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There is only one thing political parties care about in a democracy, winning elections.
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This includes political parties out of power and those in power.
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You might assume that once a party wins elections and forms a government, its main focus is
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to govern responsibly, well LOL, in fact ROTFLOL.
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All they care about is winning the next elections and there is very little correlation between
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governing well and getting votes.
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That's the nature of the beast.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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A few weeks ago in the magazine I edit, Pragati at thinkpragati.com, I reviewed an excellent
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book called How the BJP Wins by Prashan Jha.
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The book contains some amazing insights into the BJP election machine that is run so well
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Now, no matter what you think of the BJP or Narendra Modi and my opposition to the man
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in the party is well known, everyone agrees that the election machine is just stupendous.
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In fact reading the book brought me round to the view that given the complexity of the
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Indian political marketplace, Amit Shah might even be the greatest political strategist
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So my guest today on the show is the author of that fine book, Prashan Jha.
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Prashan works at the Hindustan Times and I caught up with him a few weeks ago at the
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sidelines of the Bangalore Literature Festival.
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Here's a conversation we had.
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Prashan, welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Thank you, Amit, for having me.
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Prashan, your book, How the BJP Wins, was a great eye-opener for me because I had to
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sum up much simpler notions of why the BJP did what they did.
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One partly assumed that, hey, people were sick of the previous UPA government and so
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There was a development narrative.
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There was a RSS polarization narrative and there were these simple narratives I knew.
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One assumed that everything just came together and I'd written in the past that Modi was
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like a Roshah King, that people could see in him what they wanted.
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But actually what I learned from your book was that the kind of strategic thinking, the
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kind of organization that went into prepping the BJP for power, especially in the heartland
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states, especially in UOP, which is a big focus of your book, is just nothing short
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It ought to be sort of a case study.
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So when we start, what are the sort of separate elements you break this down into?
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What did they start off by thinking about when they started planning the 2014 campaign?
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So take on from the 2014 campaign and look at how BJP has also become dominant post-2014
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because many of the elections that we see, many of the governments that the BJP has formed
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has happened post its victory in 2014.
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I think something useful to always think about when we're thinking about elections is that
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it's always easier to understand elections in retrospect and when election campaigning
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is on, when these strategies are being formulated, it's more difficult to grasp it.
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So looking back, what we can see now is that the one dominant strand in the BJP strategy
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was projection of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's image and image is quite central to
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I spoke to Govind Acharya, one of the older Sangh ideologues who used to play an important
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role in the BJP and he said to me, for Narendra Modi, politics is equal to power, power stems
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from elections, elections are about images and so politics is equal to images signalling
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And if you use that framework to understand Modi, what you see is that between 2002 and
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2007, Modi was a Hindu Hriday Samrat based on what had happened in Gujarat.
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From 2007, there was a conscious imagery invention of becoming a Vikas Kurosh delivering a Gujarat
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While retaining elements of the strong Hindu leader image, but over the past two, two and
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a half years, it is these twin images that helped him in the 2014 election.
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But in the past two and a half years, particularly after 2015, which is a very critical year
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in BJP's evolution as I see it, there has been a third underappreciated shift in Modi's
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image to becoming a Gariboh ka Neta.
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Why did he feel the need for it?
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He felt the need for it after the Delhi defeat.
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He felt the need for it after the Bihari mediation.
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He felt the need for it when he had to backtrack on amending the Land Acquisition Act.
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He felt the need for it when he started being mocked for his foreign travels.
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He felt the need for it after Rahul Gandhi made what clearly has been a sharpest political
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intervention yet of a Surboot ki Sarkar.
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And BJP felt that its problem, its handicap throughout was that it was seen as a party
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of urban India, as a party of a slice of the middle class, as a party which was soft towards
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And Modi decided that that's not the image trap that he wanted to remain with.
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And so we see this reinvention happening and that reinvention took two forms.
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The first was the narrative around demonetization.
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You have written Amit about demonetization and we now clearly know that the economics
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of demonetization was all fraud.
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But look at the political narrative that he spun around it.
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And I was traveling in UP right after demonetization, speaking to some of India's poorest citizens,
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in one of India's poorest corners, Purvanchal and there was enormous support for it.
