Part-I : The nature of the defeat
Part-II : Cause of defeat, what TMC got right
Part - III : Cause of defeat - what BJP got wrong
Part - III : Cause of defeat - what BJP got wrong
NOTE : I delayed this post by a couple of weeks in order to incorporate some insider inputs that I was expecting. Have interacted with a wide spectrum of people over the past weeks to gain insights from BJP insiders to BYJM/ABVP activists, including some outside WB.
This is likely going to be the most controversial part of this analysis.
As I have mentioned earlier, this was an election with a clear path to victory for the BJP - hold on to the ~121 seats won in 2019 elections and flip about 30 odd from the remaining 170 seats for a comfortable majority. In stead, BJP lost about 36% of the seats it had won 2 years back !
Do note that this is a severe reversal of trends in WB political history, for the elections in the new millenia the trend of LS has always strengthened in the next VS, the weakest trend is the LS1999-VS2001 pair at the turn of the century when the LF just about maintained its 2/3 majority, inspite of the TMC & INC coming together in 2001. However, there it can be argued that there's not much space left for the left front for an upwards trend from 2/3 majority; the BJP does not have this excuse & has unfortunately bucked this trend for the first time in 20 years.
Question is why ? What are the factors that BJP got wrong in this election ?
1. Strategic misstep from the past
This is not much well known outside WB BJP circles but BJP national leadership long continued to nurture hope that TMC will join NDA & hence treated the party with kid-gloves. Modi campaigned in 2014 with the comment 'WB will have do haat mein laddoo, centre mein Modi or State mein Didi'. TMC however quickly decided that BJP was the main foe & even reached out to left & cong to stop BJP. Post GE2014, as BJP vote share shot up to 17%, the irrelevance of the left, coupled with the scam infested TMC & and the rising popularity of the PM meant that the BJP had already become the de-facto opposition in WB. Many people were already fed up with TMC & few were ready to give another chance to the left so soon. BJP was increasingly being seen as the only credible opposition to the ruling party and by 2015 the pressure of the scams & increasing mindspace occupation by the PM meant that BJP had definitely left cong & left behind and well on its way to stake its claim as the main opposition in 2016 elections.
That however was not to be, as 2016 elections approached BJP's aggression progressively nosedived and with it its electoral prospects, ending VS2016 with a meagre 3 seats & 10% votes. The inside story is that BJP gave walkover to the TMC in return for MB's support in Rajya Sabha to pass bills. Of course, MB being MB reneged on her promises & extracted more pounds of flesh at every opportunity. Mostly, her scam tainted leaders had to be 'let off' in return for her support in RS (including strategic abstentations). Going down this path meant BJP's credibility as a strong anti-corruption party took a hard beating. Was it worth enough to delay BJP's rise in WB by 5 years, while allowing a ROP pasand dispensation to rule the roost in a vital border state ?
Because it could well have reached where it is today back in 2016 itself, providing a much stronger base from where to launch the 2021 campaign ! While this is not directly linked to the 2021 campaign, it does form part of a pattern of miscalculations from BJP regarding WB, as we shall see.
2. Complete mismanagement by the central leadership
There is no doubt the top two leaders of the party left no stone unturned to win WB, but the leaders they had chosen to lead the state campaign left a lot to be desired.
The central leadership led by WB election-in-charge Shri Kailash Vijayvargia ushered in a plethora of self-destructive policies that led to a suboptimal result by the BJP. The leadership was out of touch with local sensibilities, suffered from general tone-deafness, alienated core voters, had no ability to judge the talent of the leaders or the candidates handpicked by them and hobbled the very leaders who could have delivered WB for them. I will flesh out the policy mistakes in the following points but given the lower stature of the local leadership the buck stops at KV and co.
2. Giving priority to new TMC entrants over BJP/RSS old timers
A party can expand in a new region either organically or via acquisitions. If rapid expansion is needed there are few alternatives to acquisitions. However care needs to be taken that the new entrants are compatible with existing party ideology, culture and the loyal cadres who have stuck with the party for long do not feel alienated. This was BJP's dilemna and instead of taking care in picking and choosing it went for en masse recuitment of TMC turncoats sans any quality check. This resulted in induction of worthies like Monirul Islam and Babu Master (accused in murder of BJP worker). BJP even arranged security for the later !
What do you think this did to the psyche of the party cadres who had put their life on the line for the party over the years ? Would they be energised by the leadership of a babu master and bunch of similar TMC turncoats who are well known as thieves ?
