There is little reason to suspect that the BJP will have an easy time in the forthcoming state polls in Jharkhand and Bihar, writes Nalin Verma

Valmiki chose the thickly forested village of Kurkuria, now in neighbouring Chhattisgarh, to invoke the gods and write his magnum opus, the Ramayana. But the Bharatiya Janata Party president, L.K. Advani, chose Ranchi — primarily known for its association with the mentally-challenged — to invoke the “divine” at his party’s three-day national executive meeting that ended on November 26. Trying to identify the problems besetting his own party as those of the Indian nation, Advani said, “The BJP is really the chosen instrument of the divine to take our country out of the present problems.

At the conclusion of the meet, Advani was in an ebullient mood and he had reasons to be glad. For the BJP’s national executive meeting at Ranchi stayed free of the kind of embarrassment that came with the A.B. Vajpayee-Narendra Modi row in the Mumbai meet or Uma Bharti’s recalcitrance at the recent national office bearers’ meeting at New Delhi. Playing down the differences in the second rung of the party leadership as “aberrations”, the BJP president confidently asserted that, “So long as the awareness of the loftiness of our party’s goals lights up our path, we have nothing to worry.”

But will Advani’s rhetoric about his party being divinely ordained to rule the country inspire the electorate in Jharkhand or in Haryana to ensure a second term for his party in February? In his presidential address, Advani dedicated as many as six paragraphs to describe how the party should “emancipate” Bihar from the “asuri (evil) forces” (read Laloo Yadav). Will his battle cry against the Rashtriya Janata Dal, which has “impoverished Bihar, criminalized politics and governance and made corruption its creed” be heard in Bihar in February? Will his impassioned appeal to launch a nationwide movement against the arrest of the Kanchi sankaracharya, which has “hurt the Hindu faith”, help in uniting Hindus in favour of his party in the states?

The party mandarins find it hard to answer these questions positively. And the reasons for the BJP’s lack of confidence, particularly in Bihar and Jharkhand, are not far to seek. The BJP stood battered in Jharkhand in the May polls as it lost 13 out of the 14 Lok Sabha seats to the Congress-Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-RJD-left alliance. And there seems no reason to believe that the factors which contributed to its phenomenal fall in the Lok Sabha elections have changed or that the Arjun Munda government in the state has done anything miraculous to alter the trend.

It’s not that the Munda government has been sitting idle since the Lok Sabha debacle. With his eyes on the polls, Munda recently recommended to the Centre the inclusion of the Mahatos (an intermediary caste) — who constitute 17 per cent of the state’s population and have a sizeable presence in Ranchi, Hazaribagh, Giridih, Dhanbad, Chatra and East Singhbhoom — in the scheduled tribe’s list. The party believes that it lost in all these seats because the Mahatos, who constituted its support base in the successive polls since 1990 onwards, deserted it in the May polls.

But Munda’s recommendation suffers from some basic limitations. It is for the Centre, now ruled by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, to put its stamp on the Jharkhand government’s recommendations. And, needless to say, the UPA government’s action will be guided by its own political considerations. Moreover, Munda’s recommendation to include Kurmis in the ST list has antagonized all the state’s tribal bodies, which have taken to the streets in protest against the “conspiracy to dilute the tribal preponderance and identity” in the state. Munda’s move is fraught with the danger of alienating the tribals who constitute over 26 per cent of the state’s population.

Munda has taken other populist measures like digging one lakh ponds in the water-starved villages of the state by the end of the current fiscal, providing rice to all the 23,94,000 below-poverty-line families at the rate of Rs 3 per kg till March next year, providing bicycles to all scheduled caste and ST girl students studying in government middle schools and high schools. He has also got his picture embossed on ration cards for BPL families and on match boxes being distributed among the poor, perhaps taking a cue from the former chief minister of Chhattisgarh who had got his pictures on children’s school bags before the assembly polls in December last year.

Observers, however, do not believe that these measures will help the BJP reverse the trend. The primary reason behind their belief is the social combination and political equations which weigh against the BJP. It was the solid Congress-JMM-RJD-left alliance that ensured the rout of the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls. By inducting the JMM supremo, Shibu Soren, in the Union cabinet once again, Manmohan Singh has given a clear signal that the alliance will be in place to decide who will form the next government in Jharkhand. On the other hand, there is no sign that the differences between the Janata Dal (U) and the BJP, which cost the BJP heavily, are going to be patched up. The state Janata Dal chief, Inder Singh Namdhari, continues his attack on the Munda government and four Janata Dal rebels are supposed to join the RJD on November 27.

The BJP seems to have been facing even more trouble in Bihar. The BJP had been strong in the Jharkhand part of Bihar, before its bifurcation in 2000, by virtue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s activities in the rural and tribal areas of the Santhal Parganas and the Chhotanagpur regions. The presence of Christian missions and their activities in an undivided Bihar, in a way, helped the RSS strike roots.

Unlike the plateau region, Bihar’s plains remained more under the influence of the socialist movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan and Karpoori Thakur. Besides, the presence of Yadavs and other backward castes, battling upper caste-hegemony over the land, provided impetus to the socialist school of thought. Laloo Yadav has been harvesting the fruit of that movement by combining the backwards, mostly the Yadavs, with Muslims for the past 15 years. Unless the BJP finds a way to break this alliance, it will find it extremely hard to make inroads here.

Of late, the BJP’s main ally, the Janata Dal (U), is trying hard to persuade Ram Vilas Paswan to join the anti-Laloo fold. Paswan has clearly stated that this is impossible till Janata Dal retains its ties with the BJP. The battle in Bihar is thus more difficult.

Despite speaking like an evangelist at the meet, Advani is aware of the troubled times ahead. That is why he sees hope in Karnataka, ruled by a fragile Congress-led alliance. But it is not yet time to predict a mid-term poll in Karnataka, or to say if the “low hanging fruit” will fall into the BJP’s lap. There is no poll scheduled in the next three years in any of the states once the polls in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana are over. Which means the BJP faces obvious unemployment in the coming months.

Nalin Verma
The Author is the Ranchi based special correspondent of the Telegraph