The Karnataka Assembly results must have shocked even those who had been seeing the writing on the wall for some time now. For, the defeat was so comprehensive and staggering. One at least thought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would put up a fight. Especially given the Congress’ propensity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — and its leaders didn’t surprise their detractors by making indecent personal comments on the Prime Minister or unnecessarily indulging in a Hanuman controversy.
In Karnataka, despite the Congress’ comprehensive victory, it was the BJP that seemed to have lost power. This assessment may appear to be unfair towards the Congress, especially in the wake of the spectacular showing in the Assembly elections, but not when one micro-analyses the results. Every political party connected to the roots has about 15-20 percent of fixed voters; they will remain loyal to the party come what may. The BJP and the Congress, in the states where they are strong, too have this loyal vote-bank. One can see the same pattern among other regional parties, especially caste-based ones like the SP and the RJD.
In India, an election is largely decided by 10-15 percent floating voters, mostly Hindus, who exercise their electoral rights as per their understanding of the political scenario, the performance of parties, et al. Being young, educated, urbane voters, they are largely expected to go the BJP way more often than not. But when they don’t, the impact is devastating for the saffron party, as in 2023 Karnataka, or as was the case in the 2009 Lok Sabha polls. This vote-bank is Hindu, and when time comes it votes like a Hindu, but it never stops him from leaving a “Hindu party” when it gets disappointed. This group is very conscientious but also quite judgemental.
So, what should the BJP do? Should it blame this unreliable bunch of voters who switch sides at the drop of a hat? The BJP would be tempted to jump to this conclusion, but only to harm its prospect indefinitely. For, it is this ‘unreliable’ voter that has been eating from the hands of Narendra Modi, first as the chief minister of Gujarat and now as Prime Minister of this country. It’s actually not as unreliable as it appears, after all.
This ‘unreliable’ voter has certain basic expectations from the party it votes into power. Once met, it doesn’t leave. No wonder, this vote-bank refused to leave the side of Yogi Adityanath when he approached the second term. It is this very vote-bank that almost left the BJP in Uttarakhand, but came back to the fold when newly chosen CM Pushkar Singh Dhami made amends to the blunders of his predecessors — one of them being the decision to repeal the Char Dham Devasthanam Board Act, which had brought over 50 temples, including Char Dham shrines of Gangotri, Yamunotri, Badrinath and Kedarnath, under state control.
So, what went wrong in Karnataka for the BJP? Of course, it was the perception of being a corrupt, inefficient government running a lackadaisical administration that damaged the reputation of the state dispensation. One can say, for the argument’s sake, that the Congress governments in the state had been equally, if not more, corrupt — then why this special treatment for the BJP? Because those who live by the sword invariably die by it! Since the saffron party has made a virtue out of probity and clean governance, people tend to judge it via a different parameter. It’s time the BJP realised this. And this parameter isn’t just administrative or related to corruption. It’s equally, if not more, related to its failure to forcefully spell out its ideology — Hindutva — and the state’s failure to stand up to Islamist terror.
The biggest, though the least deliberated upon, reason for the BJP’s electoral rout has been the lack of any perceptible ideological difference between the BJP and the Congress in Karnataka. Yes, the party did raise the issue of Hanuman during the election campaigning, but then the voters are smarter than that: They can easily see the political desperation of taking refuge in Hanuman during the poll season.
This is most clearly evident in the rude shock that the results from coastal Karnataka, a traditional BJP stronghold, gave to the saffron party. Though the loss of seats may not seem so steep — going down from the BJP’s tally of 16 seats in 2018 to 13 seats this time — it is the dip in the vote-share that should worry the party leadership. The BJP’s vote-share in the region has stumbled almost by half in many seats. This means the party has lost more than just the ‘unreliable’ votes in the region; it lost even the hardcore ones. And that should be a big concern for the BJP. Interestingly, the coastal belt of Karnataka includes Udupi which first saw the hijab controversy that later spread to other parts of the state.
Though many Left-‘liberal’ commentators would try to twist this verdict to project how hijab was a non-issue, the reality is just the opposite: The region has seen the rise of Islamist forces, with the Hindutva activists targeted and killed/maimed by PFI terrorists as the state looked the other way. The murder of 32-year-old BJP youth-wing worker Praveen Nettaru in the coastal district of Dakshina Kannada in July last year, for instance, sparked widespread outrage; it saw mass resignations by party workers and also the vehicle of state unit president Nalin Kumar Kateel was targeted. Then, there was the killing of a 23-year-old RSS activist in the Shivamogga district in February 2022 which saw BJP workers come out in protest in large numbers.
The party and the government it led in Karnataka not just failed to protect Hindutva activists, but also didn’t do enough to look after the families of those killed during the previous Congress dispensation. There are many instances of callous indifference — from the story of Meenakshamma, the mother of a BJP leader killed by PFI terrorists in 2015, who, as per a story by The Print in 2022, “collects plastic trash to eke out a living, lives in penury and is the sole caretaker of her grandson”, to Yashoda, whose son Prashanth Poojary was again hacked to death by PFI men in 2015, surviving on the “rent she receives from their flower shop — where her son was killed — and a widow pension of Rs 600”.
How can a party that fails to look after its own cadre expect to win? The BJP can consider itself lucky that it has got a central leadership that people largely find to be credible (along with a credible governance record of a few BJP states, especially Uttar Pradesh and Assam) — and to add to it is the Opposition that is rudderless and bottomless. But then in politics, things don’t take long to change. It, after all, just needs a spark to burn the whole house down.
The BJP’s problem, however, is bigger than just Karnataka’s. And it’s not just confined to the saffron party. Even the changing nature of the RSS may have some role to play in this. But more of that in the second part of the series.
(This is Part 1 of the two-part series)
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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