The end of the beginning

The Congress is in pole position in Haryana, and that is bad news for the BJP

DURING my recent travels, I found myself at one point in enforced proximity with a distant relation I’d classify as, at best, an acquaintance. That proximity led to one of the most bizarre conversations I have had in recent memory.

As is usual among acquaintances you haven’t met, the conversation was on “how are you?” and “what have you been up to since we last met?” lines — only, it didn’t stay there.

In course of a little over half an hour, this acquaintance showcased a remarkable ability to turn even the most innocuous conversation-starter into a rant about Muslims, or a paean to Modi, or a diatribe against “those people who are always against Ambani and Adani” — and the most notable feature of his rants was that he wouldn’t look at me while letting loose.

We were sitting side by side in those uncomfortable metal-and-mesh chairs that appear to have been specially designed for waiting rooms, and each time he launched into one of his diatribes, he faced front, as though addressing not just me but the entire class of “anti-national liberals” — a characterisation he used repeatedly.

Initially, I attempted rebuttals, but he merely raised his volume a couple of notches and spoke all over me. So by about ten minutes in, I gave up and let the thinly-veiled vitriol dissipate into the atmosphere.

“It’s getting late, shall we go someplace and have lunch?”, he asked once we were done with what we had come there to do.

I declined, not fancying biriyani with a healthy side of bigotry.

I was thinking of that conversation last evening, while re-reading parts of my friend Rahul Bhatia’s seminal book The Identity Project — a classic of connect-the-dots reportage which leads off with the anti-CAA protests, goes back in time to trace the origin and growth of the movement to convert India into a theocracy where religious minorities will be reduced to second-class citizens, and then links the whole with the Aadhar-powered identity project.

It is an ambitious book that was eight years in the reporting and writing, and that locates Aadhar within the larger socio-political context — a must-read for anyone who wants to know how we, as a civilisation, got to where we are today.

That reminds me — if you are in Bangalore, come to BIC on Sunday, October 6. I’ll be chatting with Rahul on how the book came about, its central themes, the robust reporting process that underpins it, and much else. RSVP here, and come say hello if you do make it. (For those not in Bangalore, BIC regularly posts videos of these talks on its YouTube channel a week or two after the event).

XXX

HARYANA votes this Saturday — and there is way more at stake than the question of who gets to form the next government in a state where the BJP has held power since 2014.

In course of a preview of the sixth phase of voting in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, I’d written this on the situation in Haryana:

The BJP-run government is in a state of stress following the recent upheaval when, on 7 May, three independent MLAs withdraw support to the government. The double-engine government’s highhandedness against the Haryanvi farmers both during the farmers’ protests and during the protest of India’s ace wrestlers against the alleged sexual abuses by then Wrestling Federation of India president Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh; Dalit unease at the hinted-at possibility that the BJP will take away reservations if it returns to power; widespread anger directed at the patent unfairness of the Agniveer scheme… the stress factors are many, and they have worked in concert to ensure that all the Congress has to do to decimate the BJP is make sure it doesn’t trip over its own feet.

That is pretty much how it worked out — the Congress and the BJP split the state’s 10 LS seats five apiece, a shocker for the BJP which, in the previous election, had swept all ten seats. And every single point made in the above paragraph still holds good as the state nears polling day.

If you break down each LS seat into its assembly constituencies, the LS results show that the Congress won 46 and the BJP 44 of the 90 assembly seats in the state. But those numbers are not indicative of the state of the race, which as it stands is clearly the Congress party’s to lose.

The BJP’s troubles began even before ticket distribution, with the disqualification of Haryanvi wrestler Vinesh Phogat just prior to the finals bout in the 50kg wrestling category at the Paris Olympics in August.

Wrestling is deeply embedded in the Haryanvi psyche, cutting across barriers of caste and class. The state, en masse, appears to have taken the disqualification as an affront and, worse, the general mood is that the BJP government at the Centre is somehow responsible for this affront.

Haryana’s powerful khaps got into the act. In late August, the Sarvkhap Panchayat got together and awarded Phogat a gold medal in lieu of the one the khaps believe she was cheated of. Worse followed when a joint meeting of the khaps and the farmers’ unions urged supporters to vote against the BJP, citing both the “injustice to Vinesh” and the ongoing demand for a centrally-mandated MSP for their produce.

Vinesh Phogat is contesting, on the Congress ticket, from the Julana constituency, which is home to her husband Somveer Rathi, and word from the ground is that she is a lock to win. The BJP, aware that it is on the wrong side of this argument, has meanwhile denied a ticket to Vinesh’s cousin Babita Phogat, who had earlier been inducted into the party in an ultimately futile bid to drive a wedge between the protesting wrestlers.