BJP failed to understand that many of these leaders were coming over precisely because TMC/PK/IPAC found them unelectable, not only were they corrupt, they were corrupt leaders without a strong voter base. Their moving over to BJP was TMC's gain and BJP's loss. Not only were these leaders not invested in a BJP win, some of them even worked for TMC from the inside and have since started moving back.
They were only interested in the money coming in from central BJP and consequently did not bother to give accurate feedback to the central leadership.
A major subplot of this phenomena was how DIlip GHosh was treated. Dilip Ghosh and his right hand man Subrata Chatterjee are both old RSS hands who had helped deliver 2019. But the duo objected to the unrestricted entry and empowerment of exTMC people in the BJP which led to regular complaints to the central leadership of KV & co. Egged on by another TMC turncoat Mukul Roy, KV & co sacked Subrata Chatterjee as Secretary(Organisation) of WB BJP last year in October in order to teach Dilip Ghosh a lesson.
The signs were clear, Dilip Ghosh was to continue as a figurehead state President while Mukul Roy was the real power in WB BJP. This was even worse than sacking Ghosh outright, with 6 months to go for elections, they ended up with a lameduck president who was unable or unwilling to push the party machinery for the final dash. To most seasoned watchers, it was clear that this was not Dilip Ghosh at his 100%.
Any political party needs street fighters to win WB, I have been saying this for a decade now on BRF. Fortunately, BJP has managed to discover a few of them, the combative Dilip Ghosh being one of them. He has his share of problems but his ability to deliver is not in question, cfe 2019 results. His sidelining & the removal of the man who built WB BJP organisation 6 months before the election greatly hampered BJP's chances.
The importance given to Mukul Roy is another subject of abiding mystery to WB politics watchers. Let me be very clear, Mukul Roy is no HBS. He is a backroom operator with no mass base unlike HBS, his culpability in sarada etc scam was no less than any other TMC leader, he was never a popular leader and is far more hyped up than his ability suggests. State BJP supporters have always been embarrassed by him. It is barely tolerable to have him in the party but to have him lead ? It significantly dilutes the corruption charge against TMC. KV & co however started believing that Mukul Roy is some genius ala Himanta Biswa Sarma who will single handedly deliver WB to them. And Mukul Roy's single point policy was simply get as many TMC leaders as possible, without bothering about their ground support or credentials.
3. Deliberate disregard for local talent
I remember speaking to a number of friends post 2019 elections(and possibly on BRF as well) that if the BJP wanted to win 2021 they needed to start a frantic talent hunt program at lower levels. Two years might not sound like much to create seasoned leaders or a CM candidate but it is more than enough to identify the student & youth leaders who can gather new recruits, facilitate lower level campaigning, lead the party apparatus on ground etc. This, as per insiders, was not done. KV & co does not trust 'upper caste bhadraloks', which as per them meant all educated bengalis (more on that later) and preferred resident hindi speaking workers. Even this might not have been a problem since many of the WB hindi speakers are here for multiple generations, speak good bangla (most do it better than Dilip Ghosh) and have a finger on the local pulse. However, even from this group only those made it through who shared the central leaderships' mistrust of bengalis. The rest of the numbers were made up by out of state BJP workers who brought the only tool they knew, caste politics. The BJP was thus left with karyakartas who were either yes men or completely cut off from the society, who were thus unwilling/unable to garner support for the candidates or galvanise supporters.
As a result BJP's ground game was mostly non existent, with the candidate often left to fend for himself. In my constituency the BJP candidate (professional with clean image but little ground connect) appeared the grand total of one time, on a lone auto rickshaw that sped through the locality with a loudspeaker blaring 'vote for BJP candidate Shri .....' once and that was it. Blink and you will miss it. In contrast the TMC candidate came twice with a huge procession of vehicles & supporters. And this is a ward that the BJP has consistently carried.
There were similar problems with their polling agents who were novices with no knowledge of election procedures and how to safeguard the interest of the candidates. Unlike TMC their agents had recieved no training and had no motivation to ensure a fair election. Many a times these were young guys going through the motions for money. Again points to weak clueless leadership.
4. Poor candidate selection
Much has been written on this so I will be short. Pathetic would probably be the correct word to describe BJP candidate selection. Candidates were announced who themselves were not even part of BJP (utterly embarrassing the state unit), many utterly corrupt ex TMC people were given tickets, a bunch of tollywood c grade actors were given tickets for god knows what (there are nasty rumours) who were busy partying with TMC minister madan mitra on a river cruise as he was singing a song abusing BJP, all this literally days before the election. SinghaBahini's Devdutta Maji was given ticket from Chowrangee, a place where he has no base.
