ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

After Vajpayee who?

An intimation of mortality is perhaps the last thing the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to receive today as it wallows in the wah-wahs of victory and settles down to a reasonably long spell in office. But surely some wiseheads in the party (and Parivar) should be sitting somewhere and wondering: "After Vajpayee who?"

And, more importantly, "After Vajpayee what?"

Make no mistake, as yours truly did: the BJP was awesome in the battle for 272. It won 182 seats on its own and in spite of Uttar Pradesh. Its National Democratic Alliance crossed the 300-mark. And, together, they gave the 115-year-old Congress a pasting Sonia Gandhi will not forget till her passport lapses.

Yet, a durable majority has come at such a price for the BJP at long last, and the victory bears so few of its hallmarks and so many of the "moderate" prime minister, variously estimated at between 72 and 77 of years of age, that in the answer to the question "who" lies the "what" of the BJP's future as a stand-alone political outfit.

Meanwhile: • Has the coup in Pakistan on the eve of the swearing-in robbed Atal Bihari Vajpayee of a possible shot at greatness by reinitiating the Lahore process and making peace? • The number of women MPs in the 13th Lok Sabha is down to 43 from 47 last year. Does that mean the 33 per cent reservation idea is gone for good? • Every second contestant on Mastermind India is a Bengali. If Bengalis are so brainy, why does Bengal still vote for the Left Front in election after election? • The number of people below the poverty line has risen by four per cent in the last five years. So is it official now: the rich are getting richer, and poor are getting poorer? • All four contestants in the Bournvita Quiz Contest all-Asia finals this year were from non-metros; the winners were from Chandigarh. Does it say something about children in the metropolitan cities?

In setting aside the core of its agenda -- Ram mandir, Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code -- to accommodate the allies, and in turning the party mukhauta into the alliance mascot (nine photos in the 14-page NDA manifesto), the BJP has achieved its shortterm objective of seizing power. But it has set off on a road whose twists and turns, post-Vajpayee, are difficult to envision.

A right-wing party's swerve to the centre, compelled by the demands of coalition politics, may be a great thing for the nation as the Congress begins to decay. But is it such a good thing for the BJP?

Sure, it has nothing to worry about at the moment. The BJP won 182 seats in 1998 and it has won 182 this time, a statistic that looks even more stupendous when you consider the fact that it contested a full 58 seats fewer than the 388 it did last year. Which means, not only did it do as well as last year, it did better.

On the other hand, the Congress won just 112 of the 453 seats it contested this time (141 out of 476 in 1998).

How did that happen? Pokhran, "performance" and Kargil may be the answers the BJP spin-meisters would like to hear. I'd wager that it was the pre-poll electoral alliance that the BJP struck (and the Congress didn't) that mostly did the trick. Not only did the allies contribute 123 seats to the NDA's tally of 305 (40 per cent) but they helped the BJP candidates win in nearly 80 constituencies (45 per cent).

Clearly, it was the moderate face of Vajpayee that convinced the allies of the BJP's good intentions and helped rope them into the 24-party alliance. Clearly, it was the moderate face of Vajpayee that convinced voters to vote for the BJP and its allies.

Which is why, the question "After Vajpayee, who?" becomes important for the BJP. It boggles the mind to imagine what would happen to the NDA if a hardline leader incapable of saying no to "Nagpur" were to bring back the contentious issues on the table, and scare away the allies. And it boggles the mind even more to imagine what will happen to the BJP itself.

In other words, can an L K Advani inspire the same level of confidence in the allies and voters? Or a Murli Manohar Joshi? Or a Jaswant Singh?

Of course, the BJP's task, post-Vajpayee, becomes ridiculously easy if the Congress were to simply disintegrate and die and vanish before our eyes. But there aren't too many signs of it. In spite of ending up a full 70 seats behind its rival, the Congress totted up a larger vote share (28.42 per cent) than the BJP (23.07 per cent) this time (source: EC).

In fact, as M J Akbar points out in The Asian Age (October 10), the Congress did much better in the assembly election than the general election in states where they were held together. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, it got 90 assembly seats; in Karnataka it formed the new government; and in Maharashtra it came within striking distance of one.

