Mortar Beneath Fissures

While every India-Pakistan cricket match unites the entire nation, in our victory and loss alike, it is ironical how the collective memory of the wounds of Partition stands to divide us as a people. I have a clear observation of polling trends and I hope political leaders reading will note—polarisation can never be the main reason for your victory. That may sound like a rather sweeping statement to make but I will argue my case patiently. Since the first poll prediction I made in 2013, I have repeatedly asked voters what counts in an election and I can tell you with some certainty I have never come across anyone who has prioritised temple construction or minority appeasement when they choose their representatives. That is not to say that communities do not have their sympathies with a particular political party with a certain ideology that is in line with their own religious beliefs. Political parties will always continue to enjoy their traditional support base even as they make their best efforts to invade and engage their rival’s votebank. Polarisation typically works when the incumbent has a solid report card while the challenger is at a loss and does not have much to show for in terms of fresh promises or is unable to demolish the incumbent’s claims. Since the incumbent is always evaluated on the basis of the outgoing government’s or individual’s performance, the challenger’s only opportunity is to highlight the failures and punch holes in the incumbent’s claims. It is only when this does not pan out as per expectations that the challenger resorts to a slander campaign or makes a polarisation bid to consolidate votes from a single community. The most recent reminder was the Delhi assembly polls in February 2020. The nationwide unrest following the abrogation of Article 370, the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens in the winter of 2019 made for the perfect recipe for a highly polarised poll battle two months later.

The protest at Shaheen Bagh, against the exclusion of Muslims from the Citizenship Amendment Act, kept the pot boiling while hate speeches by local leaders added fuel to fire. Incumbent Delhi chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, fully aware of the pitfalls of letting the campaign der­ail by falling into the communal trap, repeatedly harped on how he would talk of nothing but his government’s performance. He dodged questions on Shaheen Bagh, refused to openly woo the minorities, and till the time the model code of conduct kicked in he kept churning out pro-people policies. As this went hugely in his favour, the opposition BJP in a desperate bid escalated its ‘nat­ionalism’ card. Their leaders crossed the line so many times that the Election Commission had to repeatedly intervene and issue a ban on campaigning for several of them. The countdown to the res­ults gave me sleepless nights—probably as much as those in the contest. Despite the BJP’s confidence of a sure victory, my predictions stood vindicated as AAP swept the assembly with 62 out of 70 seats, just five seats short of their previous tally. For an incumbent government that is a stellar performance. Now, had the AAP not been able to deliver, the opp­osition’s campaign would have worked like a dream, because it would have added to the existing anger of the voters. Instead, the BJP’s campaign backfired as it appeared like a diversionary tactic by the opposition, particularly at a time Kejriwal stuck to his script and came out with his ‘Lage raho Kejriwal’ slogan that drove home his message of good governance.

Even as I keep insisting on ‘delivery’ being the key to success, I will tread cautiously and acknowledge that in some cases a highly polarised poll battle does affect approximately 10 per cent of the seats won. While I would credit Modi’s resounding victory in 2019 almost entirely to his delivery of promises in the first term, the campaign around Balakot strikes, the slew of patriotic commercial movies like Uri and others on his initiatives like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha contributed significantly in image-building. ‘Nationalism’, ‘deshbhakt’, ‘go to Pakistan’ became a part of our lexicon like never before. To entirely dismiss that would be an unpardonable oversight but to give it more weightage than the Modi government’s good governance will be a far bigger folly. A large section of society, intellectuals and the media included, have often att­ributed Modi’s smooth sail at the hustings to the support of his party’s ideological parent.

But I beg to differ. Had that been the case, how did the BJP fail to rake up such high numbers in Parliament following Babri Masjid, when the country clearly seemed far more polarised? If we look at 1996, the BJP won 161 seats, in 1998 and again in 1999 they managed to emerge as the single largest party with 182 seats both times. While Ram Mandir remained the centrepiece of the BJP’s manifesto each time, their campaigns were more rounded and spoke as much of development. In 2014, BJP recorded its first biggest victory on a pro-development and anti-­corruption poll plank. At the end of the United Progressive Alliance’s second term, Modi played up the corruption charges against the Manmohan Singh government while projecting Gujarat as the development model. Ramjanmabhoomi and Hindu rashtra were nowhere on its top agenda, though its ideological parent, the RSS, worked silently behind the scenes, keeping its cadre motivated with those promises. The mainstream voter, however, chose the promise of a corruption-free India and a new dawn. The dedicated foot-soldiers of the RSS des­erve all the praise as they form the crucial backbone of the BJP’s campaign on the ground, taking its message to the farthest corners, knocking door-to-door from Jammu and Kashmir to the Northeast. But its ideology barely played a role in winning the hearts of the voters. Modi’s public image and the BJP’s campaign strategy in 2014 rem­ained the game-changer. If communalism did pivot poll fortunes, how is it that the BJP remained on the fringes while the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party dominated the Uttar Pradesh legislative assembly for decades? An inherently right-wing party in that case should have always caught the imagination of its votebank and never conceded any of it to its riv­als. In the 2019 parliamentary polls, BJP increased its seats in West Bengal remarkably, from two in 2014 to 18 in 2019, because people began seeing it as their next best option. People have alr­eady given the Trinamool Congress and the Left an opportunity to perform and evaluated their work. For BJP it is a clean slate, making the 2021 assembly polls a completely new game. It might be speculated that the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens anno­unced by the BJP’s central government—allegedly to drive a wedge between communities—helped them rake up a larger voteshare, but I would still argue that these announcements have very limited implications for the party as there are several other factors that finally matter.

(Pradeep Gupta is the founder of Axis My India. His book How India Votes and What it Means is out now)