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And if you go back to Modi's speeches, particularly one in Muradabad which struck me, not only
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was he saying that this is a battle that I am waging for the honest poor against the
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corrupt rich, he was mocking the rich, he was contemptuous of the rich.
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So there was a very strong anti-rich narrative which was tapping into this latent class resentment
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that does exist in society maybe because of the inequities that existed in society.
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So there was this narrative around demonetization.
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The second was sharper welfare delivery and then to give UPA its share of credit, they
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did realize towards the end that India's welfare architecture is leaky.
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And so they commissioned a socioeconomic caste survey, they started thinking about direct
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benefits transfer, they started thinking about Aadhaar.
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And while all these moves are controversial in their own regard, what this did was this
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gave an infrastructure, this gave foundations to the BJP to run to improve the welfare architecture
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There's some improvement and with it, it delivered cylinders for instance to the UP electorate.
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And so I think it is Modi's image reinvention and has allowed BJP to construct a multi-class
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And this multi-class alliance is the first source of strength for the party.
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And you know, one of the reasons why over the years as a commentator and a blogger and
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so on, this trusted political analysis is like you correctly pointed out, a lot of it
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You're looking back and you're force fitting narratives, but that's clearly not what you've
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done because even a couple of years ago, a good friend of mine who knows Modi very well
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told me that Modi's next big focus is going to be on class warfare.
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And it's turned out exactly like that.
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And right down to, you know, I love the analysis that you made of a speech of his where the
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way he's using language with all those trigger words and those keywords and you know, is
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And the amount of planning that actually went in, it wasn't that accidentally it happened
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So he reinvented himself as a Garibuka Neta.
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That was actually how he planned to do it.
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My other question to you regarding the narrative therefore is that, you know, going all the
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way from Hindu Ridesh Samrat to Vikas Purush to Garibuka Neta, these are very different
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How did you manage them all?
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I don't know whether I have a neat answer to that question because it is a good question
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and it does speak of his political genius and there is little doubt that to be able
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to straddle these different worlds, these different narratives, speak to different audiences
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with different messages while still not diluting one of those three images requires a lot.
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So the guy can still go to Kedarnath and speak about Hindu regeneration and give that implicit
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message and come out as a proud cultural Hindu.
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He can still go to an industry chamber and tell them that look GST is for your good eventually
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and he can do bank recapitalization, which I think is a move as a signal to his original
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Look, I have not forgotten you.
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And he can still do welfare politics and I think in 2019 for instance, the key elements
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of this welfare politics will be Jandhan, construction of toilets, the Ujwara scheme
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again and power and if he is able to deliver even a fraction of what he has promised on
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power to all households.
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So this requires a very careful balancing act and Modi till now has succeeded, but it
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is precisely because of the coalition that he has built, sometimes constructing a coalition
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is easier than sustaining it, especially when you are in power and you need to be delivering
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to all these three different constituencies and that's I think his biggest challenge.
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In this shift to the pro-poor image and not that he has yet done a lot in terms of tangibles
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for the poor, but in this shift to the pro-poor image, is he losing out on his original constituents
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and some of the disillusionment that we see over the past few months articulated on social
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media is coming from his original constituents.
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So will he be able to keep it together and that I don't know whether we are in waiting
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for a fourth imagery invention and what that will be for the guys capable of it.
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I've even seen disaffection on Twitter about how he's not Hindu enough, which is, you know,
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like he said the original and the interesting thing about all this is that 30 years ago
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it would have been possible to be different things to different people because if you
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speak at Kedarnath and you speak to an industry chamber, though your speech is restricted
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to those audiences, but today everything is on YouTube, everything is widely reported
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and I think one factor in that just thinking aloud might well be that people believe what
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So those who see him as a Hindu, they won't bother about the other stuff, they'll say
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yes, that's a sentence, but you know, and they focus on...
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And maybe something else just to take forward that thought is that I was in Bihar six weeks
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ago and I was, I travelled through six districts asking voters what they thought about Modi
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and they said, you're doing good work, you're doing good work, I said, what are you doing?