Bad candidate selection & consequent revolts by many local units meant quite a few units refused to support corrupt/helicopter candidates, otherwise BJP's tally
won't have gone below 100 in the worst case.
5. Adopting leftist ideology & hostility towards local culture
Yes, you read this correctly. Please read on.
WB has about 25-30% muslim population, so the BJP needs unseen levels of H consolidation to pull it through. That would be quite obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense. Right ?
Not apparently so obvious to the BJP, because it adopted a threefold election plank, abusing bengali(hindu) culture, trying extremely hard to introduce caste faultlines & going all out to get muslim votes.
(Sounds crazy right ?)
BJP seems to have internalised the JNU leftist narrative that bengali culture is essentially anti hindu and decided that the existing bengali identity needs to be destroyed in order for bengal to join the 'mainstream'. This is likely due to the 'guidance' provided by non resident bengalis like swapan dasgupta, sanjeev sanyal etc, who are themselves completely cut off from their roots and some were leftist not too long back. These people are a variant of lutyens elite and share their self hating nature, with the Indian hate replaced by Bengali hate. These people, limited in their personal experience to other NRB's who are mirror images of themselves, decided in all their wisdom that the term bhadralok in bengal society is equivalent to 'elite & anglicised'.
This is like a couple of sharma ji ka betas living in SoBo deciding that all sharmas are anglicised & anti-hindu, because their immediate friends & family are like that. (no offence intended to any Sharma ji's anywhere)
In BJP's imagination bhadralok is the symbol of bengali leftist ideology that needs to be villified & destroyed. So who are the bhadralok ? Armed with decades of experience in caste politics & ably supported by the JNU caste cabal, the answer seemed obvious to them. The upper castes of course, right ?
Thus out came the BJP campaign strategy, a strategy based on abusing bengali upper castes in rural bengal in the best traditions of DMK/RJD/SP/BSP, ignore or demean bengali culture/icons throughout the campaign, try and manufacture the narrative that there is tremendous caste discrimination in WB and the BJP's true fight is against that.
This was a classic case of tilting at windmills that ever was. It didn't matter to them that this theory, so 'obvious' to their experts from UP, MP & Maharashtra had no relation to ground reality and was not getting any traction on ground. The term bhadralok(bhadramahila for women) in bengali culture is a very wide term used to refer to *anyone* who is educated & maintains a certain level of politeness & decorum. The term originates from the sanskrit term 'Bhadra' ('Bhadre' for women) which is cognate with 'arya' or gentleman in english. That's it !
It is not restricted to any caste, certainly doesn't mean upper class (term for which is bodolok == bade log in hindi) and is not even restricted to bengalis. Any gujarati, tamil etc person satisfying the twin criteria of education & polite conduct would be referred to as a gujarati bhadralok, tamil bhadralok etc.
When the BJP, especially the IT cell drones led by clueless idiots like Amit Malviya was attacking the bhadralok identity, it was
attacking every single educated bengali, which is to say it was attacking the bengali identity itself. The same identity that gave rise to hindutva icons like Swami Vivekananda, Bankim, Aurobindo and so on. How do you think this played to the average bengali BJP supporter ? All dissenting voices within the BJP were ignored & silenced. Consequently, many long term supporters & members of the bengal BJP got frustrated and stopped amplifying IT cell's misguided campaigns on caste & anti-bengali propaganda creating a complete vacuum in social media against TMC/IPAC propaganda.
Most speeches & pressers were in hindi only, candidate lists were only in hindi, TV ads spoke a odd version of bangla that was clearly a word for word (google?) translation of a hindi slogan that made no sense to their intended targets, let alone capture their hearts. This could have been easily remedied with a bengali speaking person doing QC before the ads went out but hey, bengalis were not to be trusted unless they were SC/ST and not even then if they were educated. BJP campaign trucks only blared JSR, the witty retorts and slogans aam BJP supporters created on their own were conspicuously absent in BJP official campaigns, presumably because they were in Bangla. BJP leaders pointedly ignored Maa Durga in favour of Sri Rama, ironical because in Bengal the two are intricately connected, (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaal_bodhan) and this was a perfect cultural bridgehead to win over Bengal. But of course, to do that the BJP needed a local 'sherpa' to guide them through the local variations of culture & religion and they didn't have one. Or at least no one they listened to. Beyond a certain point it became difficult for even the most loyal of supporters to ignore the obvious pattern.
