The verdict is out and the writing is on the wall. After the thumping victory and returning to power in four of the five states that went to polls over the past month, the BJP has set its sight on the road to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Especially, since the resounding victory riding high in the main battleground of Uttar Pradesh where the party rode to power the PM Modi’s policies and the party’s electoral plank of “double-engine” government despite criticism against Yogi Adityanath of the handling of the pandemic, job losses and the migrant labourer crisis. The verdict across the four states was a stamp of approval for the BJP in the polls widely considered a test and run-up to Lok Sabha elections two years later.
The PM addressed party workers in New Delhi on Thursday, and said, “I hope political pundits, who did not think much of the party’s 2019 (Lok Sabha) win saying it had already been decided by the 2017 UP results, will now have the courage to say that the 2022 (UP) results have decided the 2024 (Lok Sabha) results,” according to media reports. “A hill state adjacent to the border, a coastal state, a state with special blessings of Mother Ganga and a state on the northeastern border, the BJP has received blessings from all four directions,” he added.
While the PM might have mentioned the four directions, the road to the south still seems an uphill task for the saffron party. Despite making inroads and holding the Karnataka turf for years now, the other states have not yet welcomed BJP into their folds. It is not as if the saffron party hasn’t thought of or tried narratives and strategies to appease the electorate. However, the outcome in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in Assembly elections last year, along with dismaying performance in Andhra Pradesh in 2019, south seems to have firmly shut its doors to BJP.
In the past, the saffron party’s strategies have included fielding high-profile candidates. ‘Metro man’ E Sreedharan was fielded from Palakkad (Kerala) in the 2021 Assembly elections, bringing together the warring factions of OPS and EPS in AIADMK in Tamil Nadu. Forget the hopes of winning an additional seat through Sreedharan, the BJP also lost its lone seat in Nemom in Kerala, which was won by party veteran O Rajagopal in 2016. Similar dismal performance was also seen in Tamil Nadu Assembly election 2021, where BJP’s vote share was an abysmal 2.63 per cent — a further decline from 3.57 per cent votes that it had managed to win in 2016. The party bagged four Assembly seats in alliance with AIADMK.
However, the BJP’s problem in the South is not really a question of failing to put a political jigsaw puzzle together. It is more a problem of ideation. The politics it needs to keep it winning in the Hindi belt cuts no water here, just as it didn’t in the Northeast. It is only when the BJP constructed a platform with a different focus did it establish a footprint in the region.
It has however made little effort to understand the needs of the South and tailor a message that resonates. Its leaders in Tamil Nadu, for instance, continue to flog watered-down versions of Hindi belt politics, often coming across as tone-deaf and non-serious. On the rare chance they take a stand on a locally important issue as they did on Sri Lankan Tamils, they found themselves on the same side as the Dravidian parties and at odds with New Delhi.
Addressing the party workers on Thursday, the PM said of the party’s victory in the five states: “The challenges of these states are different, the path of their development journey is different, but what is common, weaving them in the same thread, is the trust in BJP, in the BJP’s policies, intentions and decisions.” The South doesn’t trust in the party, its policies, intentions and decisions, and the BJP is making no effort to step to take off its Hindi-belt blinkers before crossing the Vindhyas.
The BJP will need to recruit a wide range of people who can ideate a vision for leadership that is different from the functional politics that already exist in all five states. Anything short of this will not succeed.