The Congress 'revival' was in evidence not just in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh alone. In at least 50 assembly constituencies, the Telugu Desam Party's victory margin was a mere 1,500 votes or less (The New Indian Express, October 10). The Congress tally went up from 26 to 92 seats, even though it won just six LS seats.

Clearly, it was Vajpayee who did the trick for the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls; not so at the state level. So, has the BJP prepared a blueprint for the party's gameplan at the Centre sans Vajpayee?

Of course, such perspicacity would be rendered infructuous if the BJP were to remain the "good boy" it has suddenly become and finds a leader who is acceptable to all, and if it were to live happily ever after with the allies after the honeymoon. But political parties and politicians do their pranaams before the ballot boxes, not before fairytale books.

So it's a tricky situation for the "Hindu nationalist party", as the BBC and CNN love to remind us. To even get a simple majority of 272 on its own in a House of 544, the party has to expand its area of contest to mop up an additional 90 to 100 seats. To win more seats, it would have to contest more seats. But remember, when it contested 471 seats in 1996, it won just 161.

One healthy sign for the BJP this time was that on top of winning 182 seats, it was second-placed in 115 seats (source: Dainik Jagran). But the 182 figure doesn't quite convey what happened on the ground. For instance, the BJP lost over 60 of the 182 seats it held last time (Dainik Jagran), but made up for the losses elsewhere.

In other words, contesting more seats is no guarantee that it will win more seats. So it's in the BJP's interest to carry forward with the allies. What this election clearly establishes is that the allies need the BJP just as much as the BJP needs them.

In Andhra, it was only with the BJP's 9.98 per cent vote-share that the TDP (39 per cent) was able to jump over the Congress's 43 per cent vote share. In Tamil Nadu, it was the BJP's 21.48 that helped the DMK's 23.12 to climb above the AIADMK's 25.65 per cent vote-share. Likewise, in West Bengal, it's only the BJP's 11.24 per cent vote-share that took the Trinamul (26.06) any where near the Left Front's 46.76 per cent.

But how can the BJP balance its own interests with those of the allies, and yet move closer to the magic figure of 272 without rattling its friends?

At one level, of course, it can always work at bagging big states where it contests on its own -- UP, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh -- lock, stock and barrel. But that's easier said than done as the UP experience (minus 29) given the rise of the "others". Also, the Congress is making headway in MP, where in spite of the BJP's good showing, it gained one seat on top of the assembly victory last year.

At another level, all the five of its major allies -- the TDP, Shiv Sena, DMK, Trinamul Congress and Janata Dal-United -- have no national ambitions. Which means the BJP can at best hope to contest only a few more seats in Andhra, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Bihar, where it gained 16 in all on its own, thanks to the strategic pre-poll tie-up.

Likewise, in the four southern states, there is little room for manoeuvre. Out of the 129 seats on offer, the BJP and its allies notched up 70. Considering that the NDA tally was zero in Kerala, that means the NDA took 70 of the 109 seats. The BJP gained four seats but lost six. How much more will the allies accommodate Big Brother without sending the wrong signals to the minorities?

Stunning as its growth is, the BJP, however, still cannot delude itself of its growing reach. In Andhra, Bengal and Kerala, which together contribute 104 seats, the BJP bagged just nine. In Bengal, for all the hoo-ha, the BJP still continues to lead in only 17 of the 294 segments. In Kerala, its vote-share is still a measly 8.1 per cent.

An obvious area with growth potential are the Union territories where it won only one of the six seats (second placed in three) and in the northeast where it won only two of the 24 (runner-up in 10). But that's neither here nor there, even if the Asom Gana Parishad enters the NDA fold, later if not sooner.

As former prime minister Vishwanath Pratap Singh rightly put it in The Hindustan Times (October 10), there are only so many seats a regional party will want to give to a national party. The battlelines, in other words, are clear. "Every ally has to confront the BJP or be subsumed by it."

In short, even in the time of Vajpayee, the BJP appears to have hit the apogee of regional alliance. So what happens to the BJP sans him?

Krishna Prasad