The Landscape Just Moved A Bit

• The terror card isn’t working, so focus will be on governance
  
• There’s also the realisation that Muslim-bashing could prove counter-productive
  
• Rhetoric about Ram, the Ayodhya issue and terror is an article of faith for cadres. But the party has decided to work its campaign around governance, strong state and NDA leaders.
  
• The party is struggling to strike the balance between motivating the cadre with ideological issues and yet not appearing to be trying to crudely reap political gains from terrorism and Pakistan-bashing

***

Indeed, there’s now a realisation in the party that, in electoral terms, its so-called Pakistan card has gone flaccid—especially after that country’s admission that its citizens were involved in Mumbai 26/11. Internal surveys by the party have shown that terrorism does remain a big issue with the electorate. But BJP sources admit to a realisation that people do not believe that the NDA would have done any better than the UPA on terror. Indeed, the party has been advised by strategists that it should only raise ideological issues to motivate the cadres; with the electorate, it should try to strike the right, non-offputting balance.

Why is the BJP reluctant to tap familiar prejudices in the electorate? For one, there is growing realisation that the public sees through motivated posturing and that emotional issues cannot be raised repeatedly. G.V.L. Narasimha Rao, a psephologist who was inducted into the BJP’s national executive in early February, says: "The surveys suggest that the BJP should focus on the governance success of NDA chief ministers. Yet the party is searching for an ideological issue because it is now an established fact that if you can bind emotion with development, it could generate an electoral wave. I have suggested to the BJP that it should talk of terrorism in a way that does not seem negative. Invoking negative emotions is not going down well with the electorate."

Yet, even Vajpayee miscalculated on the Pakistan front. After the attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001, a massive troop mobilisation named Operation Parakram began on the western borders and continued for months, inflicting a great cost on the nation and loss of lives from the desert heat on soldiers. Sources in the then BJP government say the political calculation had been that Vajpayee and the party would subsequently be unbeatable. This was proved wrong just three months later: by February 2002, even as soldiers were at the borders, the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. It has never really recovered there since.

Then the Gujarat riots took place, and by the end of the year, Modi played the Pakistan card to great effect in communally charged Gujarat. He kept referring to ‘Mian Musharraf’ as the embodiment of the Muslim community. Today, Modi has abandoned such rhetoric because he no longer needs it, having delivered on so many other fronts in Gujarat. But the point is that it takes charismatic politicians and orators like Modi and Vajpayee to make the terror card work. And this proved true even after events like the Kargil war and the Gujarat riots. But lately, even Modi’s post-Mumbai utterances have not really clicked with the electorate. And the BJP’s assembly election campaign in Delhi, which was soon after the Mumbai attack, went horribly wrong, generating only revulsion in voters.

But the message has not been lost on the BJP: ideological issues can also prove counter-productive. The new thinking in the party is that just screaming about terrorism will not work. There has to be some cogency to the discourse and some reasonable points must be made. The party’s prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, has been struggling to do this. He has been consistently saying that the UPA should come out with a 26/11 inquiry report on the lines of the one prepared in the US after 9/11. "The government must not put a lid on any information or lapse linked to the Mumbai attack," he says.

Yet, some confusion is also generated when Advani invokes the Ayodhya issue or alleges a local hand in the 26/11 Mumbai attack. BJP leaders justify the latter, saying that even the Mumbai police has spoken of locals who might have helped the Pakistani attackers. Of the Ayodhya bogey, they say that it is raised periodically merely to signal to the cadres that the leadership still keeps the faith.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, the party will also harp on the Talibanisation of Pakistan, particularly in the states of western India. BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley cleverly juxtaposes the "votebank politics of the UPA" and the "Taliban as an idea". In a Rajya Sabha speech he made last week, he said: "The Taliban is an idea. In the Shah Bano episode, you succumbed to this idea. In the Amarnath agitation, you initially also succumbed to this idea. You encourage the very idea of Talibanisation." His speech is a pointer to the rhetoric to come.

Even so, it is clear that terrorism will not be the central issue for the BJP—at least in the forthcoming general elections. And the fact that it is the Congress that’s now toying with making Pakistan one of its election planks is another indication that Indian politics never moves in straight lines.