BJP A Season Of Alliances

The BJP wins back an estranged Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and secures a piggyback ride on the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu in its bid to offset anticipated losses in the Hindi heartland.

- Uday Mahurkar, Amarnath K. Menon, Kiran D. Tare and Kaushik Deka

When the BJP lost power in three Hindi heartland states—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh—in December last year, several party leaders expressed reservations about its prospects in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, just months away. In January, when the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) announced a tie-up in Uttar Pradesh—the state with 80 Lok Sabha seats, the highest tally in the country—panic gripped the BJP camp. In 2014, the BJP had won 71 seats in the state. Based on the new post-alliance arithmetic, the party’s tally was seen dropping to less than 30 seats. Even independent surveys predicted hard times for the BJP in Uttar Pradesh.

Under these circumstances, there was a demand in the Sangh Parivar to rake up the Ram temple issue. At one point, RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat demanded an appropriate law to pave the way for the construction of a Ram temple in Ayodhya, even though the case was being heard in the Supreme Court.

But Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he would wait for the court verdict. And instead embarked on a plan to build strategic alliances even while ridiculing the opposition parties’ efforts to seal their own tactical pre-poll alliances as mahamilavat (grand adulteration). The message to his lieutenant and BJP president Amit Shah was clear—reach out to old disgruntled allies and test the ground for new friends. In the past year, the BJP had lost three allies—the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam and the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. The prime minister felt pushing the Ram temple issue could annoy more allies, such as the Janata Dal (United) which banks heavily on Muslim votes.