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You're cleaning up so much dirt, he's cleaning up dirt and I asked them, tell me one tangible
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thing that you, has changed in your life and many of them did not have an answer, but there
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was this enormous faith in the intent and integrity of the man and I think this faith
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in the intent and the integrity of the man has allowed him to straddle these different
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worlds and that faith in the intent and integrity comes from this perception that he's not in
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this for himself, he doesn't have a family, he's not making money, he is committed to
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the state, to the nation, so I mean all that, that is the overarching image under which
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he can do these, you know, this balancing act.
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It's masterful image building and you know that leads me to the next point and then the
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next thing that you address in the book is that again there's a simplistic vision that
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the election was all about Modi, but actually despite the remarkable work that he did constructing
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these narratives and redefining himself, it wasn't all about Modi, the BJP ground game
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was absolutely mind blowing and the detail in which you've described it in the book just
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sort of blew me away, can you tell me a little bit more about the kind of conscious thought
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that they put into redefining the ground game and what they went on to do?
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So I really believe that Amit Shah has created the most formidable national election machinery
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Congress has been in power for longer of course, but Congress was a mass-based party, it didn't
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rely as much on the carder, we have seen regional variance with strong organizations, the left
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in West Bengal had a strong organization, Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu had strong
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organizations, but there is no national party with the kind of Sangatthand that BJP has
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today and this is clearly the Amit Shah school of election management I think and if one
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was to identify key elements in it, the first as when he took over as president was focusing
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on numbers and the quantitative expansion of the membership base, many of us mocked
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him thought that this missed call membership drive means very little, that these figures
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are going to be all conjured up, today they claim they are the world's largest party,
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larger than the Chinese communist party, even if that is an exaggeration and we don't have
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any way of independently verifying the figures that they put up of over 10 crore members,
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even if there are a few crore short, there is no doubt that there has been a massive
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expansion of the BJP membership base and when I went back and looked at how they did it,
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the first thing they did in a state like UP which has 141,000 booths in 2014, they realized
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that in 13,000 booths they got no votes and they said these are Muslim booths, we won't
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worry about them, the other booths, they told these booth committees that look we want you
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to enroll 100 members each in your booths, now usually what happens in political parties
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is that between elections booth committees are dormant, now here the booth committees
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have just worked and delivered your 2014 mandate and the party headquarter was telling the
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party booth committee, now go back and get us 100 members each, then they told the new
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members get us more members, they recognized that a state like UP or even Bihar has high
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degrees of intrastate migration, we think about these states contributing migrant labour
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to Bombay to Delhi, but there is high levels of intrastate migration because women marry
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and move to other villages, so they set up block level camps so that women or even men
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who migrated for work would get an opportunity to enroll themselves as members, so there
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is this quantitative expansion.
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The second was that in this process what they were also doing was qualitatively changing
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the nature of the relationship between the party high command and the party grassroots,
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the party grassroots now was constantly mobile, this was constantly in operation, so after
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the membership campaign they told the booth committees that now you go back and get these
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new members to fill up forms, this will be a part of something we call maha samparkabiyan,
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it was not as successful as the membership campaign because getting somebody to give
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a missed call is easier than getting somebody to fill long tedious forms, so they didn't
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succeed on the same scale, but what was happening was that the booth committee was active, then
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they worked on organizational elections and training camps where they were again just
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ensuring that the machinery was being well oiled.
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Look at ticket distribution which comes up closer to the election, the BJP has had this
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debate internally in the organization about states, about seats where they don't win and
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there is a view within the sun that look ideological purity is important, people have to rise up.
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For Amit Shah the only thing that matters is winnability, so there were 60 to 80 seats
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in UP where they were not winning, what did they do?
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They picked up the 60 to 80 candidates who used to win those seats, imported them from
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other parties, gave them tickets and felt that they will have to work within that ideological
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framework, don't worry about it.
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One of the things that Amit Shah often tells people back in Gujarat is that why is it that
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we have always run short of 5 to 10% votes despite working so hard, we have to compensate
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for the 5 to 10% vote and if we can't win, get the guy who can win.
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Then you will see a fifth element of this school of election management is begin early
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and unleash a propaganda blitzkrieg.
