By Syed Zia for TwoCircles.net,
In the wake of 2003 Delhi’ election result [in Congress’ favour], one of my friend said: Sir, Delhi ki public samajhdar hai (…just for recollection …BJP was ruling the center as NDA, then) they are not carried away by mere sloganeering and that too loaded with divisiveness. This friend is Lalit Mohan – a soft spoken, empathetic and flexibly open minded. God bless him!
That said; let’s turn to the present Delhi Election. Like many of you I too was looking at it closely. The result, unexpected by all account! AAP has won and more than AAP winning the BJP has lost miserably.
So what it is that made a two-year old party –funded by the donations of ordinary citizens like you and me – to defeat a party which has 73% of its funding from unknown sources [who have its own axe to grind] and was seen as invincible till the other day given the manipulating ability of its policy making leadership and mobilization of the cadre driven by the passion of seeing India of its own spectacle where everybody else who doesn’t identify with the ideology that they visualize; as not worthy of basic citizenry right/dignity?
Quite a few and many reasons will be petered out, but what is often missed out is this:
The BJP being invincible is more to do with the spirit of passionate voluntarism of the cadre driven by the RSS agenda and its opponent being bereft of the spirit of passionate voluntarism of the cadre. …rather any party that wins election consistently wins because of consistent passionate spirit of voluntarism. Occasional winning here and there based on cast calculation or alternate winning by any political combination given the very high degree of anti-incumbency is something that stands now challenged by the invincibility of BJP. Wherever there is no ground for BJP viz. Kerala & Tripura it’s because the left in that region has solid cadre based mobilization resources with spirit of voluntarism.
The left being routed in west Bengal was because the volunteer of the left {in West Bengal} had more turned into the franchise rather than being volunteers and also left brand of Marxist Economics is not the way to live with. …This brings me to a parley with another of my friend named AK Singh who once averred: as to why man like Nitish Kumar, lose to the BJP despite [he] being a proven progressive administrator/politician and having acceptance amidst almost all creed/class of Bihar? My response was: despite finding acceptance from all corner of society Nitish Kumar doesn’t have, a) any second line leadership of the honest and trustworthy kind &, b) cadre driven by selfless spirit of voluntarism as the BJP has in the form of RSS cadre. And this selfless spirit of voluntarism comes out of espousing the sacrificial cause of abstract nature viz. subjugating Muslim and restoring glorified Hinduism as advocated by RSS or a passion of seeing India as corruption free, advocated by the AAP; not by the passion of espousing hope of social advancement {in the form of authoritative power and material gain} by being part of the political class, as is the case with the cadre of every other party other than BJP/Communist and now AAP. So here is the catch… now, we have a party (AAP) that can look into the eye of the BJP, with its backing of the passionate selfless cadre driven by the spirit of voluntarism. This is what that makes AAP the party …to look out for. And the likes of Nitish Kumar with his credible brand of clean/progressive administrator should merge itself into. Yes merge (itself) because the possibility of alliance [with AAP] is not AAP way of politics and to play second fiddle to someone like Kejriwal is anyway preferable to being arm twisted by the likes of Mr. Lalu Yadav.
What does this defeat mean to the BJP and rest of us {from the spectacle of the BJP}?
Is the result as bad for BJP as it’s made out to be? No! Please be mindful of the fact that BJP vote share is by and large intact. It has just come down by 1%. Yet, it continues to enjoy support of around 32% of the electorate. That translates to roughly around 40% of the population of the segment of society that BJP and its parental ideologues claim to represent or rather crave to represent; considering that the population of that segment is 82% of the total population of India. In other word 2 of every 5 of the majority is with BJP and had been with BJP even when BJP won 282 of 543 Lok Sabha seats. …And mind it this vote share is not going to increase in near future because the present political scenario of India is at saturation stage of Hinduisation. Hereafter if there is any politician of Modi’s brand of politics is to coup the mind space of the majority in even bigger way it will be akin to the kind of Hindu Taliban; which is not likely to happen in near future…. So what went against BJP in this election is that the AAP managed to place itself as the main and the only opposition. The intent of BJP of nipping this alternate kind of politics in the bud and consigning the motley of the kind of Kejriwal to the bin, as the Tea Party [of the Sarah Palin fame] has been thrown in the United States of America- a prophecy of the right wing intellectuals led by the like of Surjit Bhalla, Rajiv Malhotra, Tavleen Singh etc. has been foiled and almost irreversibly; ceteris paribus. But let’s not forget that the rest of India has its own regional satrap with their own baggage of impropriety, barring a few like Nitish Kumar or Naveen Patnaik. Hence the kind of politics that AAP represents is highly unlikely to be given space by those regional satraps and replicated. And that being so BJP will continue to win in states where the regional satrap with baggage of impropriety rules the roost.
And to top it all we must recollect what Christopher Jafferlot said in the run up to the Lok Sabha election that given Mr. Modi’s credential, if his development plank fails he will revive the polarization plank. Hence the states going for election hereafter must be very …very careful if they don’t want any communal conflagration to take place. And the most vulnerable of all is my own state i.e. Bihar.
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(Syed Zia is a retired Air Force officer from Bihar living in Mumbai.)