THE Congress is in a quandary about what it should do first: mobilise the masses on the ground or retool the party organisation. Its predicament is reflected in the twin exercises preoccupying the party: Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra and the impending election to seek a party president in October. However, on the other hand, the BJP has a catch-all strategy devised before the 2014 elections that seeks to optimise the amassing of voters and energise the organisation at every tier so that the two aspects work in tandem without contradictions.
The concept of micro-level booth management through the instruments of the “panna pramukh” (designated workers to scrutinise voter rolls) and the “labhartee sampark pramukh” (persons assigned to work with the recipients of the Centre’s welfare programmes), drawn from the RSS’ vast pool of “pracharaks”, best exemplifies this amalgam of the BJP.
It has set in motion the dual prongs in the prelude to the Lok Sabha battle. Typically, despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high ratings (according to periodic polls) and an active killer instinct that has demoralised a frayed Opposition, the BJP has left nothing to chance.
There’s probably time to unveil that big idea which ignites voters weeks before the polls, as the Pulwama terror attack did before 2019.But what is revealed by way of an early campaign has a tired ring to it, as demonstrated by Modi’s address to flag the celebration of the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence. The themes were combating corruption and ending dynastic politics and nepotism, subjects that stoked the electorate in 2014 through Modi’s masterly oratory and an ability to sound credible because 10 years of the UPA regime were deeply flawed by the very drawbacks that he spotlighted from the stump.
Modi regurgitated the “nationalist” plank, exhorting listeners to obliterate the last vestiges of a “colonial mindset” and not seek “certificates from the world” — the last an ironic statement from a person who, as Gujarat Chief Minister, strove hard to discard the hangover of the 2002 violence, which had provoked condemnation from the West, and earn the West’s approval. But it was the corruption charges implicating some principal opposition parties that expectedly drew the PM’s oratorical wrath. He called on people to treat the corrupt with “contempt” and “hatred”.
On Modi’s radar were the Aam Aadmi Party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, the Trinamool Congress, and, of course, the Congress. The first three regional entities have thwarted the BJP’s entry in their turf. While the party has registered gains in Telangana against the TRS, the AAP-ruled Delhi and the TMC-controlled West Bengal remain challenges.
However, the plethora of family patriarchs/matriarchs and their legatees crowding the Opposition’s stage has caused the BJP to believe that at least in the parliamentary election, people, especially the young, will vote with their “heads and not their hearts” and reject clannish politics because it choked the entrepreneurial spirit, counted as a gain of the changed demography.
Singly, it is probably tough for the regional players to take on the BJP effectively in a Lok Sabha poll. If they regroup into a front, with or without the Congress, that could potentially give a good fight on the presumed strengths of social equations, a countervailing narrative that focuses only on bread-butter issues impinging on price rise and complaints of unequal distribution of resources and aid from the government’s schemes. A combined front could reduce the BJP’s target of netting 350 seats to an air castle.
The BJP brass probably anticipated the possibility even though the Opposition remained scattered. At a recent meeting — significant because it laid the party’s emphasis — Amit Shah, Home Minister and key political resource person, identified 144 constituencies which the party lost in 2019, mainly in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and assigned charge of different clusters of seats to senior ministers, including Nirmala Sitharaman, Piyush Goyal and S Jaishankar.