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In UP in November they were doing parivartan yatra and they are going to start doing that
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in the new election bound states.
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I asked the BJP strategist why are you doing it right now, it's four months before the
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elections, don't you think you will peak early?
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He said in Hindi to me, bhajapa cha jaana chahiye, basically BJP should dominate the
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In every district we want either a yatra going through or we want an OBC meeting or we want
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a women centric meeting or we want a youth centric meeting.
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He said I want the people in the district headquarter, people in the village square
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forming an opinion to think about us, even if they are not going to vote for us, to talk
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He said because half the battle in an Indian election is projecting the inevitability of
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The Indian voter often thinks about the wasted vote and I don't want to waste my vote and
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vote for a party which could lose.
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So how is my vote not wasted, I vote for the party which is going to win.
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So you have to project this image that you are going to win and so that also requires
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a lot of careful organisational work and then it boils down to closer to the elections,
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constituency something called chunnav sanchalak samiti, so election management committees
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in every constituency which has a team.
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So in what happens in many of the regional parties for instance or even in congress,
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the candidate is given the ticket and the candidate has to fight the election alone.
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Here the candidate has to fight the election, has to put in the resources but the organisation
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plays an important role in supporting the candidate.
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So the election management committee has a person who is managing the candidate's schedule,
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has a person who is coordinating with the party central command and getting leaders
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for campaigning, has a person who is managing the money.
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So there is that organisational back up, all of this I think reflects a party machinery
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that is constantly at work, very well oiled and all of this of course also requires money
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and then that's also a very important I think element of how the BJP has been succeeding
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and then there is resource mobilisation that is happening at the constituency level.
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The candidate is supposed to have money on his own, he is supposed to know the petrol
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pump owner who will fill in fuel for carders in the run up to elections, he is supposed
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to know the transporter who will give 1000 or 200 cars for rallies.
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At the state level there is resource mobilisation where real estate entrepreneurs, mining barons,
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people who depend on patronage at the state level would end up contributing to the party
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because they think the party will win.
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But what is distinct about BJP's resource mobilisation is that there is centralisation
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of resource mobilisation.
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Congress has this leaky, decentralised model of corruption where if Congress president
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wants a certain amount, she would ask an aide, the aide would ask two chief ministers, the
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two chief ministers would ask two ministers for 50 crores which needs to be mobilised,
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everybody in the Congress chain would earn 400 crores.
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In BJP you have a more centralised model depending on a more limited set of lenders and so that
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financial muscle then allows BJP to sustain the kind of rigorous organisational machine
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that we see in operation.
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Just earlier you mentioned that all Amit Shah cares about is winnability and I don't know
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if that should be a disappointment to the BJP supporters or something that might give
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hope to those who oppose them.
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But the point of the matter which I often keep making is that forget what a party stands
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for, all a party stands for is winning, they will do whatever it takes to win no matter
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what kind of transactional politics.
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This involves, just to indicate how hard these guys work, I want to read out a sentence from
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your book where you say that between August 2014 and March 2017, Shah travelled to almost
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every Indian state twice covering over 5 lakh kilometres to understand, supervise and direct
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And this to me is remarkable and it also explains Amit Shah's well known disdain for elite commentators
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who are sitting in the Ivory Chambers and commenting because he actually did the hard
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yards and put in the hard work and so on.
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I now want to move on to the next…
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Since I wrote this, if I can just supplement it, since I wrote that, after March 2017 he
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has done a 120 day yatra and he is on the road for 4 months after the UP success when
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somebody else would have probably sat, got complacent and thought 2019 was a done deal
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and we don't have to work.
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So that element of hard work, these guys just work hard and that's an underrated quality
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that you don't think about.
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I know you talk about work so hard, it percolates all the weight off.
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Yeah, in fact talking about micromanagement, there's another anecdote in your book, I
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think in Maharashtra, they were tracking by GPS all the district unit heads to see exactly
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how many miles they do in a day which is…
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And whether they were just sitting in the district headquarters and making money of
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the fuel or whether they were actually…
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So that kind of brings me to the next point.
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It's one thing to rebuild Modi's image and make him, you know, all of these things.
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It's another thing to build a great ground game.
