Self-Introspection Time for the BJP

Despite having a plethora of issues to campaign against the ruling UPA coalition the BJP has suffered a poll debacle. Its paltry tally of 116 Lok Sabha Seats, as well as dip in national vote share by 4 to 5 percentage points compared to the last Lok Sabha elections, which it had also lost, should prompt rethinking in the party about its direction. If it wants to look once again like a contender for power, the first lesson it should draw is not to run a shrill and negative election campaign, full of grievance and vitriol, as it did this time. Terror, for example, can be a valid election campaign theme. But it's a serious issue. The BJP's approach, by contrast, came across as rancorous, personalised and superficial, hung on the three pegs of reviving the unpopular POTA, hanging a convicted terrorist and characterising Manmohan Singh as a weak leader. As Shivraj Singh Chouhan, one of the BJP's most successful chief ministers, has observed, the hanging of Afzal Guru can hardly be made into an attractive election issue. Internal criticisms within the BJP have brought out that it is losing popularity among youth as well as among the urban middle classes, two segments where it had been strong earlier and which represent the emergent India of the 21st century. To reconnect with these segments and devise a winning strategy, it needs to focus on the future rather than obsess with the past.

The BJP may still look at the Ram Janmabhoomi movement as a foundational moment, because that's how it came into prominence as a national party. But this is a new century, where destroying a mosque in order to establish a temple at the same spot hardly makes policy sense. India has changed dramatically between 1992 and 2009. The old ploy of provoking communal riots in order to polarise the electorate, a formula that BJP appears to have stuck to as late as 2008 in case of anti-Christian riots in Orissa, is subject to diminishing returns at the ballot box. If identity politics has played itself out by now, how can the BJP reorient itself? It could do so by identifying and filling a gaping lacuna in Indian politics, the lack of a centre-right party which speaks the language of reform and harnesses globalisation to expand the middle class. That would be incompatible with a Hindu Rashtra plank, but Hindu Rashtra could be substituted with a strong nationalist appeal which would have greater resonance across the country. If that requires the BJP to cut its ties with the far right, it should do so with the intention of occupying a moderate conservative space.