No one had said the run-up to the general elections would be boring. But what’s the right word for the collective state of mind we find ourselves in presently? Shashi Tharoor may have offered ‘discombobulated’. Insta-kids may just say ‘shook’. Even by the standards of the shock-mongerers and scandal junkies we have become—where the next headline has to be dripping tabloid yellow and the next fix must leave us ever more off-balance—the political events over the last fortnight have been rather astounding.
You could say it started with Nitish Kumar’s stunning political pirouette over a month ago. It has ended with an event that marks another U-turn, this time unfolding in agonising slow motion and forced by circumstance rather than taken by volition. It has taken Arvind Kejriwal a full 180 degrees from his original perch as a patent-holder on public morality to a place where he proposes to run a state government from prison.
The puppet master in both cases is the same: the ruling BJP, which is itself in the midst of shaking off the chastisement that has come its way unbidden via a series of stern, unsmiling Supreme Court rulings on electoral bonds, and perchance finds the creation of parallel headlines a useful distraction for a punch-drunk populace. They are not fully unconnected, of course. In some of the later revelations, we now see that one of the accused-turned-approvers in the Delhi liquor scam had in the interim donated good money to the BJP via electoral bonds. Also to the BRS!
But we need not get detained here by the nitty gritty of either the case that has now swept the entire top layer of the Aam Aadmi Party leadership into various legal stages of incarceration or the dizzying financial rabbit-holes that the other one takes us through. It would suffice to leave a sticky note here to remind everyone that The New Indian Express was the one that broke the first story on AAP’s liquor policy. And capable public-spirited individuals (and collectives) are putting Arun Jaitley’s masterpiece to a good post-mortem: the case is anyway complex enough to have left an ace lawyer like Harish Salve, who perhaps charges the worth of a good-sized electoral bond by the hour, with scalded omelette on his face in full court. Our gaze must be equally fixed on its effect on the political landscape, which is going into high flame with just three weeks or so left for voting in a general election. And everyone is equally foxed on that front.
What explains the BJP’s decision to go for broke in this manner? Unlike with plain old loyalty reversals like with Nitish or the RLD’s Jayant Chaudhary, here things are not fully self-explanatory on the tactical plane. Because even the best possible outcomes for it do not, at first sight, seem commensurate with the political risk it is courting. Why would they want to see a sitting chief minister in jail on the eve of elections? And almost directly ask to be screamed at by Opposition campaign stars and loudspeakers as being heavy-handed and resorting to a vindictive weaponisation of central agencies—in fact reinforcing, rather than disarming or deflecting, a pre-existing negative narrative?
The quantifiable benefits, if they do come about, are not great. Delhi, even with the Congress and AAP pooling its votes, was fifty-fifty and even theoretically at most they can gain one or two seats. On the other hand, in Punjab—with its history of dissent towards the Dilli durbar, given a fresh coat of paint recently with the farm protests—it may actually be a vitamin shot for AAP.
Its presence in Haryana is still not significant enough to warrant even this sentence. And the only other playfield where it enters its name is Gujarat, where again a Congress-AAP union offers an interesting experiment. But no one expects a swing that would alter national equations there—the only conceivable argument is that the BJP wishes to stub out the chances of even a moral victory to the Opposition in Narendra Modi’s home state. Symbolically, a seat in Gujarat perhaps weighs as much as two-three in, say, Odisha.
On the other hand, on the friable plane of perceptions, what accrues to the BJP’s image plays out on the national stage. Expect West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee to not exactly be coy or dulcet-toned as she raises the issue of central excess. Likewise for the Yadav phalanx of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Haryana’s Jat patriarchs in the Congress, Karnataka’s D K Shivakumar—all of them singed episodically by the same approach, and thus ready and authentic with their anger.
Add to that list Tamil Nadu’s M K Stalin, Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan, Andhra’s newly alienated Jagan Reddy—not to mention the BRS in Telangana, which has managed to find itself a meaty walk-on part in the Delhi liquor scam and consequently has seen the former chief minister’s daughter also land in gaol. The other name people are forgetting amidst all the hullabaloo over Kejriwal is that of Hemant Soren, who thought it fit to resign as Jharkhand chief minister before walking off to his cell. Why would a ruling party that wants to minimise Opposition chances hand them a whole pantheon of martyrs with which to move the electorate to sympathy?
Super-confidence, to the point where some would say it borders on hubris? Or a well-thought-out burst of aggression as a double bluff, coming from a place that’s less secure than the sense it puts out for public consumption? That is, offence as another line of defence? For, the outward impression this generates is surely that of a party which can only be utterly sure of its hold on power—where no chance exists of a blowback that could shake its boat.
In this reading of what the BJP would like to put out at the level of pure animal signalling, a more visibly insecure party would play safer. And that would actually embolden the rivals. This take-no-prisoner approach, to twist the literal facts metaphorically, on the other hand creates a ground of invincibility and fear. The idea that this is an entity that acts on the promises and threats it makes, in open-air speeches or behind closed doors. Once a promise, pledge or threat is not acted on, the next one loses its value. That signal goes out both to political parties—friends, potential friends, foes—as well as to the masses of bhakts and beneficiaries out there.
Every political party stakes some kind of claim on public morality, but most often this is not universally accepted and appeals only to those who anyway have a confirmation bias. Even AAP, whose whole raison d’être was based on such a claim, too has joined the ranks of other parties on this front. The BJP’s tactical approach, which could confound any attempt at conclusive analysis, most certainly goes beyond that realm of naivete.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor
Follow her on X @santwana99