Mission 325: Three lessons BJP learned from three-state win for 2024

BJP’s deployment of hard Hindutva in the Assembly poll electioneering on twin planks of the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya and the charge of minority appeasement against the Congress struck chords with the electorate in the three states. The twin planks were executed by the troika of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Minister for Home Affairs Amit Shah, and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

The three states have traditionally been fertile grounds for Hindutva politics, giving BJP handsome gains in polls since 1990 when the Ram Janmabhoomi movement electrified the party’s rank and file. The same approach didn’t work in Telangana.

BJP’s ‘Mission 325’ will be incumbent on the party making additional gains in Bihar, West Bengal, and Odisha against formidable regional outfits. Also, incumbent chief ministers in the three states – Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, and Naveen Patnaik – may not be easy targets for  BJP’s corruption plank with which Modi pinned down Congress’s Ashok Gehlot (Red Diary) in Rajasthan and Bhupesh Baghel (Mahadev App, liquor scam) in Chhattisgarh. Thus, BJP may have to work out state specific poll narratives.

Firing Up Workers, Practising Collective Leadership

BJP is sensing that the party’s bid to go into polls with the collective leadership plank worked well. The BJP top brass took up the challenge when the feedback from the grounds suggested plenty of roadblocks in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. Union home minister Amit Shah’s closed-door meetings with party workers at the district levels laid the ground for the fightback. All that ordinary workers want is for top leaders to lend ears to them. BJP is likely to turn this into a mantra for the tough battlegrounds next year.

By fielding Union ministers and Lok Sabha MPs, BJP tested their appeal in state polls, as well as taking the burden off the shoulders of seasoned regional satraps (Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Raman Singh, and Vasundhara Raje) who had been nursing the turf for several years. Yet, BJP quickly made amends when adverse messaging flared up that the party wanted to cut these satraps to size.

They were then given appropriate space during electioneering and their loyalists given tickets. BJP may further examine ways to accommodate rising aspirations among leaders at the state levels to maximise gains through the “all hands on deck” strategy and also to sport a united house at the battlefront.

Ambushing With ‘One-To-One Marking’

While Modi evidently ambushed Gehlot and Baghel by spotlighting corruption allegations, he singled out former Congress president Rahul Gandhi for his sharp and pin-pointed attacks to take the winds off the sails of the Congress’ poll plank of caste census and cash dole outs through welfare promises.

On the ground, several caste leaders manned each of the Lok Sabha constituencies while executing the strategy employed in football of “one-to-one marking” to blunt the caste census plank with Hindu vote consolidation.

BJP’s electioneering blitzkrieg by the party’s top campaigners will now as a practice be backed by an army of party leaders manning parliamentary constituencies coupled with rigorous training of workers. BJP may intensify and wrap up its ongoing training programmes at the municipal and gram panchayat levels in other states by year-end.

This is aimed at seamless dissemination of electoral messaging, something BJP is already adept at, and which will be taken to the next level through grassroots functionaries. In contrast, there is no comparable effort by opposition leaders to take the messages spouted by their leaders at rallies to the doorsteps of voters.

Manish Anand is a senior Delhi-based journalist. Views are personal, and do not represent the stance of this publication.