Opinion BJP’s choice
Sushil Modi has disowned the Yogi Adityanath brand of politics. His party must take its Bihar leader’s cue.
The “love jihad” campaign run by the BJP in Uttar Pradesh has evidently failed to persuade the voters, and if the BJP’s underwhelming performance in the bypolls is an indication, it has probably alienated many. The UP setback is remarkable because it follows the BJP’s sweep of the same state in the Lok Sabha polls held only a few months earlier on the back of a campaign less divisive and shrill. Yet, will the BJP draw the obvious lessons, see the writing on the wall? Will it reassess its decision to lead with the hardline Hindutva issues to win UP and presumably other states, amid the growing evidence that a young and aspirational country does not want to be dragged back into the politics of grievance and hoary resentment? Answers to those questions are likely to trickle in slowly. Meanwhile, the BJP would do well to listen not just to the voters, but also to itself.
Speaking to The Indian Express, former deputy chief minister and the party’s face in Bihar, Sushil Modi, has distanced himself and the BJP’s Bihar unit from the polarising rhetoric of the UP BJP. If Yogi Adityanath (the BJP’s star campaigner in UP) had made in Bihar the kind of controversial statements he made in UP, “we would have contradicted him”, he said, adding that the state unit of the party had “not co-opted” the Adityanath-type hardliners. It would be all too easy to view Modi’s intervention as part of a grand design, a sign of the perfect choreography of moderate and extremist voices the BJP is often credited with, or accused of. In all likelihood, however, it is another reminder that saffron has many shades and that a party which has a presence, as government and as opposition, in various states, shapes its setting but is also shaped by it. In Bihar, the BJP has a specific trajectory and context — it has been less willing to seize the polarising “communal” issue as a tool of political mobilisation. But Modi’s intervention draws attention to more than just that.
At a time when the party has won power at the Centre on the strength of a massive mandate for change but is seen to be backsliding to a divisive agenda, especially in UP, Sushil Modi’s disavowal of the Adityanath brand of politics is a cautionary note to his party. In India in the 21st century, the politics of fear and anxiety has diminishing returns. Across states, there is mounting evidence of a splintering of identity politics and old vote banks and of the possibilities of cross-sectional support being forged by the promise of better opportunities and governance. At a time like this, the BJP can let Adityanath set the agenda at its own peril.
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