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But UP is still dreadfully complicated.
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Identity politics was ruled, there is this minefield of so many different castes and
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sub-castes and so on and it was always thought that the BJP with this sort of pan-Hindu identity
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How did they crack the caste board?
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So I think, you know, BJP today is becoming an inclusive Hindu party.
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It remains a Hindu party but it is an inclusive Hindu party that is moving beyond its largely
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And there are three or four, I think, tangible points that we can allude to, to substantiate
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The first is of course the Prime Minister's own image.
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The fact that he comes from an OBC community helps in drawing a section of the community
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towards the party and project a certain kind of image.
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The second is very careful calculations of caste politics in each state.
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In UP, they figured that Muslims who constitute 20% of the population would not vote for them.
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Yadavs who constitute 10% of the population would vote for the Samajwadi party.
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10% to 14% of the population are Jatas, Mayawati's core vote and that they would not vote for
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They felt that, you know, the mistake the BJP was making was that it was a 20% party
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of Brahmins, Thakurs and Baniyas.
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What it needed to become was a 55% party of Brahmins, Thakurs, Baniyas who consolidate
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your upper caste base, but also get the others, get the other OBCs who are resentful that
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the opportunities and political power and resources that came after Mandal was monopolized
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by certain OBC sub-castes like Yadavs and not shared among the larger heterogeneous
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When we talk about OBCs, one has to understand how diverse, how fragmented it is.
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Among Dalits, they reached out to non-Jatav Dalits who were resentful that Mayawati's
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party which began, when Kanshi Ram started, he said, so it was supposed to be a party
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which would give proportional representation to OBCs, to Muslims, to Dalits, ended up becoming
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a Dalit party and eventually ended up becoming a Jatav party, but there are 55 of the Dalit
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sub-castes and BJP recognized that contradiction, mobilized them.
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So we see them reaching out to communities within the OBC and Dalit fold who are resentful
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and who have not got similar opportunities as some others within their community have.
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The third thing we see is that this then leads to the construction of wide social coalitions
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of the most visible castes, which are the upper castes, with the most invisible castes
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for the most subaltern of these Hindu sub-castes against the dominant political caste of every
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So in UP it was the Yadavs, in Haryana it was the Jats, in Maharashtra it was the Marathas
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and BJP is constructing coalitions of everybody else against the dominant caste.
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So that is again something that, and all of this is also reflecting in the organization.
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So when Amit Shah went to UP in 2014, he did a survey and he figured that the BJP organization
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had only 7% OBCs as office bearers and 3% Dalits in a state where you have 50% OBCs
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So 70% of the population in the party, they are only 10%.
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Today 30% of the BJP organization in UP are OBCs and Dalits.
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Out of 75 districts, 34 districts had OBC presidents, 3 had Dalits.
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The state president was an OBC.
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The numbers are still less than what their population share would suggest, but this clearly
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shows you that BJP is changing on the ground.
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Its organization is changing and it is becoming more inclusive.
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And so the stereotype that we often have, you know, all these things also break certain
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stereotypes that we have cultivated about the BJP.
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If we thought about the BJP as a rich man's party, as an urban party, Modi is now changing
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But we have often thought of BJP as an upper caste party, but BJP may actually be representing
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even the subaltern within the Hindu force.
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In fact, in your book, you've quoted Badri Narayan, who's of course a renowned scholar
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And I'll just read it out verbatim, quote, what Kanshiram did for Jatavs.
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The RSS and BJP are doing for the rest of the Dalits.
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They are helping create the community leaders.
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They are helping document their caste histories.
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They are exploring heroes of their community.
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They are inventing and celebrating the festivals.
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They are playing shakhas near Dalit bastis, unquote.
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And it almost seems like they're reinventing themselves as a Dalit party in doing all this
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filling the party organization with, you know, OBCs and Dalits and so on, and doing that
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What is the RSS's role in all this?
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Where does the Sangh Parivar come in?
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So as we know, the Sangh is the source of BJP's worldview, source of the BJP's personnel
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from the top, the prime minister down to the booth worker, and then BJP has allegiance
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to the Sangh, and this is an association they are very proud of.
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It is an organic relationship.
