The Bharatiya Janata Party’s metamorphosis from a bunch of squabbling amateurs in the past decade to disciplined soldiers forging columns behind their general has led to a reversal of its fortunes in the last one year.

The victory run started from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh last winter. It gained momentum with the party’s extraordinary performance in the Lok Sabha, which emboldened the BJP to cut errant allies loose in Maharashtra and Haryana.

Not unexpectedly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, coupled with the deft political moves of his lieutenant, BJP president Amit Shah, have once more yielded dividends for the party.

New theories

The BJP’s ascendance, impressive as it is, has constructed multiple arguments that currently form the dominant political discourse in mainstream media. A defining feature of this discourse is that Indian politics has now entered the post-Mandal era, where caste no longer determines voting patterns.

That the national political trend is no longer an aggregate of all provincial currents. Under Modi’s leadership, the BJP is set to subsume coalitions and regional, caste-based political parties and practices.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In purely statistical terms, all election results point to only one trend — that the BJP’s electoral gains are directly proportional to the losses of the Congress. In the Haryana as well as Maharashtra Assembly elections, a comparison between 2009 and 2014 results proves that the BJP has gained primarily at the expense of the Congress. The regional parties, whether it is the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) in Haryana or the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, have, in fact, gained substantially since the last Assembly elections.

What’s the equation?

In 2009, the BJP had secured four of the 90 seats in Haryana with 9.04 per cent of the vote share. The Congress won 40 seats and had a vote share of 35.08 per cent. The INLD had won six seats in Haryana in 2009 with a paltry vote share of 7.40 per cent.

This time round, the INLD’s vote has risen to an impressive 24.1 per cent. The BJP accounted for an impressive 33.2 per cent of the popular vote and 27 seats in Haryana because the Congress’s share fell to 20.6 per cent, a decline of over 15 per cent.

Forget Amit Shah who has been characteristically circumspect about dishing out any pop-analysis about caste and coalition, even lower rung party leaders interpreted the results in Haryana as a “consolidation of non-Jat voters” around the BJP.

The Jats, they say, were torn between the Bhupinder Singh Hooda-led Congress and the Om Prakash Chautala-led INLD. The BJP offered the other caste voters multiple choices of leaders with a potential to occupy the chief minister’s chair — Kishan Pal Gujjar, Rao Inderjit Singh who is a Yadav, Ram Bilash Sharma, a Brahmin, and so on.

The party, of course, spared no efforts to woo the Jats, an intension conveyed to the voter by Amit Shah’s public endorsement of the young Captain Abhimanyu as a leader of importance.

The Marathi manoos

In Maharashtra, it was mostly the losses of the Congress and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena that accounted for the BJP’s gains. In 2009, the Congress had 82 seats and 21.05 per cent of the votes in the seats it won.

The BJP had 14 per cent of the vote share and 26 seats in the Assembly. But this year, the Congress’s vote share fell to 18 per cent and the BJP’s rose to 27.8 per cent. The MNS fell from 5.7 per cent in 2009 to just about 3 per cent while other regional parties gained.

The Shiv Sena rose from 16.26 per cent and 44 seats to 19.3 per cent vote share and 63 seats. The NCP, in fact, increased its vote share from 16.37 per cent to 17.2 per cent. However, its seats fell from 62 to 41. It is more or less a repeat of the Lok Sabha elections where there seemed to have been a role reversal between the BJP and the Congress — from 28.55 per cent in 2009, the Congress fell to 19.31 per cent in 2014 while the BJP rose from 18.8 per cent in 2009 to 31 per cent in 2014. And barring the Bahujan Samaj Party, no other regional party lost substantially in terms of vote share.

Caste rules

What this means is that despite Modi’s rise as a national icon and decades of spadework by the RSS, caste politics in India is yet to be subsumed in a larger Hindu identity. The BJP’s election strategy in all recent polls also reveals a deep understanding and influence of caste stratification and its influence on voting patterns.

And the NDA remains a coalition of as many as 28 different political parties despite the BJP having a majority on its own in the Lok Sabha.

Unsurprisingly, Amit Shah is dismissive of questions about whether the BJP is ready to shun alliances, be it the Akalis in Punjab, the Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, even a group that goes by the name of Revolutionary Socialist Party (Bolshevik) in Kerala and, of course, the Shiv Sena, with which ties are expected to be resumed in the coming days.

The BJP’s star is on the ascendant and it will doubtless convert the momentum of its recent victories into inroads in unchartered territories such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and even West Bengal.

But it will do so by a clever amalgamation of the “national” and the “regional”. In short, nothing really has changed in the way politics is practiced in India, except that the Congress has been replaced by the Modi-led BJP.

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