Kanika Datta: One step back?

In the months immediately after the Lok Sabha elections, TV pundits, the chatterati and corporate India sagely portrayed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s stunning victory as the triumph of its star Narendra Modi's "development" (that is: pro-corporate) agenda over the United Progressive Alliance's prolonged inaction and mismanagement.

Now, as the party lives down its most embarrassing defeat in the Delhi Assembly polls, less than a year after taking charge at the Centre, the "development" talk has abated. Instead, the party's overt, violent and medieval communal agenda is in the spotlight. This was the agenda, Mr Modi's more liberal cheerleaders had predicted so incorrectly, that was supposed to recede once he took power at the Centre. But it may be too optimistic to write off communalism and identity politics as electoral deciders.
 

It is interesting, for instance, that the politician crowing the most at the BJP's discomfiture is some distance from the action: Mamata Banerjee. "This is a victory of the people and a big defeat for the arrogant and those who are doing political vendetta and spreading among the people [sic]. Congratulations to Delhi voters, AAP workers and leaders for big victory. All my best wishes. We are very happy," she tweeted. Her hard-working MP spokesman Derek O'Brien duly followed it up with the crack "Bhag Modi Bhag".

Ms Banerjee's glee is understandable. The BJP is making alarming inroads in a state that had managed to keep communalism out of politics for 30 years. In September, the party won one seat in the Assembly by-elections, a shock defeat for the Trinamool Congress candidate. One Trinamool minister has already crossed the floor and Nabanna rocks daily with rumours that more will follow. Ideologues and cultural figures, the vanguard of her middle-class base, have also started nailing their colours to the saffron mast.

Ms Banerjee's homily "for the arrogant and those who are doing political vendetta" could as well apply to her when the state goes to the polls next year. That's because she has, ironically, chosen to follow a trajectory similar to the BJP, of fostering communal politics. This together with her party's association with the Saradha small savings scandal and the notable absence of any "for-the-people" development has proved a toxic combination. At any rate, it has ensured that support for her across the urban and mofussil middle class is receding faster than the Himalayan glaciers.

Her triumphal surge to power in 2009 took place on the back of a rigidly anti-industry movement that was more leftist than the geriatric Left Front. If her strategy worked at the hustings it was because in densely populated, under-industrialised Bengal, land ownership and loss is a deeply emotive issue. Within months of her taking power, it became clear that as the aborted Tata Motors project languishes in the courts, a potent symbol of her political success - that too right on the edge of the state capital - had become an uncomfortable reminder of her real problems.

Ms Banerjee's initial reaction was to look for a new political base. And she thought she had found it among the state's significant Muslim population. Thus began the cynical Congress-style appeasement of the more fundamentalist elements of the Muslim clergy with subsidies and rhetoric. In short, Ms Banerjee has played right into the BJP's hands with her confused hodgepodge ultra right-ultra left political ideology, if it can be called that.

As the BJP started making inroads, Ms Banerjee decided to change tack and focus on Modi-style "development". So where she earlier snapped at industrialists approaching her for solutions to stalled projects, she told a gathering at the January 2015 "global summit" that she "touched their feet" for their investment proposals of Rs 2.4 lakh crore. The realisation that corporate investment and industrial activity are critical has dawned late. No one doubts that much of the January pledges are phantom - or that the meagre turnout of industrialists was mostly because Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley attended.

Ms Banerjee may be aware of these shortcomings. So within days of her underwhelming global summit, she announced a seven per cent increase in dearness allowance for state government employees. This will cost the exchequer - cash-strapped by her own admission - an additional Rs 2,100 crore.

Meanwhile in Bihar, which goes to the polls later this year, "development" is back on the table, replacing the old trope of identity politics, with former chief minister Nitish Kumar anxious to shunt out the Mahadalit, Jitan Ram Manjhi, his hand-picked successor after he stepped down following the Janata Dal (United)'s poor showing in the Lok Sabha elections. As the MLA haemorrhage continues Mr Manjhi is desperately retaliating by extending reservations for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in government road projects of a certain size.

Who knows whether such explicit populism counts for anything. The Aam Aadmi Party's spectacular performance occurred without freebie offers in sharp contrast to its earlier uncertain showing. But Delhi is not India, as the pundits have tirelessly reminded us. So maybe an agenda that did not work for the BJP in the city-state will work for it in Bihar or West Bengal. As Mr Modi's corporate supporters are discovering, the Indian voter moves in mysterious ways.