BJP falls back on Hindutva after election setbacks

The BJP is back to its time-tested politics of polarisation, especially in Uttar Pradesh, where byelections to 10 Assembly seats are scheduled this year, and in Jharkhand, Haryana, and Maharashtra which will elect new Assemblies this year. The Lok Sabha results in these States were not too heartening for the BJP. With no new narrative at its command to capture the imagination of voters, the party is falling back on Hindutva, whether it is raising the pitch over “love jehad” and “land jehad” in Jharkhand, using the “Aurangzeb Fan Club” jibe in Maharashtra, or asking eateries on the Kanwar Yatra route in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand to display their owners’ names.

The Narendra Modi government’s move to lift the decades-old ban on government officials participating in RSS events is another move in this direction. These decisions are being steamrolled despite opposition from allies like the Janata Dal (United) and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) in Bihar and the Rashtriya Lok Dal in Uttar Pradesh.

The Supreme Court on July 22 imposed an interim stay on the Uttar Pradesh (and other States) administration order asking eateries on the Kanwar Yatra route to display names of owners and staff. (On July 26, the stay was extended until August 5, the next date of hearing on petitions challenging the order.) Undeterred, the BJP is doubling down on its communal rhetoric.

This renewed push for polarisation is prompted, at least in part and especially in Uttar Pradesh, by the urgent need to paper over differences within the party. While a section of leaders has rallied behind Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, others are with the Kushwaha leader and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya, who seems to have the backing of the BJP’s central leadership. Maurya is an OBC leader who was tipped to be Chief Minister in 2017.

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Fissures in the party deepened after the Lok Sabha election debacle in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won only 33 of the 80 seats, down from 62 in 2019 and 71 in 2014, leaving the party exposed to attacks from a strengthened opposition. Besides the Adityanath-Maurya rift, there are widespread reports of serious differences between Adityanath and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

For the first time in 10 years, National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners in Uttar Pradesh (Anupriya Patel, Sanjay Nishad, and Om Prakash Rajbhar) have questioned the BJP-led government on issues such as alleged discrimination against OBC candidates applying for government jobs, mandatory digital attendance for teachers (now put on hold), and the “misuse of bulldozers”. Voices within the BJP are also heard criticising the Chief Minister’s style of functioning. The upcoming byelections are being seen as a referendum on Adityanath’s rule. Against this backdrop, the BJP has little hope of successfully running a personality-oriented campaign, and this may be a reason for reverting to the Hindutva plank.

BJP lost tribal seats in Jharkhand

In Jharkhand, the BJP could not win any of the five tribal seats in the Lok Sabha election. All its star candidates, Arjun Munda, Sita Soren, and Gita Koda, lost, and this in a State where the party has been in power for the most part since 2000 when it was carved out of Bihar.

The party faced a tribal backlash after Chief Minister and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader Hemant Soren was sent to jail in a graft case. The All Jharkhand Students Union, an NDA ally, has been losing its base among Kurmis, the second largest population group in Jharkhand. The BJP is trying to deal with the situation by raising the bogey of Muslims as the “other” that the tribal people must fight. Now that Hemant Soren is out on bail and back as Chief Minister, the BJP hopes that the sympathy factor for him will peter out and the issue of illegal settlers can be used to turn attention to the narrative of a demographic threat to tribal people.

JMM leader Hemant Soren comes out of Ranchi’s Birsa Munda Central Jail after getting bail in a money laundering case linked to land purchase, on June 28. Soren was reinstated as Chief Minister shortly thereafter.  | Photo Credit: PTI

Tribal people account for over 26 per cent of the population in Jharkhand, Kurmis are 16 per cent, and Muslims about 14.5 per cent. The JMM-Congress-CPI(M-L) alliance seems to have a hold over the Muslim vote; it also draws the majority of tribal and a good chunk of Kurmi votes.

Addressing party workers in Ranchi on July 20, Shah accused Hemant Soren of propagating “land jehad” and “love jehad”. He alleged that this was bringing demographic changes in Jharkhand. Illegal immigrants from Bangladesh (read Muslims) were marrying tribal women and settling in the State by buying land, he claimed.

The BJP MP from Godda, Nishikant Dubey, demanded in the Lok Sabha on July 25 that the National Register of Citizens be implemented in Jharkhand and a separate Union Territory incorporating parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal be created to deal with the problem of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. A furious Trinamool Congress asked for the “divisive” remarks to be expunged from House records.

In April, the Prime Minister reacted to reports of schools in Muslim-dominated localities having declared Friday their weekly holiday by accusing the JMM of trying to start a fight with Christians.