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But we have also seen in the past that when BJP has been in power, there have been tensions
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between the Sangh and the BJP.
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During Atal Bihari Vajpayee's time, the Sangh affiliates were very critical of economic
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He shared a very difficult relationship with the Sarsang Chalat.
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And many BJP insiders actually say that the 2004 elections went the way they did in key
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states because the Sangh or part of the Sangh machinery went inert.
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I think what is happening at the moment is that there is a very high degree of convergence
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between the Sangh and the BJP.
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And this convergence is driven by three or four factors.
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The first is the relationship between Narendra Modi and Mohan Bhagwat, who are contemporaries,
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who have grown together in the Sangh, whose rise at the state level or within the RSS
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machine or at the national level has almost coincided.
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So this is a relationship where one can pick the phone, talk to the other and say, calm
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The second is ideological convergence.
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I had spoken to a VHP leader Ashok Singhal in 2013, and I asked him what would be your
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expectations of Modi wins.
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And he said three things, Guy, Ganga and Ayodhya.
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And if you look at what's going on, Guy is clearly high up this government's agenda.
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Ganga may not be clean, but they have spent a lot of political energy in creating a ministry
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which also has Ganga regime.
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They built the Ganga narrative.
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They built the Ganga narrative.
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Ayodhya, nothing has happened from the central executive, but look at the political symbolism
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of Yogi Adityanath celebrating Diwali at Ayodhya and keep an eye out for what's going to happen
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in the Supreme Court over the next year where Ramzan Bhoomi case is up for hearing, incidentally
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from December 5th on the eve of the 25th anniversary, the hearing starts.
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The third is that there is close coordination and personnel and policy.
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So the RSS is not running the government of India, but every ministry of the government
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of India is open to RSS inputs.
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And the fourth is the prime minister, as we earlier discussed, is a proud cultural Hindu.
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When he comes out of Kedarnath, when he comes out of Pashupatinath, when he comes out of
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Bishwanath Mandir with the Tikka, he is basically telling the RSS base and the Hindu base that,
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look, I am willing to own my religion.
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This reminds me of what the late Andrew Breitbart, the alt-right hero once said, politics is
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And it seems to me that this is how they've played their roles.
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The RSS has really entered the culture and taken it over and it's been a project that's
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been going on for so long and the BJP is doing the political side of it and actually winning
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Would you say that makes sense?
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I mean, see this, we look at the post 2014 or post 2013 BJP and we look at this as a
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very rapid rise of BJP to power, who had thought that a person, a member of the BJP would occupy
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Radharastrapati Bhavan, would occupy the Maulana Azad Road residence of the vice president
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of India in Delhi, would occupy the speaker of the Lok Sabha position, would be the prime
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minister of the country and have the central government would run governments in 18 states
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And we think that, oh, this happened so suddenly.
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But the other way to look at it is that it has happened after 92 years of work that RSS
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You know, the RSS and the Communist Party of India was set up in the same year, 1925.
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And we know where the RSS today is and we know what the Communists are, right?
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But it gives you a very interesting frame to look at the sustained, disciplined work
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of the Sun over decades without political power coming in.
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I mean, Jansangh, as Amit Shah also keeps saying all the time in public, we have spent
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all our time in opposition.
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This is actually work that has been done on the cultural front and now I think what is
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happening is that this Sun ecosystem is changing the Indian state, the Indian society and the
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And then this is not work that has happened just over two years.
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So before we move on, just a tangential question that earlier we were talking about how all
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Amit Shah cares about is winability and therefore it doesn't matter what you stand for, you
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just figure out how to win.
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But at the same time, the Sun has this decades long project that's been going on.
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Whatever you call it, the Hindutva project or the RSS project or whatever, how do you
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So I think when I suggest that Amit Shah cares about winability and he's willing to co-opt
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existing political elites of other parties, I think it is confined to elections.
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The point is that after winning, what is it that the BJP is doing?
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And on that, I don't think the BJP has stepped back from its ideological framework.
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So they are using power to A, maximize power and further expand power.
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That's something that you see both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah and Narendra Gujarat.
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Amit Shah has never sat on the opposition benches of the Gujarat Legislative Assembly.
