The results of the Bihar Assembly elections have come under a cloud with serious allegations being raised by the RJD and the Mahagathbandhan (MGB). After a virtual neck-to-neck fight through the day, towards Tuesday evening, the main opposition party, the RJD, alleged attempts by the chief minister’s office to subvert the counting process. It cited names of constituencies where it claimed that its candidates had been told that they had won but before they were given certificates of victory, they were declared as having lost the election. It is well known that in about 20 seats, the leads on either side were very small—often only in two figures—and it is in these that all the disputes have been raised. The allegations are serious and need to be probed.
This dispute notwithstanding, it is possible to make some pertinent observations about the elections, beyond victory and defeat. It is clear for instance, as analysts like Prannoy Roy pointed out during television discussions, that in relation to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, there had been a massive swing of about 12% votes against the NDA. Even though voting behaviour in Parliament and Assembly elections are not really comparable, the magnitude of this swing does indicate a significant loss of support. Even the high-decibel campaigns, like the one to cash upon actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide, simply did not work. Nor did the Ram temple issue, till the prime minister himself descended to communalise the campaign in its third phase. So, the 12% swing is really what we see after the communalisation of the campaign.
While this is important, the more interesting issue is altogether different: It is not that the NDA lost
so much support but that the BJP managed to emerge strong—despite the immense suffering caused by the sudden imposition of the lockdown and complete abdication of responsibility by the Central and state governments. After all, in terms of seats, it has won only one less than the RJD, the largest party, and in terms of vote shares, it came second with 19.5% votes against the RJD’s 23.1%.
I was initially expecting the NDA to do much better as many friends who were out on the streets, speaking to and helping the hapless migrant workers with food, reported that most of them saw Covid-19 as a cosmic disaster where ‘Modiji’ simply had no option but to do what he did. There are other aspects of the mythical figure of ‘Modiji’ that we cannot possibly go into here but this aspect of an almost karmic fatalism is something that the prime minister knows how to exploit. And he does so without compunction.
Modern democratic politics, let us note parenthetically, is actually about transformation and mass involvement in politics. It is about breaking the traditionally inherited passive fatalism; it is about people taking their destiny in their own hands. But once inserted into democratic politics, this fatalism can also be—and has repeatedly proved to be—raw material for all kinds of anti-democratic politics.
As lakhs and lakhs of migrant workers returned to Bihar, along with their families and belongings, they weren’t exactly greeted with warmth at the state’s borders. Rather, they were simply seen as possible carriers of disease and hence to be put away in appalling ‘quarantine camps’. The little anger that was apparent from that stage on was directed at Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his party.
What was truly transformative, it seems now, was the availability of a different understanding that linked the tragic suffering of the workers to the fact that there are no employment opportunities within Bihar itself; to the fact that Bihar had remained a place from where people left for other climes in search of employment. The youthful figure of Tejashwi Yadav, pushing for a change beyond the old plank of ‘social justice’ and insisting on ‘economic justice’, for creating employment locally, seems to have caught the imagination of the youth of the state. The massive turnout in Tejashwi’s and MGB’s rallies was an indication that something was striking a chord.
It is here that the presence of the Left, the CPI(ML) Liberation in particular, as part of the MGB certainly helped shape the discourse. And as Dipankar Bhattacharya, the party’s general secretary, put it, the Left had been present on the ground, working with the migrants returning from Delhi and other places. The CPI(ML)’s longer-term work surely must have paid off but there seems to be little doubt, given its performance even in areas that are not its traditional areas of influence, that its presence at this crucial juncture too has played a significant role. This greater reach was enabled by the fact that already during the 2019 Parliament election, the CPI(ML) had reached a tacit understanding with the RJD. If this understanding develops, it could indicate longer-term possibilities of realignment with ‘economic justice’ reinforcing social justice.
The takeaway then is that there is never any straight and obvious connection between ‘experience’ and the conclusions we might draw from them. The experience of the lockdown too did not mean anything in itself. It can make sense only when inserted into a meaningful narrative. Till the new narrative of employment and governmental responsibility made the lockdown experience understandable in a different way, it was the karmic narrative that gave meaning to it. That this narrative was reinforced by high levels of myth-building via electronic media makes no difference to the fact that the fatalism is already there, waiting to be exploited. The challenge for those who want to contest the BJP’s position is to really provide for possibilities of making sense of popular experience in ways different from such a karmic narrative.
Aditya Nigam
Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi