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With 70 days left for a new government to take charge in Delhi, it is now clear that these general elections will be about whether India wants Narendra Modi to be prime minister or not. The answer to that one single question will determine the outcome of the poll.
So it is not surprising that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s entire campaign strategy has been about projecting the image of its vote-gatherer. So what if Lal Krishna Advani doesn’t like this. Who cares if the Congress mocks this? Whatever the opposition may say, this is the bare fact of these elections. No wonder Arvind Kejriwal has chosen to directly target Modi.
In almost every State, even regional political parties are being forced to define their political platform on these terms. Interestingly, not every regional party has fallen into this trap. Nitish Kumar’s haste in Bihar has made others cautious. While Uttar Pradesh’s Mulayam Singh Yadav has had no option but to define his platform as an anti-Modi one, West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee has been less strident in so defining hers. In Andhra Pradesh (the State is still called that!) and Tamil Nadu, regional party leaders have all fudged the issue. The Telugu Desam Party, YSR Congress and even the Telangana Rashtra Samithi leaders have kept their options open without positioning themselves against Modi. In Tamil Nadu, while DMK supremo Karunanidhi has warmed up to Modi, Jayalalithaa has truly distorted the issue, targeting the Congress and the DMK, while remaining silent on Modi.
Some political analysts have been critical of this ‘presidential’ twist to a parliamentary election. Rahul Gandhi went a step further and offered a spurious theory, saying the Congress party always allows its parliamentary party to decide who would be PM! India’s general elections have, with a couple of exceptions, only been about who would preside over the Dilli Darbar.
What can, however, be said, is that every now and then a ‘regional’ leader may spoil the grand strategies that define a national campaign. The late YS Rajasekhara Reddy did just that in 2004. That election was about Atal Bihari Vajpayee getting another term. While Sonia Gandhi led the Congress campaign, she was not claiming the top job. In fact, the Congress warped the issue after Gandhi burnt her fingers in 1999, staking claim to form a government with the support of “272” MPs.
The BJP’s defeat in Delhi was engineered by YSR’s victory in Hyderabad. The dramatic defeat of Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam government in Andhra Pradesh, on the back of a campaign that YSR crafted and led, ensured that the Congress got enough seats in the Lok Sabha to form a coalition government. The voters of Andhra Pradesh took an electoral decision based entirely on their local preferences, however, in the process, they made a difference to the national outcome.
The Congress’ long-standing political enemy, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), then decided that an enemy’s enemy could be a friend and offered support to the Congress to keep the BJP out. In short, the dynamics of the parliamentary system worsted the tactics of a presidential campaign.
Can regional politics play a spoiler in this year’s national elections in April? Can victory in the Dilli Darbar be shaped by the local preferences of some distant electorate? That is the game in town.
Having come to terms with the fact that the Lok Sabha elections are indeed going to be presidential, and the single most important question for a great majority of the voters will be whether or not they want Narendra Modi to preside over the Dilli Darbar, his opponents will naturally want to throw sand in his wheels by making the campaign ‘non-presidential’. Perhaps, even very municipal.
In the very seat of the Dilli Darbar, very local factors have helped the emergence of a new ‘regional’ challenge to the national campaigner. Other regional leaders are playing the old game of projecting themselves as potential PMs to mobilise local support for themselves. Telugu Desam founder NT Rama Rao did that when he formed a National Front and projected himself as a prime ministerial aspirant to ensure re-election in Hyderabad. The Left Front did that with Jyoti Basu in Bengal in 1996 to ensure CPM’s re-election at the State level. Except that comrade Basu took the campaign seriously and thought he should become the prime minister. The politburo had to purge him of such ambitions.
This time round every State leader pretends he/she can be the next Deve Gowda. However, if the latest CNN IBN, Lokniti, opinion poll is reflective of public sentiment, the strategy is not yet working. In Tamil Nadu, for example, the poll shows that both ‘national leaders’, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi, are running ahead of the regional one, J Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK. Her party’s attempt to project her as a potential PM has not yet helped her gain traction.
In Bihar, UP and West Bengal, regional parties are using the same strategy of projecting their leaders as potential PMs to garner support. If they succeed, the elections will lose their ‘presidential’ sheen. However, so far that has not happened. Even in defining their platforms, Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav and now, even Mayawati, have all had to refer to Narendra Modi. So, this election is already about him. Time Lal Krishna Advani understood that!
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