An individual, party and community to shape future of Indian politics
As the results of assembly elections in the states of Goa, Punjab, Manipur, Uttrakhand and Uttar Pradesh have been out with the BJP bagging four of the five states and the Aam Aadmi Party forming the government with a record-breaking majority in Punjab, some tropes are bound to follow with the not so surprising results.
Formation of a committee by Sonia Gandhi to scrutinize the reasons for the demeaning defeat, primetime shows with absurdly creative headlines discussing for the billionth time how the Modi-Shah duo is unbeatable and the usual frustration and agony of the minorities still looking for a viable option to stand against the BJP juggernaut. By now even the political pundits of tea stalls would have started getting bored with the no masala elections being delivered by the political dispensation.
Though, these election results were pretty soothing for the channels banking on their exit polls to be the most accurate, for a political nerd what lies in those numbers is the future of Indian politics. With this mandate an individual a party and a community have sounded the bugle, announcing their arrival. From here on, the face of politics in India is all set for a rollercoaster ride, at the end of which the scene might be completely different from what anyone could have perceived till the last general elections.
The individual
With parties already warming up for the next general election, there are some whispers along the party lines regarding the successor of Narendra Modi. Though the 75 years retirement rule might not apply to the incumbent prime minister of the world’s largest democracy, the world’s largest party starts preparing its leaders well in advance, and seven years does sound reasonable when it comes to choosing the face of the country’s leader.
Today, even in the BJP the only viable face seems to be that of Yogi Adityanath, even though he is not from the RSS ranks as usually other prominent leaders are. His high handedness with the use of force, unapologetic radicalism and open usage of rhetorics like Ali vs Bajrang Bali, which even the Sangh Parivar might shy away from using in public, have made him favourites among the extreme right-wing core of the party.
There are other factors as well playing in his favour. Yogi Adityanath is just over 49 years, and among the youngest serving Chief Ministers in the country. For putting things into perspective, he is even younger than the Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, who himself is very young when judged by the yardstick of Indian politics.
In addition to that, recent surveys have shown an increase in the popularity of the saffron monk. In 2020, before Covid could have made an impact on people’s choices, the Mood of the Nation survey ranked him as the fourth most popular choice for the next Prime Minister of India. By 2022, his ratings doubled in the same survey.
Though the increase might have been on a small base, it is worth mentioning by 2022 he was not only ahead of all the opposition leaders except Rahul Gandhi, who managed to beat him by a mere one percentage point but was also beating Amit Shah and Nitin Gadkari from his own party. This shows that the party workers are not vesting more faith in the new arrival than the old faces present in the party.
Now, with the largest state of India again in his bag, Yogi Adityanath seems like a formidable force countrywide and within the BJP, with no other leader in sight capable of challenging his claim to be the face of the party after Narendra Modi.
The party
The rise of the youngest prominent party in Indian politics can be understood with just one question. How many political outfits have managed to rule more than one legislature at the same time?
Aam Aadmi Party has managed to achieve this feat in less than ten years of its establishment. When it was started by Arvind Kejriwal, along with the other leaders of the Jan Lokpal movement, the majority of political scientists in India claimed that it was dead on arrival. No one thought that a party with no ideological leaning, caste connection or linguistic or cultural base could survive in India.
Yet, in the long political history of India since independence, it has managed to become the fourth political party after Congress, BJP and CPI(M) to rule over two states at the same time. The only proposition put forward by Aam Aadmi Party was ‘sab mile huye hain’(all of them are accomplices) with Arvind Kejriwal portrayed as the torchbearer of the anti-corruption movement and honesty.
Contrary to what other expected, in its short political journey till now the party has successfully learnt the art of marketing not only the message but selling the messenger along the way while building a cult around Arvind Kejriwal. His appeal to the middle-class with populist schemes has done wonders.
Moreover, they know the value of losing an election, therefore, when they win one they make sure to break records announcing their arrival with no plans to vacate the legislature for the next few elections.
It seems like the Aam Aadmi Party has taken some pages from BJP’s books as well. Working on the motto of ‘no election is too small’ and learning from the BJP’s machinery and inputs deployed in Hyderabad, AAP has successfully lost the Gujrat local body elections. Their loss was so significant that even after winning less than 5% of total seats, they grabbed the headlines by making inroads into the BJP’s fortress of Surat.
Now with this successful defeat, they can start working on phase two by presenting themselves as the principal opposition to the BJP while rating into the Congress’ vote bank of “secular votes”, much like what BJP is doing to the grand old party of India in southern states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The Community
With the onset of these assembly elections, every party had a new trend in their mind. But it will not be wrong to say that the understanding of most of these political parties has lagged behind others by years. Be it by poll tickets distribution, populist schemes or slogans, every party had its eyes on the women voters.
But this trend of rising numbers of women voters and their voting preferences has been there for some time now, starting from the 2014 general elections. According to an article by The Hindu, despite sweeping the election the ruling party faced a 3% gender disadvantage among female voters, which was being bagged by regional parties like the All India Trinamool Congress and Biju Janta Dal.
Apparently, the top leadership did not miss the opportunity of gaining some points in that arena. BJP’s approach to wooing the women voters manifested for the first time in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh election as an overwhelming number of Muslim women voted differently than the men of the families, giving their approval to the triple talaq bill.
Similarly, in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP swept across West Bengal as while men voted on the lines of identity, women had the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the gas stoves and cylinders received under the Ujjwala scheme in their mind. The difference in the voting pattern of women was still there during the West Bengal elections as the popularity of Mamta Banerjee as a woman leader and her welfare schemes turned the wave against BJP’s juggernaut.
Furthermore, in Uttar Pradesh, the incumbent state government benefitted massively from the centre’s subsidies for building toilets under Swachh Bharat Mission manifested in the form of votes. Not to imply that Yogi Adityanath’s anti-mafia image, though with some religious bias, had no role, but it had some limitations put on by BJP’s ideological foundation and core vote bank.
Crime against women has many forms and one of them was dealt with the help of those toilets built under the Clean India Mission. A great number of harassment, abduction and rape cases took place as women were forced to go to far-away open places for defecation, which was now solved. Though the whole issue of rape is still grave and far from solved, just one aspected being treated still made the voting preferences a bit easier for the female voters in UP.
However, the intriguing fact is the rise of female voters as an ‘independent’ vote bank. All this while when the men kept voting on religious or caste lines, Muslim women in UP 2017 and Hindu women in the regions of northern West Bengal turned the tide against the perceived winners by exercising their autonomy as voters, changing the future of Indian political discourse for good.
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