Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Will Modi wave last?

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group


In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, BJP"s spectacular victory was attributed to a "Modi wave" because of the decisive nature of the result. With BJP winning 282 seats on its own, it was the first time in 25 years that a single party could gain majority in the parliament. Before him no party other than the Congress, and the post-emergency Janata Party, could cross the victory line of 272 seats. Political pundits had assumed that the polity would remain balkanised. Modi proved them wrong. And that gave rise to the popular conviction that it could not be due to BJP"s merit alone; it was due to a "Modi wave" that blew across the nation.

But will the wave last through the upcoming elections, notably for the assemblies of Maharashtra, the richest state, and Haryana, which has undergone a rapid transformation from agriculture to service and industry? Besides, will Modi"s popularity sustain beyond the assembly elections, through the subsequent years of his leadership of government? It is a fact that the BJP did not appear to be anchored in concrete in the ongoing round of assembly by-elections at least till last week (when this article was written), having won in only four of the 10 seats in Bihar that went to poll recently.

However, by-elections are hardly the bellwether to gauge the mood of the nation. Elections for assemblies of mainline states are a somewhat different matter. Because assembly polls hinge on a face, which is that of a state"s towering political personality, they have the potential to throw up national figures. Modi himself graduated from a state leader. Vishwanath Pratap Singh was essentially a state leader who successfully challenged his Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

It is in this context that the future of the so-called "Modi wave" should be gauged. Who are Modi"s challengers left on the ring? Are they all in full form and in a position to turn every lapse of the Union Government to his or her favour? In 2004, the Vajpayee-led NDA government fell because by then Sonia Gandhi, the Congress president, had cobbled together a large enough alliance of parties opposed to BJP whose constituents wanted NDA to exit from power at any cost. Is a similar counter-wave building up against Modi?

Doubtful. The Congress today is stung by its humiliating defeat and the consequent leadership crisis. It will be some time that it can gather enough self-confidence to take on a opponent of Modi"s stature. The biggest problem of Congress is that, with Vice President Rahul Gandhi not able to make a mark as boss, and his mother, Sonia, not keeping well, for some time, it must look for new life. But it cannot do that because it is a divided house and an image deficit across the board has turned it into something like the house of the seven dwarfs that Snow White had discovered in the forest. Besides, the popular expectation that Prime Minister Modi is bent on bringing about systemic changes in governance is still high. It is therefore premature, to say the least, to expect that either Maharashtra or Haryana will throw up a verdict that gives NDA cold comfort.

Beyond Maharashtra, the anti-NDA national leaders are all so hobbled that none of them can hope to fight back any time soon, if not ever. Jayalalitha, the AIADMK supremo, should by now be trembling to hear the verdict of the CBI court in end-September on the ongoing graft cases against her to engage in any sparring with Modi. Her D-day is September 23 and she is a scared person today. Things are no better with Mayawati, yet another ambitious leader. In the UPA period she had almost managed to get the Income Tax and disproportionate assets cases against her leave in a frozen state. Come NDA, and judicial activism has brought the cases back to life. So dispirited is she that her party BSP did not put up candidate in any of the 11 assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh where by-elections were held, knowing well that in the absence of her party"s elephant symbol it is quite likely that most of her Dalit voters would press on BJP"s "lotus". She is going alone in Maharashtra and Haryana. Going by revelations of CBI Director Ranjit Sinha"s famous "guest book", Mayawati"s confidante S. C. Mishra visited the top cop"s residence, so high is the level of anxiety in the mind of bahenji, once considered indestructible as granite.

In Kolkata, Mamata Banerjee, who was once regarded as an icon of simplicity and integrity, is now so inextricably embroiled in a scam involving plunder of a Ponzi scheme that her popularity is at its lowest in her state. The condition of Mulayam Singh Yadav, once a symbol of secularism, is no better. In Uttar Pradesh, two years of hellish mis-governance by Akhilesh, Mulayam's swell-head son and chief minister, has reduced his own stature to a ridiculously low level. In Bihar, Lalu Yadav is on bail and hearings on his appeal will commence soon. It will surely churn up much of the dirt from his past. By embracing him in a marriage of convenience, Nitish Kumar, the only secular person who had the moral credential to challenge Modi, has scored a self-goal by siding with corrupt Lalu.

Modi's pull is sustaining because of the hypocrisy and self-deception on which the capital's politics is based. Tainted leaders who deserved to be in prison cell could use their clout to paralyse the judicial process and strut about like big shot. Such a vain political class had to go some day. It is strange that it could survive so long. The Modi wave of course needs a counter wave. Just as democracy is meaningless without an opposition. But it has to be reborn and rise, like Phoenix.

  
Who are Modi"s challengers
left on the ring to
create a counter-wave ?