It is understandable that in a varied nation like ours there would be some parochial hatred on the basis of culture, language etc even in the mainstream society. But to see that kind of bias driving the electoral campaign of a national party, that too one promising hindutva & to look after the interests of all hindus; it was painful & sobering for many, to say the least. It was almost like the BJP wanting Bengal but not the Bengalis.
While Dr Praveen Patil was waxing lyrical about the USHV, BJP in WB was trying to introduce anti-UC caste schism in WB polity in the name of 'subaltern hindutva', where it absolutely does not exist. For a so called hindutva party to adopt the language of 'smash the brahmanical patriarchy' was beyond the pale. A BJP supporter friend has derisively started calling it the saffron-left. As someone wrote on twitter, BJP trying caste politics in WB is akin to McDonald's selling beef burgers in India and wondering why no one's buying.
No wonder BJP failed. This strategy only reinforced the idea that BJP was an outsider out to destroy bengali hindu society by dividing it along caste.
Adopting woke-ism & leftism discourse is a disease that has reached BJP significantly in the past few years and I suspect not a few of the new gen advisors of the BJP are in the Sudheendra Kulkarni mode and do not have India's or the party's best interests in their heart. The party needs to take a very close look at who it is listening to because by current trajectory they are quickly becoming a congress minus the gandhi family.
6. Backfiring govt policy
Fuel price increase, LPG price increase, no movement on CAA, plight of hindu bengalis in Assam(this is a genuine issue and BJP spent no efforts to address this) were all issues arising out of Govt. policy that were latched on by IPAC/TMC and successfully used for fear mongering. It might not have worked in a better environment but a moribund WB BJP disheartened by the approach adopted by the leadership (reason mentioned above) failed to counter such simplistic propaganda on ground or on SM. The lack of a major newspaper supporting the BJP POV hurt it big time. Of course, as I have mentioned before, BJP's big hope in TV news, republic bangla itself was subtly leaning towards TMC.
The biggest policy mistakes were however a) not taking the scam investigations to their conclusions, as discussed in point 1 above
and b) not imposing president's rule. As I mentioned in my previous post, TMC's win in 2011 was an extreme example of the success you can achieve against an embedded party-society using primarily democratic means. That is practically impossible sans a major mistake by the ruling party since they are the best at understanding how to guard against a takeover bid on their own party-society model. Many long term observers expected BJP to acknowledge this reality and impose prez rule in order to ensure a level playing field. And if BJP was fearing a backlash from the people of Bengal they couldn't be more wrong because the people of bengal respect power and realpolitik and that no-holds barred tenacity is one of MB's USP.
7. Inconsistent campaign platform
Successful campaign platforms are consistent, on point and have easy recall. All features that were absent in the BJP's efforts. BJP needed the twin planks of development & no appeasement to win WB. Instead what we got was every leader going his own way, often contradicting each other.
On one hand BJP leaders were speaking of how muslims in WB are oppressed and that BJP will bring 'true secularism' and on the other hand there were crass comments (on asked about the sitalkuchi incident, in stead of explaining based on the district SP's comments that central forces fired in defence of govt workers attacked by the peaceful mob, BJP leaders went for hyperbole, threatening more sitalkuchi like incidents ) that didn't achieve anything but a counter polarization in favour of the TMC (without the fear mongering ISF would have cut into TMC votes giving BJP an easier run).
In a job starved state, Kailash Vijayvargia gets asked whether BJP will focus on new industries and jobs. Easy question right ? Just say yes and you score 100% right ? Of course not ! Amazingly, KV finds another way to insult bengalis & confuse listeners about BJP's approach. He derisively says you guys need to stop hankering for jobs and need to start providing jobs instead and that will be BJP's policy. Obviously, other BJP leaders start taking cues from him and parrot similar lines. The sheer tone-deafness and arrogance of the BJP leadership destroyed much of the goodwill that people had for Modi govt.
Post elections, the approach taken by the central leadership who rapidly decamped to delhi while aam BJP workers were getting killed was taken as fleeing the battlefield by the rank and file and absolutely destroyed the reputation of the party. It is increasingly considered by BJP rank and file that their only value to the central leadership is as cannon fodder to frighten hindu voters. BJP needs to move quickly if it wants to continue being a power in WB.