Why victory in every election is important for the post-2014 BJP

The BJP’s prime objective, under Modi-Shah, ever since storming to power in 2014, has been to become the country’s dominant party. (Image source: Reuters)

Why does the Modi-Shah electoral machine fight each state election like an existential battle? And what impact does a loss like Karnataka have on the authority of the BJP’s national leadership? To understand these questions, let’s first try to capture the essence of Modi-Shah’s duopoly by placing it in the context of the party’s evolution.

When the BJP first assumed national power under the Vajpayee-Advani partnership, the prime object of the party was survival. Being part of the larger NDA, which included secular and socialist parties, the national party sought legitimation within the established norms of parliamentary democracy. While ideological expansion was outsourced to the RSS (along with key ministries like education), political thrust was given to the accommodative approach of working through traditional power networks, rather than seeking to replace them.

Concentration Of Power

The Modi-Shah BJP (the charismatic leader and his organisational “Chanakya” fused into one centre of authority) is a remarkably different creature. The party’s prime objective, ever since storming to power in 2014, has been to become the country’s dominant party. This is not a moral/normative claim but a descriptive one. The power-strategies of parties are, after all, governed by their political capacity.

The Modi-Shah BJP has achieved its object of domination, over the last decade, through two steps. First, the concentration of political power (not just of the party, but of the political system writ large) within the national leadership. Second, using that concentrated power, among other things, to build a formidable electoral machine, centred on the PM’s charismatic appeal.

This strategy has brought the BJP unprecedented electoral success, including the second Modi wave of 2019. Finally, electoral successes loop back into further concentration of power, completing the circle of political domination.

Political Legitimacy

This “virtuous” cycle of political domination is based on the perception of Modi-Shah’s “unmatched ability” to keep winning elections. It is the aura of electoral invincibility that confers political legitimacy on the leadership, beyond their ideological appeal. As the PM stated in his parliamentary defence on the Adani issue, he did not need to answer the opposition’s questions because he drew his legitimacy directly from the people (“Janta ka Ashirwad”) as supported by his superior electoral record.

Thus, electoral reverses in states like Karnataka do have a significant impact on the authority of Modi-Shah. It is often cited that the three state elections the BJP lost to the Congress in December 2018 had no demonstrable effect on the national election five months later. But it is often forgotten that in the immediate aftermath of these losses, the Mood of the Nation Survey released in January 2019 had shown that Modi remained the PM choice only for 46 percent, his lowest ratings of the first term. Incidentally, Rahul Gandhi had jumped then to 34 percent.

The only other time Modi’s ratings, on the PM question in the MOTN survey, dipped was in Aug 2021, when they cratered to below 30 percent, as many right-wing respondents switched over to Yogi Adityanath. This was, of course, in the aftermath of the second devastating Covid wave. But it also followed a few months after the Bengal defeat, where the BJP got soundly defeated despite the personalised Modi campaign.

It is of course a truism that electoral victories strengthen leaders, and defeat weakens them. But the argument being made is a little more complex. If there is indeed a virtuous cycle that compounds the dominant power of the Modi-Shah BJP, there must also exist a corresponding vicious cycle.

And this vicious cycle can only start with electoral losses. Every dominant system has enough contradictions lurking under the surface waiting for the opportune moment.

Perceptions of weakness can change the political leverage the leadership enjoys with certain opposition parties, as well as the leverage commanded over various institutional actors. Let’s take the case of Modi-Shah and the Hindutva support base.

The Sangathan’s Deference

The Hindutva support base, most importantly the RSS, cedes autonomy to Modi-Shah to undertake pragmatic political maneuvers (such as breaking other parties and incorporating their leaders into important positions) as long as they win elections. The reports about RSS’s discomfiture with Modi’s personality cult have been grossly exaggerated, as experts on the saffron formation like Walter Anderson have repeatedly asserted.

In fact, as Anderson has claimed, never before have the RSS and BJP functioned so much in unison as in the Modi era. The BJP’s domination has afforded the RSS an unprecedented access of state power and opportunities for grassroots expansion.

Electoral victories built on Modi’s charisma, particularly in new terrains, are thus key for the Modi-Shah duo to reinforce their indispensable position, and maintain its bargaining power over the RSS. However, as the Karnataka election reminded us, for all the books on the signature organisational management of Amit Shah, the digital campaigns and ‘panna pramukhs’, the BJP still struggles in states where it does not possess the hardware of RSS cadres.

In Karnataka, RSS shakhas are concentrated in the coastal region, which is also the only region where the BJP’s Hindutva campaign actually worked. Communal mobilisation is hard to achieve merely through the saturation of airwaves.

The historian Ian Copland once summarised the starkly different conception of leadership among VD Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha and MS Golwalkar’s RSS. Savarkar extolled the idea of a “great personality” whose charismatic appeal could become the focal point for the nation’s fast-track Hindutva awakening. The RSS centred the idea of the “sangathan”, patient organisational-building to bring about the realisation of Hindu nation through an evolutionary change in people’s consciousness.

The RSS’s conception of ideological change, of course, proved far more sustainable. The Hindu Mahasabha, tethered to a narrow social base of upper-caste landlords and princely elite, and perished in a series of fatal splits.

The RSS have adapted to the post-2014 personality cult paradigm, first with Modi and then with Yogi, in the hope that these leaders could help them access constituencies beyond their sangathan. Yet, if one looks at state elections (besides Assam and the North East), the Modi-Shah machine hasn’t really conquered a new state for the BJP post-2014.

The major states the BJP presently holds in its control (again besides Assam) are Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, states where they had entered into government by the early to mid-1990s. Of course, the leadership’s success at the national level probably still justifies the RSS’s loyalty to them. But every bargain is contingent and subject to re-evaluation, which is what makes every election important for the Modi-Shah duopoly.

Asim Ali is a political researcher. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.