Delhi Results | BJP unlikely to dump its polarising campaign style

Rajeev Sharma 

A day after the February 8 polling in Delhi, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) general secretary Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi came up with an intriguing remark: “The Hindu community is not synonymous with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and that opposing BJP does not amount to opposing Hindus.”

This was indeed a politically-loaded remark. He was speaking at an event in Goa, and went on to say, “[The] Hindu community does not mean BJP, and opposing BJP does not amount to opposing Hindus...Political fight will continue but it should not be linked to Hindus."

This is the template against which the just-concluded Delhi elections have to be seen. Did Joshi foresee the writing on the wall for the BJP and its eventual rout in Delhi polls? Maybe.

Joshi’s comments came against the backdrop of the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which offers citizenship to people from six communities — Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians — who entered India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. However, is this remark limited only to that or is there something beyond it?

This could be the RSS cautioning its protégé BJP to be neither complacent nor presumptuous in assuming that the BJP alone is the sole custodian of Hindus.

The 2019 Lok Sabha elections had seen the then Congress President Rahul Gandhi and all senior party leaders making rounds of temples. In Madhya Pradesh, after winning the assembly elections, Congress Chief Minister Kamal Nath had made singing Vande Mataram mandatory in all schools. Now cut to 2020. Immediately after winning the Delhi polls emphatically, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal dashed off to a Hanuman temple to thank the deity for showering him and his party an over three-fourths majority in the 70-member assembly on a Tuesday, the day of Hanuman.

With this, and other examples, Kejriwal outplayed the BJP in its own game by giving the Hindu voters a campaign soaked in religious symbols. Kejriwal adopted a political strategy of taking on the religious and nationalistic fervour of the BJP.

The AAP’s invocation of Hanuman against the BJP’s ‘Jai Shri Ram’ was a political masterstroke.

The BJP has reached a vital crossroad after the Delhi elections. It can’t continue without the polarisation politics which is more likely to woo the Bihar electorate with the Shaheen Bagh model of political campaigning. In fact, a repeat of the Delhi tactics in Bihar could be politically more conducive for the national party.

The BJP finds itself in a tight spot with no major ideas left with it: issues such as the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir are long dusted. Even Pakistan-bashing didn’t help the BJP in the Delhi elections.

Therefore, the BJP is strategically placed to repeat its Shaheen Bagh campaign style in future elections as well. In that sense, the polarising campaign in Delhi was just a test run. Though the BJP may have lost the Delhi election, it cannot see the prospect of entering the Bihar polls without this form of election campaign as it ended up enhancing its vote share in Delhi from 32 percent in 2015 to 38.5 percent in 2020.

So, what about the RSS’ caution? It has to be seen how the BJP reacts to it—but if the BJP feels that this style of campaigning has worked for it, it is unlikely to change it. The BJP is likely to further perfect the model in Bihar, and later use it in West Bengal for the 2021 state polls. The BJP is expected to continue with its polarising Hindu-Muslim campaign there.

Given these signs, one has to expect the BJP to continue with its polarising campaign, in Bihar towards the end of 2020, in West Bengal in 2021, and beyond.

Rajeev Sharma is a political analyst. Twitter: @Kishkindha. Views are personal.