitley has proved yet again that he is the “lucky mascot” of the BJP, adding Punjab to his medal tally that includes Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Bihar. The victory in Punjab is particularly sweet because no one gave the BJP much of a chance in that state. Yet, the BJP’s “strike rate” is far higher than that of the Akali Dal, with even defeated chief minister Amarinder Singh conceding that the Congress managed to defeat the Akalis but lost to the BJP in urban areas.The Punjab victory, where the BJP won as many as 19 of the 23 seats it contested and retained the Amritsar Lok Sabha seat, has considerable social significance as well, party leaders feel. It has shown that the traditional urban Hindu-rural Sikh divide that had got exacerbated during the years of militancy is all but over.“We could not have won so many urban seats if the Sikhs had not joined the Hindus in voting for us,” a BJP insider said, underlining that Navjot Singh Siddhu’s entry into the party was part of a larger phenomenon of Jat Sikhs too plumping for the BJP, particularly in urban Punjab.Another of the generation next leaders, Ravi Shankar Prasad, has also reasons to smile after the Uttarakhand victory. Appointed “prabhari” for the state last September, Prasad camped in the state for months and succeeded in dousing the factionalism that has been the bane of the state unit.But more than personal gains, these elections are seen as important from both the organizational and ideological angles. On the ideological front, the party leadership is convinced that the decision to highlight the Congress’s “minorityism” and linking it with Islamic terrorism has paid rich dividends in urban and semi-urban areas — the main contributing factor to the string of victories in UP, Maharashtra, urban Punjab and Uttarakhand. In Uttarakhand, the issue of national security — the BJP made much of the Mohamad Afzal case for instance — is believed to have struck a chord among the large number of ex-servicemen scattered across the state. Price rise was the other big factor — and this, too, affected the urban voter more harshly than his rural counterpart. “This was not a vote of anti-incumbency, it was a positive vote for us because our traditional voter is fed up with the Congress and has returned to us,” a BJP leader said.Such an analysis is bound to make the BJP leaders — much as in the late 1980s — even more strident in their attack against minorityism, although there is no emotive issue on the lines of the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi to whip up a Hindutva wave just yet.On the organizational front, BJP leaders make no secret of the fact that the RSS played a big role in the current victories, particularly in Uttarakhand. RSS organizational secretary Ram Lal headed the Uttarakhand region when it was part of UP and coordinated the campaign in the state. Another RSS strongman, Saudan Singh, who has been seconded to the BJP after Rajnath Singh became president also played a key role in ensuring BJP-RSS coordination at all levels. The RSS has been making inroads into the hill state for a long while now, and this latest victory is likely to consolidate this process further.But if the RSS-BJP ties, strained under Advani, are back on an even keel, the BJP has managed to keep the NDA intact as well. In Maharashtra, victory has cemented the 20-year-long relationship with the Shiv Sena. The same is about to happen in Punjab. And despite periodic “secular” noises by JD(U) leaders, the JD(U)-BJP alliance is moving along quite smoothly in Bihar. “The UPA came together for power and can fall apart quite as easily. But the NDA is proving to be a strong, enduring entity,” a BJP leader said, reinforcing the fact that nothing succeeds like success until it begins to fail.
