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KEJRIWAL’S HAT-TRICK
Jolt to BJP in Delhi
Rajeev Sharma
Baby Mufflerman attends Arvind
Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal at Ramlila Maida
Delhi assembly
election results are a
stunner! It was a
David versus Goliath
fight as the ruling
party at the Centre,
the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had
fielded 70 union ministers, eleven
chief ministers and 270 MPs, apart
from the Big Two: Prime Minister
Narendra Modi and Home Minister
Amit Shah.
Time to think, pause and reflect
Shah's bravado of telling Delhi
voters to press the EVM button with
such anger that its current is felt in
Shaheen Bagh, the site of anti-CAA
protests for last over 50 days and the
main fulcrum of BJP’s campaign in Delhi elections, boomeranged on
himself. And that too after Shah was
the BJP’s lead campaigner, having
campaigned intensively in 38 of the
70 assembly constituencies of Delhi. However, the big takeaway for the BJP from this election was that it was able to increase its tally marginally to eight seats this time from its 2015 tally of just three seats and increase its vote share from 32 per cent in 2015 to 38.5 per cent in 2020. This was largely because of a lackluster performance from the Congress which came up with the second consecutive duck and failed to open its account in Delhi assembly. As many as 63 out of 70 candidates of the Congress lost their deposit as they failed to muster even one sixth of the votes. Why the Grand Old Party put up such a bad performance which resulted in halving of its previous vote share of less than ten percent? The political circles were agog with conspiracy theories that the Congress had “sacrificed” and secretly supported AAP knowing that it wasn’t capable to take on the BJP and that the BJP had to be kept away from gaining power in Delhi after 22 years. The exultant remarks made by several Congress leaders, including P Chidambaram, lent credence to such conspiracy theories. The Delhi election was no ordinary poll. It was a virtual referendum on many issues, the style of campaign and national versus local issues as it was the first election after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by Parliament on December 11. The BJP fought this election on national agenda, having little to say about the local needs of Delhi. The strategy failed once again as it had failed in Jharkhand too, the previous electoral loss for the BJP. The Delhi election also demonstrated and proved that a political party can still win an election solely on its work agenda and the development plank. This has to be one of the biggest lessons to be learnt from the Delhi elections. The Delhi election was no ordinary poll. It was a virtual referendum on many issues, the style of campaign and national versus local issues as it was the first election after the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by Parliament on December 11. The BJP fought this election on national agenda, having little to say about the local needs of Delhi. Now let’s consider the impact on the three major players -- AAP, BJP and Congress – in the aftermath of Delhi polls. AAP: The party would obviously find itself on an upward trajectory and would like to capitalize on its success in Delhi by spreading its wings. But AAP must beware of a déjà vu feeling of having done that before unsuccessfully. AAP must remember that in Delhi it ate into the Congress vote share (while the BJP vote bank remained intact), but on the national elections the same advantage won’t be in its kitty. This election could have posed an existential threat to AAP if it had lost, but not to the Congress. The GoP has the heft to absorb such an electoral loss but this luxury isn’t available to AAP. BJP: The saffron party has been made to eat a humble pie by a local player like AAP, but on the national scene, the BJP continues to be a Colossus and that status isn’t going to change. And yet one should not be surprised if the BJP were to continue with its Shaheen Bagh style of campaign in Bihar assembly polls, due in less than nine months, as polarizing voters on Hindu-Muslim plank, though firmly rejected by Delhi voters, is likely to get traction in Bihar assembly polls as Bihar is drastically different from Delhi and a Shaheen Bagh campaign style there is more likely to succeed in a casteriven society like Bihar. Moreover, polarization is the only trump card left for the BJP in next assembly elections in important states like West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat before the grand finale of the 2024 General elections. Congress: The Congress party’s dismal performance in Delhi elections 2020 may be a shocker for a party that ruled Delhi for three successive full tenures under the leadership of the late Sheila Dixit, but the Delhi loss doesn’t pose an existential crisis for it. Big national parties are known to take such electoral losses routinely. The Congress doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel and only needs to reimplement its own resolution in Pachmarhi in 1998: prepare itself for embracing more and more allies to take on the ruling party, the BJP. After the Delhi results, the BJP will have to thrash out a new campaign model in next assembly polls as the Shaheen Bagh model has been punctured by AAP. Significantly, a day after the February 8 polling in Delhi, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) general secretary Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi came up with an intriguing remark: “The Hindu community is not synonymous with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and that opposing BJP does not amount to opposing Hindus.” This may well be interpreted as a RSS nudge to the BJP to recalibrate and re-strategize its future election campaigns. The BJP finds itself in a tight spot after the usual poll issues like the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir are long dusted. Even Pakistan-bashing no longer helps! |