Punching numbers in future tense

‘‘Hindutva is not going to be our election issue,’’ BJP General Secretary Pramod Mahajan told The Indian Express.‘‘I am telling you this six months in advance.’’

The high-flying general secretary, who went back to party just work six weeks ago, said, ‘‘Our issue will be misgovernance in the Congress ruled states, right from New Delhi to Raipur. I am on a strong wicket on their performance, on power supply and roads. Why should I divert from it? And I don’t want Digvijay Singh to divert the issue.’’

Taking a swipe at Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Mahajan asked: ‘‘Who started the cow protection issue in MP? It was not me. When we agreed to Digvijay Singh’s request, that there should be a Central law to ban cow slaughter, Shivraj Patil came and said that it is a state subject under the Constitution. Here is a CM, whose intelligence you cannot doubt, who writes one thing to the PM. And you have Shivraj Patil who says something different.’’

The four states going to polls will see BJP pitted against Congress. ‘‘After Himachal, this is now my turn (to win). These are states where we have ruled after every other election,’’ Mahajan said.

The BJP, he said, is in the process of preparing a chargesheet against Congress “misrule” in all the four states. As for Hindutva, Mahajan said, it was the ‘‘BJP’s ideological plank’’. ‘‘It is oxygen for our cadres.’’ But elections, Mahajan said, ‘‘are tested not on ideology but on policies,programmes, personalities and performance’’. Gujarat, he said, was different because of Godhra.

Pramod Mahajan is clear that the Nov 2003 elections are like the ‘‘Super Four’’ which will determine who wins the final match in 2004. ‘‘These are Congress-ruled states. If I can’t win them back — they were my states — then how will I claim victory in 2004?’’

The coming polls were equally crucial for the Congress, he admitted. If the Congress cannot retain power in these states, then it too would be in trouble in 2004.

These four states are not like Himachal Pradesh, which sends only 4 members to the Lok Sabha. Between them, they account for 72 Lok Sabha seats. ‘‘The Congress may be in power in these four states today but it is the BJP which has over 50 members in the Lok Sabha from these states,’’ Mahajan said. ‘‘This is the only battlefield where the rest of India, that is the allies, do not matter. It will pose a real test for both the BJP and the Congress.’’

BJP chief Venkaiah Naidu had said not long ago that the BJP would win 300 seats in the next Lok Sabha polls. However, the party leadership — and many admit this privately — knows that this is an impossible target to achieve, and that if the party can reach the more realistic figure of 200 seats, it should be happy.

Alliances will be a key factor if it is to reach this figure. Since it has been in power now for five years, it will have to contend with the anti-incumbency factor.

If one allows for a slump in seats by say 25 per cent — that is in a best case scenario — it would mean a tally of around 140 Lok Sabha seats for the party. There is simply no way the BJP can get another 160, particularly since it will be a player only in 360 seats in all. Its tallies were not large in the East and the South, and even in a state like Karnataka, where it won seven Lok Sabha seats last time, it has not won any of the bypolls held recently.

In order to remain relevant, the BJP will have to forge alliances with other parties in Maharashtra, Punjab, Haryana, West Bengal, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Bihar and UP. As it is, its alliance with the BSP in Lucknow is severely strained, and there are many in BJP’s state unit who fear that the party might become another Congress in the state, unless it severs links with the BSP.

An aggressive brand of Hindutva will not make electoral understanding with allies — barring the Shiv Sena and possibly the Akali Dal — easy. Of course, the party will continue with steps like the excavation in Ayodhya, the installation of Savarkar’s portrait in Parliament, use of POTA, proxy voting, opposition to religious conversion, and it calculates that the US war against Iraq and Islamic fundamentalism will go to create a favourable climate for BJP.

But it may go easy on its aggressive brand of Hindutva which was witnessed in Gujarat. The two general elections where Hindutva made a differnce to the BJP were ones held in 1989 and 1991. But it was really in 1967, 1977 and in 1998, when the party had made a quantum leap, and these were fought in alliances.

Mahajan is clear that the task before him as the party general secretary are two-fold. The first is proper election management. ‘‘We have to fight a person like Digvijay Singh who has started off by tampering with the electoral rolls. Similarly, Ajit Jogi will be a challenging CM. Election management will be very crucial in these states.’’

The second challenge for the party will be to ensure a cohesiveness in the BJP. ‘‘Himachal Pradesh should serve as a wake up call for us,’’ says Mahajan. There are rebel candidates in every election but ‘‘I had never seen anything like what happened in Himachal Pradesh, and I have been doing crisis management for some time now, with rebels in 25 per cent of the constituencies, and I could not make any of them withdraw.’’ It showed, he said, that ‘‘either the situation was very bad or they were all being controlled by someone outside their or my control.

While Mahajan’s successor, the new parliamentary affairs minister Sushma Swaraj has been wooing MPs with flowers, Mahajan has been running around the country. First he rushed off to Himachal Pradesh to camp there for two weeks, then to Maharashtra, his home state where he wants to give much more time, then to Indore to oversee the preparations for the party’s national executive and last weekend to Chennai for a ‘chintan baithak’ to formulate the party’s programmes for the next two years.