Opinion BJP needs to display compassion, not triumphalism

The second face of the elections, however, is of a much darker hue.

An election is complete only when losers concede victory to the winners. However, in Maharashtra, hours after the MVA’s defeat, Jairam Ramesh, communication head of the Congress, declared that the verdict was “inexplicable” and alleged that the level-playing field was disturbed in a “targeted” manner as part of a conspiracy to defeat the Opposition alliance. The reluctance of the Congress leadership to concede the election, a ploy already seen after the Haryana elections, is an alarming indication of the deep fissure between India’s ruling coalition and the Opposition.

Equally disquieting is the post-election message of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hailing the Maharashtra verdict as an endorsement of his “ek hain toh safe hain” (together, we are safe) call for unity. Variations of the message are echoed in Uttar Pradesh — “batenge toh katenge” claiming that Hindus “will be slaughtered if divided”. In Jharkhand, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, the election in-charge, led a campaign focused on reiterating that Bangladeshi infiltrators were changing the demography of the state, particularly affecting tribal communities.

The upturn in the electoral fortunes of the BJP has come as a re-set. The new normal is the continuation of the “three C strategy” — cash, caste and communalism — (Girish Kuber, IE, Nov 23), and perpetuation of the effort by the BJP “to bring shrill Hindutva to the centre stage” (Suhas Palshikar, IE, Nov 25) as a grand pan-Indian strategy, adapted to the specificities of regional arenas. At the subliminal level, one gets the sense of a growing rift between the government and the Opposition, not just on the floor of Parliament, but in the wider political arena as well.

Post the 2024 parliamentary elections, with its reduced numbers, the BJP had visibly felt the need to reach out to the Opposition. The Opposition, on the other hand, with larger numbers and renewed confidence, appeared to have jettisoned adversarial politics in favour of normal parliamentary transactions. The Maharashtra results might have put the party elites back into an acrimonious, adversarial mode. Polarising elites communicate their anxiety to society at large. The violent communal clash over a mosque in Sambhal in Uttar Pradesh indicates inter-community relations in a state of “frozen conflict.”

Parliamentary democracy functions at its best when parties compete on the basis of a set of parameters on which they cooperate. The need of the hour for the government and the Opposition is to reflect on the larger, long-term implications of short-term tactics, and generate the culture of implicit inter-party cooperation on the rules of the game indispensable to parliamentary democracy. The challenge is to take cognisance of the danger that political polarisation poses to the country’s security and the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy as the only mode of governance. However, political parties are not altruistic actors but vote-maximising, office-seeking machines. For a course-correction to take place, one needs to ground the argument in the form of incentives.

The BJP and the Congress will do well to take note of the harmonising publics of India which, other things being equal, will respond positively to a moderation of the tone. While the analysis of party manifestos and their campaign rhetoric present a picture of stark polarisation, the electorate at large — as one can notice from the survey of opinions and attitudes— reveals a more complex and nuanced picture. The numbers one gets from the CSDS/Lokniti pre-poll survey, 2024, depict a profile of the country where a vast majority of 79 per cent consider all citizens and not just Hindus to have the right to ownership of the country, and 57 per cent believe that both Hindus and Muslims should be brought under the scope of reservation in jobs. In a reference to the negative view of Muslims in some quarters of the BJP, 22 per cent sensed that the Muslim minority are treated unfairly by the authorities and over 29 per cent felt that Muslims are not as safe as others, or even worse.

As things stand, the stakes are particularly high for the BJP. The existential challenge that it faces is how to devise a normative structure of the nation that draws on Hindutva without excluding non-Hindu minorities from their claim to equal dignity in everyday life — on issues of what to eat, where to live, whom to marry, how to dress — guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. This is critical for its long-term political future as a modern, democratic, pan-Indian party. In order to generate an Indian nation, it needs to craft it out of the deeply held beliefs of different social groups, dipping into their collective memories, their sacred spaces and rituals, and the imaginaries that constitute the collective memories of their past. Short of this, the mantra of “sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas, sabka prayas” in its Sankalp Patra will come across merely as a slogan.

Instead, what the BJP needs to do is to send out signals that entail potential costs for itself, and therefore, become credible for the receiver. Two major acts under its watch — abrogation of Article 370, leading to the loss of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, and consecration of the Ram temple — call not for triumphalism and ostensible legalese but the signalling of some credible compensation to the losers that can transform them from victimhood to equal and competing players.

The writer, emeritus professor, Heidelberg University, is the author of Governance by Stealth (Oxford University Press)