2024 LS polls: BJP aims the bull's eye
SUBHASHIS MITTRA - Wide Angle
The BJP nurtures high hopes that the 2024 Lok Sabha elections can see it break new ground in the southern region similar to its show in West Bengal and Odisha in 2019.
The confidence stems from the dwindling fortunes of the Congress, which even in its past bad runs retained solid presence in south India, weakening of traditionally strong regional parties and the continued national consolidation of the saffron party.
At least since its victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has worked to spread its reach and break the popular image of being a “north Indian” party.
While the party has been fairly successful in the Northeast, it is now focusing on southern India.
The nomination to the Rajya Sabha of people from four southern states clearly underscores its ambitions.
The saffron party picked four eminent persons from as many southern states as its choice of nominated Rajya Sabha MPs, leaving little to imagination about the politics behind this.
In the nomination of the script-writer of blockbuster Telugu films and a revered seer in Karnataka, and in an issue being made of changing Hyderabad’s name, the political message is clear — the party wants to spread out south of the Vindhyas.
Assembly elections are due in Karnataka in about 10 months, and in Telangana — where the BJP held its recent meeting of the party’s national executive — before the end of 2023. The elections to the Andhra Pradesh Assembly will be held along with Lok Sabha polls in the summer of 2024. Kerala and Tamil Nadu held their state elections last year.
The BJP is already in power in Karnataka, courtesy the cross-over by a critical number of legislators in 2019, thus giving the party a narrow majority in the House. Such splitting of rival parties has been a standard playbook. That is how it came to power most recently in Maharashtra, and in Madhya Pradesh in 2020. The ploy nearly worked in Rajasthan too.
In West Bengal and Punjab, splits in rival parties were supported before the state elections, but the party fared poorly in both.
Much earlier, the strategy worked in Assam in 2016 after Himanta Biswa Sarma had crossed over. Indeed, it is arguable that without such defections the party would not have been as comfortably placed as it is for assuring its candidate of victory in this month’s election of the country’s next president.
As for Telangana, it remains to be seen if K Chandrashekar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), which has an overwhelming majority in the state, is able to retain support. As is typical in the regional parties, the TRS also suffers from the dominance of a single family. The chief minister’s nephew is finance minister, his son is also a Cabinet minister, and his daughter was a member of Parliament before moving to the state legislative council.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a particular issue of such one-family dominance during his visit to the state in May, terming dynastic parties a threat to the country and to democracy. While similar criticisms had been aired in the 2018 state elections, to no apparent effect, it is possible that some party leaders may want to look for options, which could boost the BJP’s chances.
It is normal in such family-dominated parties that ambitious leaders do not find enough space to grow after a while and look for alternatives. Since the Assembly elections are more than a year away, the BJP has time to prepare. The BJP polled just about 7.1 per cent of the vote in the 2018 Assembly elections, but its vote share went over 19 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections in 2019.
The Congress, the second-largest party in the state, may also see its support shift, which might benefit the BJP. The party clearly intends to increase its pan-Indian dominance and its ambition will now be tested in Telangana.
The BJP top brass at the party's national executive in Hyderabad targeted south India, where barring Karnataka it won only four out of 101 seats of four states in 2019, as the region for its next round of growth.
The BJP's back to back sweep of north and west India has powered its big win in the 2014 and 2019 polls, and the party has constantly tried to expand its footprint in east and south India to ensure that any drop in its tally in its strongholds does not mar its national ambition.
It has broken new ground in eastern states like West Bengal and Odisha and swept the Northeast but the field beyond the Vindhyas has so far proved less fertile.
While Karnataka has remained a BJP stronghold, more so in Lok Sabha polls, the remaining four states -- Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu -- have been largely untouched by the saffron wave which rode on Modi's appeal to bring the party two back-to-back wins, a feat last achieved by the Congress in 1984.
Conditions for the BJP, its leaders believe, are more ripe than ever in the region, with traditionally strong parties like the TDP in Andhra Pradesh and the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu left weakened and struggling to mount a strong challenge to the government headed by the YSR Congress and the DMK respectively.
This coupled with the Congress being not in a position to offer a national alternative has also opened new possibilities for the BJP, including in the Left-ruled Kerala where the presence of around 45 per cent minorities had made the state a particularly tough nut to crack for the party.
The BJP's fresh push in peninsular India comes after it appeared for close to two decades that its southern march had failed to rise beyond the borders of Karnataka where it first came to power in 2008.
Absence of strong state leaders and the tactic of deferring to regional allies instead of building on its base during the earlier phase of its ascent in the Vajpayee-Advani era of late 90s and early 2000s had stalled the BJP in the then undivided state of Andhra Pradesh, where it had won nine seats in 1999 in alliance with the TDP, and Tamil Nadu, where it bagged four members in the same year. This remains its best show in the two states.
Southern India, which fares better than most Indian states on socio-economic indicators, has been less receptive to the BJP's welfarism model so far while the party's another plank of Hindutva has also not worked as effectively there as in other regions.
Political observers believe that ruling regional parties in states like Tamil Nadu and Telangana have begun cleverly playing up the regional identity and accusing the BJP of pushing its hegemonic religious and language agenda in their bid to touch a chord with voters.
This was a strategy built around ethnic sub-nationalism the Trinamool Congress led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee used effectively to quell the saffron challenge in the 2021 assembly polls.
Absence of strong state leaders has been seen as a key reason behind the BJP's failure to turn its fortunes around in these states, and the party seems to have learnt its lessons.
Of all the four states, Telangana appears to be best bet for the party as of now. But defeating the TRS, which has had a virtual monopoly on the state politics since its birth, remains an uphill task.
As then BJP president, Amit Shah, now the Union home minister, had stitched up an ambitious plan to expand the party's footprints in "Coromandel" states, a reference to states along the south and eastern coasts.
This met partial success as the party put up its best ever show by winning 17 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in West Bengal in 2019. It also won eight of the 21 seats in Odisha, a state where it had declined considerably after the ruling BJD snapped ties with the party, besides four of 17 in Telangana.
Whether its Coromandel plan will bring it a bountiful harvest in the southern states in 2024 similar to what it did in West Bengal and Odisha in 2019 will be interesting to watch.