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He's always been in power.
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The Modi has not lost a single election that he has led back from 2001.
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So they use power and they don't let the rules of normal rules of anti-incumbency set in
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But two, they have also used power to precisely change state institutions, to create alternative
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intellectual ecosystems and then we can debate the merits of it and to push a certain kind
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of India that they want and they are reshaping what it being an Indian means in some way.
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So I think that ideological framework remains intact.
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This brings me to the next point in your book.
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At one point, you talk about how a newly elected BJP MLA from UP explained his success by saying
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it was an India-Pakistan election, unquote.
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And polarization was certainly a key tactic that the party used.
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So why and how did it work?
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The BJP makes the Hindu voter angry.
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The BJP makes the Hindu voter bitter.
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The BJP makes the Hindu voter resentful.
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The BJP makes the Hindu voter suspicious of the Muslim and suspicions of all other parties
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who are projected as being sensitive only to Muslim interests at the cost of Hindu interests.
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The BJP does this through propaganda.
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It does this through lies.
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It does this through spoken hatred.
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It does this through constructing narratives which are based on all of this.
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If you look at UP again, it very systematically pushed the narrative of love jihad, which
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for the uninitiated means an organized Muslim conspiracy to change the demographic balance.
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When I reported from Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 and I heard the word love jihad, it came
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to me as quite a surprise.
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And it was a fringe Bajram Dal mid-level functionary in Meerut who first mentioned it.
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When I started going back to West UP, I could see traders talk about love jihad.
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I could see even journalists of mainstream Delhi papers use the word like that existed.
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I could see politicians use it and it was acceptable for mainstream politicians to use
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Love jihad is not based on facts, but love jihad is something that is a strongly entrenched
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When BJP talks about how Muslim gangsters threw out Hindus from a town like called Kerala
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in West UP, all independent fact-finding committees have shown that this is not true.
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It constructs the Muslim as the criminal, it constructs the Muslim as hounding the Hindu.
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When BJP talks about slaughterhouses, what is it doing?
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It is constructing the Muslim as the butcher, doing cow slaughter at every street corner.
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When BJP or even a person like the prime minister is talking about electricity being supplied
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during Eid and not during Diwali, and it is not based on facts, it is not true, but what
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It creates a certain sense of bitterness among the Hindu voter against both the Muslim as
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well as the government which is seen as being sensitive to Muslim.
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So the BJP constructs the majority vote, the Hindu vote across class lines through this
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narrative of deception, which should be based on lies.
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It succeeds because secularism is dead.
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There is absolutely no resonance of the idea and the term secularism in the Indo-Gangetic
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And I did not meet a single Hindu voter, a Hindu voter of the Samajwadi party, of the
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BSP, of the Congress, so-called secular parties using the word secular or telling me that
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the secular communal binary was an important determinant in the way they made their political
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Even in Bihar, which media commentators, all of us hailed as the victory of secular forces
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against BJP, the JDU-RJD combine of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad actually downplayed
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I know of anecdotes where Lalu Prasad Yadav told Muslim leaders, apne ghar chale jao,
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tunaf ke din bahar nikalna, uske pehle dekhana mat shakal, go back to your homes, come out
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during election day, don't show your face, where Muslim leaders came and told Nitish
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Kumar, don't put us on the stage, don't talk about us, focus on the Hindu vote.
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The Muslim-dominated areas, the grand alliance of Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav gave
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ticket to Hindu candidates so that the BJP would not be able to polarize.
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So the idea of secularism, either because it's identified with parties which have misadministered
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this country and are identified with corruption, or because secularism is seen only as pandering,
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quote unquote, to Muslim interests, or because of the sustained communal propaganda of the
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This is why I think when that MLA suggested to me that this was an India-Pakistan election,
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he was basically telling me it was a Hindu-Muslim election.
#
And because we know that this has been an old narrative of the BJP of linking nationalism
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When Amit Shah said in Bihar that if we lose, Pakistan will celebrate, he was basically
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saying if we lose, who will celebrate?
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The Muslim in your area will celebrate, and that Muslim in the area is basically an agent
#
So when he said in UP that we have to defeat KASAB, and KASAB stands for Congress Samajwadi
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Party and BASPA, what is he saying?
