Victory, defeat and vindication: Twin poll verdicts a huge positive for BJP

A leader's charisma is a big plus. But don't underestimate the craft of mounting an election campaign. Haryana is BJP's reward for mastering it

The big headline from the twin verdicts on Tuesday is that it is a huge positive for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). There’s redemption in victory, and vindication in defeat.
 

Redemption first. Haryana was the BJP’s first test in its strongholds after the setback in June. It was widely expected by both its friends and foes that the party would find it impossible to win a third successive term. The BJP itself had hedged by not exposing Narendra Modi as the face of the campaign. A loss in Haryana would push it downhill from the edge where it was caught after this summer’s general elections. The resounding Haryana win changes all that. That’s redemption from the lows of June. It gives the leadership and the cadre new energy and washes away negativity. If you know this BJP, it will now go forward to Jharkhand and Maharashtra as if June 2024 never happened.
 

Here we list our three key takeaways from the BJP’s remarkable victory:
 

- A leader’s popularity and charisma are a huge plus, but never underestimate the power of craft, the science and engineering in a campaign. Haryana is a reward for the BJP’s brilliance at it. See the number of Independents fielded in most of the constituencies. Wrestler Vinesh Phogat, for example, had seven Independents against her, most of them Jats. She won after a scare but many others didn’t. In addition, check out the small coalitions: The senior Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal with Mayawati and the Jannayak Janta Party, led by the junior Chautala, Dushyant, with rising Dalit star Chandra Shekhar Azad. Any votes these unlikely Jat-Dalit coalitions got in a tight contest were at the Congress’s cost. The BJP applied the lessons from its Uttar Pradesh Lok Sabha debacle in Haryana.

- How do you win an election when the dominant and most numerous caste group is firmly against you? First, divide this group among your rivals. And consolidate the rest. The BJP discounted its weaknesses and concentrated on its strengths: Upper castes, Punjabis and now the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). That’s why that change in leadership, from Punjabi Manohar Lal Khattar to OBC Nayab Singh Saini, turned out decisive. It is the most unassailable wisdom that the dominant groups are feared and detested by the rest. The important thing in Haryana is that while the Jats often demand OBC status, they are for all practical purposes the highest caste. Forget Manusmriti. It’s as if 22 per cent of Bihar was Brahmin. The rest would resent them. By getting that right, the BJP turned its weakness into strength.

- And the third, the return of the Rashtriya Swaymsevak Sangh (RSS). In my travels through Haryana, BJP candidates spoke with breathless excitement of how the “Sangh” was back in the campaign now. Its indifference last summer had cost it too much and now it was going to stop this haemorrhage. The change was captured in great detail by Sanya Dhingra of ThePrint in the story published on October 3, two days before the polling. If all is forgiven between this BJP and the RSS, then June can be forgotten and politics begins afresh. And what does the Congress take away from this? 
 

Here are the three we list:

- The tips of the Congress campaign trident were: Kisan, jawan, and pehelwan. The farmers were furious over minimum support price, the soldiers and ex-servicemen over Agnipath and the wrestlers over the Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh story topped by Vinesh Phogat’s tragic Paris disqualification. So far, so good. Except the Congress forgot that all three added up to one caste in Haryana: Jats. The campaign became Jat-centric and helped the BJP consolidate others. The party’s leading Dalit face, Kumari Selja, was vocally disenchanted, and the farcical entry of serial defector Ashok Tanwar about three hours before the close of the campaign confused everybody. The perils of declaring victory too early.

- The Congress thinks it holds sway over the villages while the BJP owns the cities. It’s been wrong about both. First of all, a state like Haryana, so close to Delhi and so well connected, is impossible to divide into rural and urban as you might do in BIMARU states. Haryana is even more rurban than Gujarat. Even in a 2014 #Writings OnTheWall, I had noted air conditioners sticking out of the windows of almost every other house in Haryana’s villages. Now we’re in 2024.

Both descriptions the Congress thrives on, rural and agrarian, no longer fit Haryana’s big picture. Nor does the stereotype of all Haryanvis being Jat. It further blundered in making its proposition entirely transactional: Free this, free that. There was no promise of a big new thing, a leap up the value chain for Haryana. The only product differentiation seemed to be that it had the Jats and the BJP didn’t.

- The third is what the Congress will find most difficult to accept. That in large parts of the country, people will not vote against any Ambani-Adanis. India isn’t Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). ‘Aspirational voter’ is a tired expression now, but so is the supposed capitalist excess. In many parts of the country, Haryana in particular, successful entrepre­neurs are seen as role models, not rapacious thugs. They just want them to invest there and create jobs.  

However fertile Haryana’s lands may be for all kinds of crops, they totally reject the seeds of old JNU-style Leftism. The Congress showed phenomenal political misjudgement in hoping to plant it in Haryana. It would have been much better off promising three more Gurugrams, another knowledge city, a park for artificial intelligence, semiconductors and mobile phone manufacturing. The povertarian condemnation of Ambani-Adani left people bemused when they needed optimism, optimism, optimism.

Both sides will take their lessons to Jharkhand and Maharashtra. But now instead of the BJP, the Congress will begin afresh as a loser. And what about the defeat in Jammu and Kashmir?

Of course the BJP would’ve liked to rule the state, and ideally with a Hindu chief minister as it has dreamed forever. That didn’t happen. But see what it achieved on the other hand. First, all political parties, including so many former separatists, Engineer Rashid on furlough for his party, contested under the post-August 5, 2019, arrangement. Nothing better than this 63.88 per cent voter turnout to sanctify such a big change. Second, the election was peaceful, under­lining the changed popular mood and enhanced state capacity. And third, nobody would say this election wasn't fair. That the BJP lost so resoundingly is the best evidence. This is why there’s vindi­cation for the BJP in defeat here.

By special arrangement with ThePrint