Why The BJP Won And The Congress Failed Maharashtra

The political pundits are out – analysing the one sided electoral results in Maharashtra that have firmly ensconced the BJP led Mahayuti in power. The results have virtually wiped out the Congress party, the Uddhav Thackeray Shiv Sena and Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party passing the mantle firmly to the BJP (with Devendra Fadnavis in charge), Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s NCP.

Why? The Opposition is licking its wounds and crying about the EVMs but the story goes far beyond this. Money, of course yes, but funds distributed more cleverly than just handouts. The various government yojana for women, housing, backwards, Dalits were made to work and there is probably not a voter in Maharashtra who has not benefited from these in the past couple of years definitely. In preparation for the polls, the Maharashtra government ensured under the BJP tutelage that money ranging from Rs 1000 to over Rs one lakh (housing) reached the coffers of the ordinary man. Not necessarily the minorities, probably none at all, but definitely to the bank accounts of all others including the Dalits who were singled out for attention.

Closer to the polls almost every voter got a phone call to vote, with those living in neighbouring states being lured with the promise of petrol costs, food and of course some money for their effort to reach their village and cast their vote. This writer knows personally of several lower middle class families who took leave to go back to their Maharashtra village on voting day. Asked about the rush, they said they would be paid for the travel costs, and besides they were benefiting from the various schemes and did not want this to stop.

Maharashtra is a rich state, and one has to remember that it is nicer to its people than the Hindi belt states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Here, money schemes have been made to function to some extent. Infrastructure and some level of welfare is better organised than in the north Indian states. Besides we have to remember that development and corruption are issues that barely influence the vote. The Congress attack on industrialist Gautam Adani merely reinforced the anti- view but did not influence the vote simply because the common voters in India, and Maharashtra, live with corruption on a daily basis. For them there is no real link between Adani and the bribes paid by them on a daily basis to the local administration for getting jobs done. As they have told reporters for decades, over and over again, though somehow we refused to listen and absorb, “how does this matter, we still have to give a bribe to the police constable, to the munsif, to everyone, we live with corruption.”

They said the same when VP Singh and the Jan Morcha were sweeping across north India with Bofors and corruption but voted him in. This is because it was the first such campaign after independence and he and his men had been able to convince the voter that this would change. That the new government would actually work to finish corruption and make life easier for the masses. They gave the Janata Dal the opportunity, and after that was lost, the people have either joined the corrupt process as we can see increasingly now or turned their votes away in complete and total disillusionment. So Adani might create ripples in the US, and Australia and Kenya, but at home he is barely an issue with the voters for whom all business is corrupt and hence not a vote influencer.

Development barely matters as over seven decades the masses have settled into Dharavi, with many making more money than the slum requires to live in, not moving out either. Bad roads, garbage, dirt and squalor are all part of life for the people of India who have not known better, and what is worse have ceased to demand better. This pales as the Maharashtra elections have shown, besides the money that is actually available to them through government schemes and hand out doles every now and again. This is the new kid on the block, and in the psyche of the average voter at least the money is real, unlike the promises that they have heard ad nauseum, over and over again from all the political parties and candidates.

Then comes equality and justice, caste and religion. In Maharashtra the BJP and RSS campaign for Hindutva has been able to cut through caste; and has consolidated religion. The Muslims, fearful and scared, have retreated into ghettos. And the majority masses have come together in a new bonding that is presented as an empowerment package for the present and the future. Diversity is at best an elitist slogan, meaning little to the voter on the ground who does not think it is his or her job to preserve democracy through proactive measures. There is a certain belief that it exists, and as for rights and equality when did the ordinary person have this to feel its absence now. The minorities do but then they have been painted with the segregation brush and pushed into the ‘others’ alcove without their neighbours even realising or acknowledging it. Yes at this moment large scale violence and attacks on the minorities are not acceptable to most but these are also in the process of being normalised, thanks also to the media that plays a nasty and vicious role in covering incidents of communalism.

The Opposition has been looking for simple solutions, and spending little to no time in understanding the disillusionment of the voter with the old, dull, status quo politics. It does not even have the organisation or the cadres that can cut into the BJP-RSS appeal. In Maharashtra the RSS fanned across the polling booths, held meetings from the ground up, organised booths and polling committees, had lists of voters and their phone numbers to be called and contacted — in short along with money it brought in discipline of a level that the Congress can perhaps not even dream of. Sharad Pawar has passed his prime and has little to no control over his party. Uddhav Thackeray was trying hard to overturn his fathers legacy of communalism and ‘insider-outsider’ hate but could not find a convincing path in the midst of the splits engineered in the Shiv Sena by big money.

The Congress party seemed to have given up even before the elections began. Except for the attack on Adani, and a bit about price rise, employment and diversity, it had little to offer to the voter except intense factionalism. A party adrift it again failed to read the ground and relied yet again on the ‘there is no other alternative’ factor that it has not been able to shake off since decades now. The complacency since the better performance in the Lok Sabha elections proved to be its undoing, as little was done by the party, to gear up for the mother of all elections given the money involved. It is no secret that control over Maharashtra is control over big money. The party was no match at all for the BJP-RSS, and the real problem is that it did not even try to compete in real terms. Adrift and lost yet again.

The real issue is the inability of the Congress party to target and shatter the status quo. Party luminaries in the first press conference after the Maharashtra defeat said that the agenda of caste census, corruption et all would continue, and the Congress will not take the devastating state results as a referendum to do otherwise. But perhaps it needs to do exactly that, not as a reaction but through a process of honest introspection. The last has become difficult in the Congress party, but it is necessary to come out with a program that gets away from Adani and caste census per se and into the fundamentals of a new and mass based economic and social order. This needs leadership, thought and consultation that will have to go far beyond the power brokers and managers of the party.

The Congress party has to realise that its main plank is flawed where the discerning voter is concerned. Corruption is not and has not been the preserve of the BJP. Every single voter knows that and hence while the Adani masala attracts eyeballs it does not swing the vote on its own. Caste census also seems to be a promise in the air, given the Congress party’s record on the implementation of the Mandal commission report. This had brought the BJP and the Congress together, and again does not carry the teeth that Rahul Gandhi might have hoped for. Diversity is of course something that Rahul Gandhi has adopted with conviction, but the party has to think about why the Muslims in UP and the Sikhs in Punjab for instance prefer the other opposition alternatives to the grand old party. It is not enough to try and sneak in through the back door, in the hope that life becomes so tough for the minority communities that they turn to the Congress party eventually. Again the TINA factor at play. This will only happen piecemeal given the fact that there is a hard agenda driven political party on the scene now, and throw up election results of the Maharashtra kind that will leave the Congress flabbergasted over the turn of the tide.

Maharashtra is a warning. That the status quo in all its various forms has to be broken. And only a party that has a solid organisation, and a new convincing agenda, can face up to the BJP-RSS in any substantial way. Rahul Gandhi still has the advantage of being relatively new in the field- this will not last for much longer–and he needs to make full use of this by bringing in a new strategy and a new solid agenda that cuts through the polarisation of classes, castes and communities. But first he has to build an organisation, not reactivate it as there is no organisation left to revive.