THE WAKE-UP CALL

Disappointing results in the assembly polls raise questions about the BJP’s overdependence on Brand Modi

- Anilesh S. Mahajan

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is reeling from the shock of the West Bengal assembly poll results, where despite its vaulting ambitions, the party has managed a far more modest 77 legislators to its name in a 294-member house. The BJP had turned the state election into a prestige issue, deploying its poll management specialists from across the country, and using Amit Shah’s ‘shock and awe’ tactics to shake up things. The party, and Shah especially, had trumpeted its predictions of winning more than 200 seats. Now it’s left to review the failure to maintain the 40.7 per cent vote share it had in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll.

In the northeast, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured a second term in Assam, but the victory was dimmed by the happenings next door. The BJP’s expedition into Bengal was crucial to the party’s plan, but it has exposed frailties, particularly the lack of a middle-level leadership to mobilise booth-level workers. The BJP tried to draft party leaders from other state units to fill this gap, but it was a flawed strategy in retrospect. It appears playing the ‘Bengali Pride’ card worked to Mamata’s advantage, after all—her dig at pravasi karyakartas put the BJP on the backfoot. While in Assam, the party had local leaders like Sarbananda Sonowal and Himanta Biswa Sarma, in Bengal many of the candidates fielded were ‘imported’ from the TMC, Congress and left parties. Leaders of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ‘ideological parent’ of the BJP, say it had to pay for the sins of “commission [in importing leaders] and omission [ignoring their own partymen’s claims]”.