Now we do not have to over-emphasize that voter goodwill that empowers popular mandates is an ephemeral commodity. No one seems to be getting this message so strongly and frequently as Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In May 2014, he won a strong unprecedented mandate with 282 seats in the Lok Sabha. This was a feat that had never been achieved in the last 30 years. He repeated this electoral success all through 2014, securing states like Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand for the BJP with unprecedented numbers and also establishing a coalition with the PDP in Jammu and Kashmir. The first reversal came early in 2015 when the BJP was routed in Delhi assembly elections. It could manage only three of the 70 seats.
But there were several consolations in the Delhi contest. The party had propped up a former IPS officer Kiran Bedi as the chief ministerial candidate, and perhaps overestimated her pull with the electorate. She even failed to win her seat. Then again there was the pleasure that BJP’s national rival the Congress had drawn a blank. However, no such relief was available when the results of the Bihar state assembly elections came out. On the contrary, the rejection of the Modi wave by the electorate was pretty comprehensive. No prime minister had ever campaigned so extensively in a state and with such poor showing. Besides, there were no alibis for losing Bihar. Every trick in the trade had been deployed, and still the result was negative.
In fact the Bihar contest was a direct face off between Modi and the Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar who had walked out of the National Democratic Alliance to protest against the decision of the BJP to project him as the prime ministerial candidate. The first round in the Modi-Kumar contest ended in a sweeping victory for the NDA when it bagged 31 out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats from Bihar. Ideally, the NDA was looking for an encore, and Modi exerted every muscle to pull off a repeat. But only the reverse happened and the grand alliance of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Janata Dal (U) and the Congress pulled off a magnificent triumph winning 183 out of the 243 seats and the NDA had to remain content with just 53. Then, within days of this rout, the BJP lost its first by-election to the Lok Sabha with Kantilal Bhuria of the Congress regaining the Ratlam-Jhabua seat that he had lost in 2014.
Ordinarily, the municipal and panchayat elections hold no significance in the national context. But these are changing times. The voter may be exercising his local choice, yet the message that he/she sends out is global. So, the political configuration may not change at the national level but the perception does alter. The same phenomena is at work in the case of the results of the local elections in Gujarat. Besides, it is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state that he has ruled for the 13 long years and these were the first test of popularity for the BJP after his transition to the seat of national power.
In this test the BJP has flunked. It has also been proved that all the good work that Modi may have put in the last 13 years in office was not good enough to withstand another test within such a short time. The Patel agitation against the Gujarat government is also a testimony to the discontent against the performance of the government. The fact that after this defeat the BJP government has gone back to introduce a scheme for subsidised rice for the poor in Gujarat also tells the same story.
Indeed, we can be sure that whether it is Delhi, Bihar or Gujarat the main reason for the electoral setbacks suffered by the BJP is the poor performance of the Modi government for the entire period that it has been in office. For the sake of appropriating the reasons for this defeat, there could be a comprehensive analysis to shift the blame on others, yet nothing would change the reality that just as Modi was responsible for the electoral successes in 2014, he is the only person on whom the blame should fall for the 2015 failures. Though many in the BJP do seem to be holding its national president Amit Shah responsible for the losses, but to come to that conclusion would be to knock at the wrong door.
To be sure, it can be argued that no election has been as yet a referendum on Modi’s performance in office and this is technically correct as well. But then voter behaviour is not guided by technicalities. At every level, the votes are sought in Modi’s name, and thus willy-nilly everything becomes a referendum on his performance. It is this performance that has been lacking. His two main plans were economy and national security. The economy was supposed to get out of the slumber that had been introduced by a policy paralysis under the previous government, and in terms of national security a macho Modi was expected to instill some sense in the Pakistanis who keep disrupting the peace across the border.
Now not only have these twin objectives been not achieved, there are a whole lot of concerns that have cropped up. When voters opted for Modi in 2014, they did not expect issues like beef eating or the intemperate utterances of the BJP leaders to dominate the agenda. It was expected that under Modi’s watch these elements would be restrained and the focus would be on the core concerns of economy and security. On both the issues, it would be idle to blame the lack of consensus in Parliament for the failure to get things done. No party has had the luxury of such smooth passage in Parliament for decades, and this should not be a stumbling block for the government’s goals. In such a situation the only message from the voters in Delhi, Bihar, Jhabua and Gujarat is for Modi to start governing and stop campaigning.
