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Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Saturday attributed his party’s spectacular performance, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, home to India’s largest number of the poor, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s welfare agenda.
He said the landslide victory was a vindication of demonetisation, with the poor supporting the government. The victory will push the government to punish the corrupt. A visible and public pursuit of tax evaders is almost certainly on the cards. Shah also said he had no problem with people calling the results a referendum on demonetisation.
The party believes it has managed to shed its image of running a government of the moneybags. “The poor of the country are looking at the Modi government with hope and have applauded the work done for them in the last two-and-a-half years,” Shah said. He added the central government had launched 93 pro-poor projects, inducing the other backward classes and the Dalits to repose faith in Modi.
To questions on how soon the Modi government would push for the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya, the BJP chief merely said it was part of the party’s election manifesto. While religious differentiation was flagged openly and unapologetically during the campaign, there was no overt campaign reference to the rebuilding of the Ram temple.
Shah pointed out the voters in Uttar Pradesh had stepped out of the Hindu-Muslim matrix and people wanted progress. The reinvention of the BJP, particularly Modi as a messiah of the poor, is complete. Not that the BJP is likely to let go of its attack on what it calls the politics of minority appeasement, but it is likely to “reform” minority thinking.
Shah said the BJP government would shut slaughter houses in Uttar Pradesh, largely owned by the Muslim community. Issues like triple talaq and a common civil code are also likely to be debated within the party.
The Uttar Pradesh victory will ensure better numbers in the Rajya Sabha for the BJP and help it ensure the victory of its nominee for President. Shah said the BJP now planned to roll out pro-poor schemes throughout the country, betting the agenda would win elections between now and 2019. These include elections later this year in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh and in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in 2018.
Saturday’s results will buttress the BJP’s confidence to repeat its 2014 performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections with Modi getting another chance of becoming prime minister. Shah will galvanise the organisation as only he can, with a degree of ruthlessness and single-mindedness, so that it puts down roots in areas where it did not exist. Manipur is the latest example of the BJP becoming a pan-India party, displacing the Congress.
A near majority in the Rajya Sabha and a President of his choice will make Modi the most influential prime minister since Indira Gandhi. But many in his party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh continue to be concerned at the untrammeled centralisation in decision making. In 2014, it was Modi’s 56 inch chest that his supporters flagged as his USP. This election has added a couple of inches to that.
