BJP Strategy for 2019: Building Castles of Sand

A strange thing happened with BJP President Amit Shah last week. He was in Jaipur to firm up the party’s election machinery ahead of the Assembly elections slated later this year, and the 2019 general elections. An unnoticed news report said that Shah lost his cool and left a meeting with ‘vistaraks’ (outreach in-charges) because the participants seemed to be unprepared, and also because they had not yet received the promised motorcycles and fuel allowance. This gives a fascinating and rare glimpse of how the BJP president goes about fixing the election campaign strategy. It also offers a glimpse of what he – and the BJP – are up against.

Vistaraks are supposed to be solid cadre that will be campaign incharges for Assembly constituencies in the run up to the election campaign. Other reports suggest that they may be appointed for booths, or for Assembly constituencies, depending on the strength of the organisation. In Rajasthan, it is reported that BJP has already appointed 45,000 vistaraks for a 15 day period of which 6000 are said to be targeted for giving motorcycles. Last year, for the UP Assembly election, it seems the BJP spent Rs.6 crore for buying 1600 motor cycles for their vistaraks. 

Doubts about these numbers arise if one considers Shah’s anger at the lack of preparation expressed in the 21 July meeting at Jaipur. If the plan for vistaraks was pout in place a year ago, as reports had indicated, why was there no preparation? Surely a free bike and free fuel promise would attract a lot of youth, what with the raging joblessness in the country. 

Which brings us to the nub of the matter. Elections are won or lost not just by ‘event management’ skills which both Shah and his boss Prime Minister Modi have in plenty. The Vasundhara Raje led BJP govt. in Rajasthan is facing growing anger and discontent as shown not only by the number of bye elections the BJP has lost in Rajasthan but also the series of agitations by farmers and other sections in the past few years. Its popularity is at a low ebb. Perhaps that is why the much hyped Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Vistarak Yojana crafted by Shah and his backroom boys to establish the backbone of the election campaign is finding no takers in Rajasthan. Throwing money at a political problem will only conceal the malaise, not solve it. 

This problem with BJP’s election strategizing for 2019 is visible elsewhere too. Till now, the first phase of BJP’s election campaign has consisted of the ‘Sampark for Samarthan’ (contact for support) campaign kicked off by Shah himself. It involved him and 4000 top functionaries of the BJP meeting at least 10 eminent persons each and seeking their support. On his part, Shah met former Army Chief Gen.Suhag, former Lok Sabha secretary general Subhash Kashyap and has reportedly met people like Lata Mangeshkar and Sachin Tendulkar among others. The BJP propaganda machine is saying that these influential people will create a wave of support for the BJP. 

Many – but not all - of these persons are sympathetic to the BJP, to various degrees. Be that as it may, none of them declared overt support to the BJP unless it was in confidence. The BJP has been doing this publicity stunt for years now, before every general election. It’s efficacy is questionable – remember BJP lost two successive elections in 2004 and 2009 despite a series of top bureaucrats and security officers joining it. 

The other component of the BJP election campaign was PM Modi’s attempt to consolidate the ‘beneficiary base’. He has interacted with women who received cooking gas connections under the Ujjwala scheme, and with farmers, and with beneficiaries of 12 schemes of the Rajasthan govt. He has used the NaMo app for some interactions while in Rajasthan he held a rally for which the people were mobilised by the state machinery.

The idea, presumably, is to tell the people how they have benefitted from the efforts of PM Modi, either through the central govt. that he leads or from BJP led state govts., which too he is portrayed as guiding. In Jaipur, he listened to video-taped accounts from selected beneficiaries before delivering the usual exhortative speech.

As reports from the Jaipur rally indicate, those participating were not all enthusiastic of the schemes. Many had complaints which they thought they would tell Modi himself. In any case, the schemes of Modi have mostly been colossal failures – if one compares the actual results to the hyped propaganda about them. Schemes-for-political-benefit has always been tricky ground for Indian politicians. There are many more who are deprived of benefits than those who are officially supposed to have benefited. And, more often than not, more serious issues will invariably over-ride piecemeal benefits. For instance, lack of jobs or difficulties with Aadhaar linking or high cost of cooking gas refill will wash away any perceived benefit from some other scheme. In any case, these schemes are leaving out crores of people – so just claims of ‘successful’ schemes will not get BJP many votes.

All this talk of ‘vikas’ and crores of beneficiaries from schemes – as summarised by Shah himself in an interview– is but one part of the election strategy. It is official talk meant for the consumption of gullible people, helped along by a sycophantic media. 

On 14-18 June, a top-level meeting was held between RSS and BJP bigwigs in a resort at Surajkund, Haryana, on the border of Delhi. It was reported that elections were the agenda. Several changes in organisational leadership were made silently, including positioning of key RSS pracharaks as campaign in-charges in parts of UP. Similar convergence of organisational efforts with the RSS is happening everywhere, that is, in places where RSS or its offshoots exist. There are also reports that the Ayodhya issue will be taken up and brought centre stage before the elections. Despite the usual denials of polarisation politics, the stage is being set for the usual below the radar communalisation of political campaign before 2019, or even before the state Assembly elections. The Supreme Court verdict on the Ayodhya issue is about to come. That will provide the launching pad for this dangerous part of the strategy to take off.

Since the disillusionment with Modi and his rhetoric is now well underway, and allies of the BJP too are having second thoughts, the only real work for BJP’s strategists is to unleash the communal card, hoping it will unite the majority community (including the angry Dalit community), and lead to vote consolidation. Whether this will get BJP the votes to win again in 2019 remains very doubtful.