The Hindu Business Line : The strategies that win elections

Master strategist... The Law Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley, can take credit for orchestrating the BJP victory in the Assembly elections in three key States.

IN response to the article "Introspection time for Congress-I" (Business Line, December 6) by his author urging the Congress(I) to introspect on its poor performance in the Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland, a couple of readers wrote to say that along with the Congress(I) high command, the media too needs to introspect.

Over the years, one has found that the readers/viewers who are displeased with the media — both print and electronic — for carrying projections against the BJP articulate their displeasure strongly.

The harshest criticism against the Congress(I) rarely gets even a whimper of protest from its supporters. This is not to say that the Congress(I) does not have its faithful readers/viewers. But they seldom bother to record or register their displeasure with the media.

At the end of the day, media projections were right as far as Delhi was concerned, partially right in Madhya Pradesh — where it had predicted that the BJP had the edge but failed to see the groundswell of support for the BJP or displeasure with the Digvijay Singh government — and not too far off the mark on Chhattisgarh, where the Judev video issueboomeranged on the Congress(I)'s Ajit Jogi, who has landed himself in an even greater mess.

But it was in Rajasthan that the greatest upset of this election happened. What went wrong, and how did the BJP manage to snatch the State from the Congress(I), vouchsafed a comfortable victory by slew of pre-election opinion polls?

The best person to pose this question seemed to be one of the two chief strategists of the BJP in this election, the Union Law and Commerce Minister, Mr Arun Jaitley.

Pooh-poohing the opinion polls and other surveys that had described the Rajasthan Chief Minister, Mr Ashok Gehlot, as an "ideal chief minister", Mr Jaitley said: "What was the great administrative marvel that he had brought into Rajasthan, apart from distributing (during the drought periods) the foodgrains given by the Centre to the villages?"

In this background, when some of the opinion polls gave the BJP only 55 seats and the Congress(I) 130 out of the 200 seats in the Rajasthan Assembly, he said: "We knew that the media does not always get things right. I saw it in the Gujarat elections and I saw it in these elections too. They are supposed to report accurately... but some of them decide who the next chief ministers will be! So these fake polls turned out to be a googly in Rajasthan. They made the BJP more aggressive and more alert. We put in an extra effort, while the same polls put the Congress to sleep!"

As for the strategy in Madhya Pradesh that gave the BJP an unprecedented number of seats, Mr Jaitley, who was in charge of the campaign in both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, said that with the "roads of Madhya Pradesh, along with the power cuts in the State, campaigning for us, the strategy was to strengthen the anti-incumbency factor, which anyway existed."

He pointed out that in any election, the basic tenet is that "you strengthen the anti-incumbency where the people are unhappy. They are already unhappy and you have to make them conscious of their unhappiness. It is unhappy people who vote out governments. You just have to focus on the points that prick them. We did just that."

Mr Jaitley said that issues which are normally on the BJP's agenda, such as "terrorism, the Kashmir issue, taking credit for the successful holding of elections in Kashmir, or the ISI, these could have been tried." But these were not needed in Madhya Pradesh "because we realised that these were not the kind of issues that would jell with the voters in the State at this moment. Much more than such issues, it was the bad roads and the power cuts that were pinching the voters. If it were a moderately bad situation on these counts, the other issues would have helped. But if it is a terrible situation, the strategy has to be different."

So, all that the BJP had to do was "to make those already unhappy with Digvijay unhappier," he says.

Apart from this, the other strategy was to capitalise on the finding that the Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, enjoyed "huge approval ratings", and to give "Ms Uma Bharti an image make-over. And she conducted herself superbly during the campaign. The mandir in her, as I told you in an earlier chat, was getting us the upper caste, and the mandal in her was consolidating the OBC. She was going to be the first woman chief minister, the first OBC CM in MP and the first CM from the Bundelkhand region. All these factors consolidated the BJP vote."

Mr Jaitley dismissed the perception that both Ms Uma Bharti and Ms Vasundhara Raje lack the kind of administrative skills required to provide good governance in such States as Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

"I am confident that they will deliver," he said. We all learn with the office — for people like Mr Jaswant Singh, Mr Arun Shourie and myself, it is the first time in our lives that we have become ministers."

Coming to the most important issue — the back-seat given to the BJP's pet issue of Hindutva in this election, vis-à-vis the RSS claim that the BJP's victory in these elections can really be attributed to the Hindutva factor — the BJP's chief strategist has this to say: "Part of the ideological personality of the BJP will always remain. In such areas as Malwa, in MP, that factor does matter and that is the area where the Jan Sangh and Ramrajya Parishad existed even in 1950."

He feels that the solid social work done in some of the interior areas by grassroots Sangh Parivar organisations really helped in swelling the BJP's vote kitty.

Giving an example Mr Jaitley said that on the day the BJP chose Ms Uma Bharti as its leader in Madhya Pradesh, "when I went to the BJP office in Bhopal, I saw over 200 plus people who were full-time workers in her constituency. For a full six months they had been working in the constituency, and most of them were not even from the BJP. They were from the RSS, the ABVP or other friendly organisations — the faceless, marginal workers who contributed to our victory. That's the kind of support Ms Uma Bharti got."

To political analysts from the media and elsewhere, who have been putting forth learned theses on how the BJP should drop its Hindutva plank, now that it has proved that it can win elections without this astra, Mr Jaitley's response should leave nobody in doubt about the party's strategy in the coming Lok Sabha polls next year.

"In this election the focus was different, but let me assure you that Hindutva is part of the BJP's ideology and will remain so," said Mr Jaitley.

So, what would the BJP leadership do with media advice not to use the Hindutva card in future elections?

The reply is a deep sigh: "What do I say about the media? When we don't use Hindutva, they say we have given up our core issues; when we use it they say you're politicising religion."

One more question that has been raised persistently following the BJP's triumph in these elections is whether the party will need its allies at all in the Lok Sabha polls of 2004. Can the BJP not now come to power on its own, ask the more optimist and hard-core BJP fans.

One thinks that would be unlikely. For one, the BJP has mastered the art of coalition politics and has had comparatively smooth sailing in the present term.

But even if it were capable of coming to power on its own — an unlikely feature because one swallows does not a summer make — Mr Vajpayee, who one supposes will be the prime minister once again if the NDA returns to power, will prefer to have allies such as the Telugu Desam Party and the Samata Party.

Such allies will help to keep at bay the growing clamour from the VHP and other saffron outfits to rebuild the Ram temple at Ayodhya.

Surely, the present and future governments have more pressing issues to attend to than replacing mosques with temples, as Ms Uma Bharti will soon find out.

Saffron clothing and blessings from sadhus and sants at her swearing in, is just the beginning, but will not take her too far if not accompanied by an improvement at the ground level in Madhya Pradesh.

The time to use bijli and sadak as election slogans is over. It is now time to convert them into reality. That will be the tough part.

(Response can be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)

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