Anand K. Sahay | As BJP reels, can Congress use K'taka formula elsewhere?

The recent election outcome in Karnataka is staggering. It sent shivers down the spine of the establishment bigwigs who thought they were immune from criticism and were cruising on the road to perpetual success. Now there is speculation about who is in and who is out in the top echelons of the ruling party.

With the BJP’s every known trick — such as wholesale change of party candidates in an election to beat off incumbency blues, and turning the communal heat up or down as needed — failing in Karnataka, there are rising concerns in the party about how best to prepare for the upcoming polls in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Telangana. The memory of the wholesale defeat is sowing confusion about tactics.

There may be no automatic correlation between Assembly and Lok Sabha election results, but the anxiety in ruling party circles is that the clutch of Assembly polls will be followed within months by the 2024 parliamentary election. Politics, among other things, is also a matter of perception.

Not counting the 2015 Delhi Assembly polls, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi had just begun his innings, Karnataka has handed the BJP its worst electoral drubbing in Mr Modi’s nine years in power, when he has presided over not just the Union government but also over his party’s fate, bending it to his every wish.

It’s mostly been a story of success but that narrative has suddenly capsized, making an opening for finger-pointing. If the Delhi defeat had been for a leader who was still to consolidate, the Karnataka debacle is for the mature leader who took it for granted that people were his to command. As for the Congress, Karnataka gave the party the taste of the sweetest success — leading it to the oasis after a long time of wandering in the desert. In contrast with the BJP, the morale in the Congress is high at a critical moment, just before Assembly elections in politically key states that lead on to the general election.

Besides, Karnataka is not a flash in the pan. It comes not long after overwhelming success against the ruling BJP in Himachal Pradesh. When the Congress’ big win in the northern hill state and the stupendous win in the South are seen together, it would appear the BJP suffers from a common malaise in the states it governs. This has wider implications.

Typically, BJP rule is oppressive for a majority of people, the poor have no economic respite, the rich have an outsized influence in governance, the SC/ST and minorities almost invariably suffer discrimination and neglect, the political masters are arrogant and greedy, the administration is unresponsive and accused of corruption. Meaningful policy and political directions come only from the top, meaning Delhi. A disconnect with the people is the norm.

Some of these characteristics are not unique to BJP-run states, but in these states the negative features seem to have a vice-like group due to the use of high-velocity propaganda, the BJP-RSS culture of a virtually military-style hierarchy in which discussion and dissent are unwelcome, and a media that’s turned pliant and ignores egregious happenings.

At election time, the BJP’s local rulers turn to Delhi to bail them out. The PM arrives confident of his powers to make magic, duly throws himself into the campaign in a state of choreographed frenzy, and pulls a rabbit out of the hat.

Dominant sections of the media clap and sing. People’s dissatisfaction is finessed with loud appeals to religious sentiment directed against certain communities. Religion is weaponised. India has lately emerged as the only democracy in the world whose leader unleashes high-octane religious propaganda when campaigning.

This bag of tricks first backfired in Himachal Pradesh, and then in Karnataka. In Karnataka especially, there was power outage for the BJP. The defeat was deep. It covered every region, every caste and creed and professional category: working classes and peasant classes and sections of the proprietor classes. The message was: get off my back!

In recent years, the question asked frequently is if people will continue to go out and vote back a miserable government if the opium of religious nirvana continues to be provided. Karnataka has broken the mould.

BJP-run state governments have been defeated several times in the Modi era, but in Karnataka this happened with a rare emphasis. That is why the Karnataka result is qualitatively different from the BJP’s earlier defeats and bears an extraordinary latent political power to influence future polls.

The Congress’ victory was not crafted by pandering to caste/religious identities but by cultivating social forces sympathetic to the existential needs of most of the population. Civil society as a whole was mobilised, paying attention to farmers and other sections of the rural and urban poor through credible messaging. If this collective method is carried to other states, and then to the national stage, there is an opportunity for the Karnataka model to be replicated. To work for this goal is the Congress’ burden.

The BJP is a one-trick pony that aims for religious polarisation to bag votes. All that this party could do in Karnataka was building a campaign centred on vulgarising of religious and mythological symbols, quite forgetting that our southern states prize the culture of modernity and democracy in which science and reason, debate and discussion, gender parity, and environmental awareness are privileged everyday concerns.

Focusing on local concerns and highlighting the anti-incumbency sentiment was the key element in the Congress’ strategy. But to think that going local exists in a vacuum is to belittle the process of urging people to switch sides. The Karnataka election occurred at a certain conjuncture whose wide public impact marked the backdrop for local questions to be raised with telling force.

Karnataka was the first election after a series of extraordinary recent events — Rahul Gandhi’s spectacular Bharat Jodo Yatra through which he challenged communal politics and highlighted the daily life concerns of the poor; his stinging speech in Parliament on the Adani affair; and his eventual expulsion from Parliament which marks a sorry saga.

To these may be added — as a marker of the conjuncture — former J&K governor Satya Pal Malik’s explosive revelations on sacrificing our CRPF jawans, and the Modi government’s indifference to the protest sit-in of India’s most famous women wrestlers demanding penal action against a BJP MP for sexual misconduct. The carefully engineered unprecedented communal violence in BJP-ruled Manipur also occurred during the Karnataka campaign. Such events help cast voter sentiments even when local negatives hold primacy — and project themselves over a longer time span.