The farmers’ protests, which proved a decisive factor in the BJP’s poor performance in the LS elections in the state, is still ongoing. Farmers have blockaded the Shambhu border between Punjab and Haryana for over seven months now, ever since they were prevented from marching to Delhi. an attempt to get the Supreme Court to intervene ended with the farmers refusing to speak to the court-appointed panel.

To make matters worse, the internal dynamics of the two major contending parties could not be more different. The Congress handed over the reins of the campaign to the young dynast Deepender Singh Hooda, elected earlier this year to the Lok Sabha from Rohtak and, more to the immediate point, closely identified with the wrestling fraternity thanks to a decade-long stint as president of the Wrestling Federation of Haryana — a tenure that was cut-short, ironically, by accused sexual abuser Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh during the latter’s tenure as chief of the Wrestling Federation of India.

Against that, Amit Shah — who apparently has learned nothing from his errors during candidate selection for the Lok Sabha elections — hand-picked the candidates for the Assembly polls, and ended up with a rebellion on his hands. Two ministers were among a bevy of BJP leaders who immediately resigned, and as many as eight senior BJP leaders have been expelled in the run-up to the polls after they protested the ticket allocation and decided to contest as independents against the official party candidates. The list of those expelled includes one former minister, Ranjit Singh Chautala, and Sandeep Garg, who is contesting as an independent from Ladwa against chief minister Nayab Singh Saini.

While the Congress has been campaigning flat out and drawing good response, the BJP’s campaign has been lacklustre, to put it mildly. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP’s phone-a-friend option when facing electoral headwinds, has been a sporadic campaigner at best — and even when he does show up, his speeches have relied on the tired tropes of Pakistan, and Muslims, and the Congress party’s reliance on dynasts.

During the Lok Sabha campaign, BJP president JP Nadda had created a stir when he said the BJP is all grown up now, and no longer needs the help of the RSS mother ship to fight polls. That didn’t last long — in an act of political desperation, Amit Shah sought the good offices of Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh to intercede with the RSS and get the parent body to activate its cadres on the ground to support the BJP’s flagging campaign.

The RSS leadership made polite noises, but ground reports indicate that there is little change on the ground. It doesn’t help that many RSS cadres are themselves farmers, and sympathetic to the farmer protests; equally, going up against the cause of the protesting wrestlers doesn’t win them brownie points in the state. Net net, the RSS — which can read the tea leaves as well as anyone — is content to make token gestures of ground support, without going flat out.

A measure of the state of the race is this: all pollsters, including those who officially work with the BJP, have been going on television to predict a BJP rout — and when was the last time pollsters were willing to stick their necks out against the ruling party?

Predicting numbers in an election is always freighted with egg, meet face risk. But from conversations with locals and regional journalists, my sense is that of the 90 seats, the Congress is poised to win at least 40 quite comfortably, while the BJP is equally secure in about 20 (plus/minus three in each case).

That leaves 30 seats up for grabs — and word from the ground is that the Congress will win, at a bare minimum, half of those, taking it comfortably past the halfway mark.

If that happens, it is merely the end of the beginning. The BJP’s two major allies are increasingly restive, for two reasons. Under intense pressure from the RSS, the BJP has been trying to push the hindutva agenda at warp speed — and this is not to the liking of either Nitish Kumar or Chandrababu Naidu, both of whom are aware that their support for a hard hindutva push can trigger a backlash on their home grounds.

A more immediate cause for angst among the allies is that the BJP is yet to substantively deliver on the promises made to them in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. In its 2024 Budget, the BJP allocated Rs 15,000 crore to fund Naidu’s pet Amravati and Polavaram projects — and that too only in the form of loans. That figure is less than half of Naidu’s original ask — and the TDP chief is not too pleased.

Both allies are biding their time, awaiting the results from Haryana, and from the Maharashtra and Jharkhand polls to follow. A BJP defeat in two, or all three, of the states will visibly weaken the party, and provide the two main allies leverage to escalate their demands, or else.

All of this puts the onus firmly on Amit Shah, who is Home Minister in name only and whose job description is to lead the BJP to electoral wins. The party’s failure to breach the majority mark in the Lok Sabha polls hasn’t endeared him to his boss; defeats in the state elections this year will further undermine his usefulness to Modi, just when Shah has been moving to have himself elevated to the post of Deputy PM.

The BJP, currently, is in a bind. Just how much of a one it is, we will know — or at least, get an initial inkling — on October 7, when the J&K and Haryana results will be known. More on this then.