A Jharkhand High Court order of July 3 directing the State government to repatriate illegal immigrants from Bangladesh gave some teeth to the BJP’s campaign. The court is hearing a PIL petition that alleges that illegal migrants are marrying tribal women to secure land and are settling in areas like Jamtara, Godda, Dumka, Sahibganj, Deoghar, and Pakur. The court recently reprimanded the State government for not furnishing proper responses.

Haryana: Pitting Muslims against OBCs

Playing Muslims off against Backward Classes seems to be the strategy in Haryana too. Addressing a “Backward Classes Samman Sammelan” in Haryana’s Mahendragarh on July 16, Shah said the Congress took away reservation from Backward Classes and gave it to Muslims in Karnataka and would do the same in Haryana if it came to power. He promised that the BJP would not allow Muslim reservation in Haryana.

Haryana’s OBC Chief Minister Nayab Saini replaced Manohar Lal Khattar, a Khatri by caste, in March. The move was part of the BJP’s strategy to mobilise OBCs and Dalits against the Congress’ dominant Jat leadership under Bhupinder Singh Hooda. The Congress is also likely to draw a sizeable number of Muslim votes here.

Kanwar Yatra pilgrims near Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. The State government order directing eateries on the Yatra route to display names of owners and staff was clearly a divisive strategy. | Photo Credit: R.V. MOORTHY

The OBCs, comprising 78 big and small castes, make up 40 per cent of Haryana’s population, but being heavily splintered, they lack effective leadership and influence over all castes in the group. The Jats, 27 per cent of the population, are more assertive politically. Dalits comprise 20 per cent and Muslims 7 per cent. Shah is attempting to create a larger OBC narrative by painting Muslims as cutting into the OBC share of the pie.

‘Aurangzeb Fan Club’: Amit Shah on MVA

This divisive strategy was evident in Maharashtra too. On July 21, addressing a BJP State convention in Pune, Shah called the Maha Vikas Aghadi an “Aurangzeb Fan Club”. “This Aurangzeb Fan Club cannot ensure the security of the country.... Uddhav Thackeray, who calls himself Balasaheb’s heir, is sitting with those who fed biryani to Kasab.... Uddhav Thackeray is sitting in the lap of those who support PFI,” he said. The BJP has often invoked the imagery of Aurangzeb to portray medieval Muslim rulers as oppressors of Hindus.

Prem Singh, a former teacher at Delhi University and a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, told Frontline that communal polarisation was the only key the BJP had. The party, he said, had never backed down from “hard-line Hindutva” in the past 10 years. With politics in the country devoid of ideology, the RSS and BJP are unlikely to have problems forming newer coalitions. “Their work is going on in the north-eastern and southern regions. They have made a strong base in places where they had no entry earlier. They have made deep inroads among NRIs. In their mission, the RSS and the BJP are far ahead of the secularists,” he said.

Harish S. Wankhede, Assistant Professor, Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, JNU, does not believe the polarisation will work. He told Frontline: “It is the realisation that the issues of development and social justice are not working in its favour that is making the BJP go back to its tested formula of communal mobilisation. In the upcoming Assembly elections in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, and Haryana, the BJP has nothing much to offer on substantive issues of development, employment, and for the betterment of farmers, Dalits, and Adivasis. Communal polarisation is an old tactic that targets Muslims as anti-nationals, spreads prejudice against them (as in the Kanwar Yatra episode), and demonises them as producing more children. However, the voters understand the BJP’s tactic and it will not work this time.”

He said the hype surrounding Modi and development had fallen flat in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, and to some extent Karnataka and Rajasthan. “Only in the last three phases of the election we noticed the BJP building a campaign around anti-Muslim rhetoric. However, it hardly worked,” Wankhede said.

Also Read | Economic anxieties may have trumped Hindutva, yet deep-rooted political dysfunction persists

The results of the byelections in 13 Assembly seats across seven States in July seem to have further emboldened the INDIA bloc, with the alliance winning 10 seats across States: the Trinamool Congress all 4 in West Bengal, the Congress 2 of 3 seats in Himachal Pradesh and both seats in Uttarakhand, and the AAP and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam 1 seat each in Punjab and Tamil Nadu, respectively. The BJP won a lone seat in Madhya Pradesh and 1 in Himachal Pradesh, while 1 seat in Bihar went to an independent candidate.

The loss in Uttarakhand, where the party is in power and where it won all five Lok Sabha seats, hit the BJP hard. In particular, the party’s loss of Badrinath, a key Hindu pilgrimage town, coming on the heels of the loss in Faizabad (won by the Samajwadi Party’s Awadhesh Prasad), seems to have placed a serious question mark on the BJP’s core plank, where it had tried to portray both the SP and Congress as “Ramdrohi”.

Some observers believe the time for hard-line Hindutva politics is up, and the BJP’s downhill journey will not be reversed by knee-jerk polarisation responses. But another section believes that with communalism having taken deep root in society, the BJP may well stage a comeback with its old game.