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He is saying that if we win, the Pakistani terrorists who conducted such an attack on
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Indian sovereignty and interests and people would be defeated, and who is he represented
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He is represented by these so-called secular parties.
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Because they listen and represent Muslim interests.
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Because this conflation that is done of nationalism and religion, and the subtle projection of
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the Muslims in the fifth column is something that is really working, it's resonating, right?
#
Whether we like it or not.
#
And when he said that it's an India-Pakistan election, he basically meant it's an Hindu-Muslim
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election and Hindus won.
#
And this is out of the classic playbook of populism and nationalism, where you create
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another and then you project yourself as standing for your people, and you like the dead magnificent
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Akron in KASAB, which is so incredibly clever when you think about it, we know but clever.
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You associate your enemies with the other, and therefore it becomes a very simple choice.
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And I'm just thinking a lot, it seems to me that the reason that this works is because
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anger is a much more effective way of motivating a voter to actually take action than a benign
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goodwill towards everyone.
#
So just sort of summing up some of the major factors that you pointed out, at level one,
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there was the narrative around Modi himself, his transformation from a Hindu Hridayasamra
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to a Vikas Purush to a Garibuka Neta, essentially being all things to all people and without
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contradicting himself at any point.
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Level two was an incredible ground game, which you've laid out in detail in your book and
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I'd urge listeners to buy it and read that and it should really be a Harvard Business
#
I mean, I can't think of any election anywhere in the world given the scale of this, that
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such remarkable work has been done.
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Three is how they navigated UP and other states like Haryana and Maharashtra by looking past
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the caste dynamics, by triggering resentments among OBCs who felt left out and Dalits who
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felt left out because the Yadavs or the Jats or the Marathas were getting the OBC spoils
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and so on and so forth.
#
Then almost reinventing themselves into a Dalit party and doing it with actual hard
#
work on the ground rather than just mere campaign rhetoric, which is quite remarkable.
#
After this, we see the cultural role of the Sanparivar, ingraining those ideas among the
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people building up that social movement and then using it to feed into the political party.
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And fifth is the tactic of polarization where you motivate people to come out and vote by
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creating fear and hatred against the other.
#
Now my question to you, therefore, at the end of the podcast, as you started the party
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very deeply, is that as you pointed out in the book, a lot of these sort of coalitions
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Whether it's Modi being all these different things or whether it's the caste configurations
#
in UP where you've got all the non-Yadav OBCs and the non-Jacob Dalits and plus, in fact,
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I think somewhere in the book or elsewhere in your analysis, you mentioned how the plan
#
was for Maurya, if I'm not mistaken, because he's an OBC leader to be chief minister and
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instead it was Adityanath in wondering how that would play out.
#
And how hard will it be now for the BJP because 2014 and what has followed since was almost
#
How hard will it be for them to keep all these strings tied together and in place?
#
So we do look at, I think you summed it up very well, those are the sources of strength
#
that I identify in the party.
#
The only point I would supplement with is that in areas outside this traditional stronghold,
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like the Northeast, the BJP adopts a different set of techniques, it co-ops existing political
#
elites, it dilutes its ideological core, it adapts to specific realities and it's been
#
But to go back to your question, I still don't think that BJP is invincible.
#
In a competitive democracy, in a very complex hierarchical unequal society like India, with
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strong regional variants, strong sub-nationalisms, diverse linguistic politics, I think it's
#
very difficult for a party to remain hegemonic at the moment, it is probably hegemonic.
#
And there are key vulnerabilities.
#
So what are the vulnerabilities?
#
If you go back to the sources of strength, the first vulnerability is whether Modi would
#
be able to sustain this multi-class alliance.
#
To do that, he will need to keep corporate India happy, he will need to keep the salaried
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middle classes happy, he will need to keep the new middle class of young Indians as he
#
calls them who are coming into urban spaces, who want jobs, who have aspirations happy
#
and he needs to keep the poor happy.
#
And for that you need high degrees of growth, you need job creation or at least job losses
#
not happening and that's what we've seen in the last few months and you need welfare.
#
Those are three important legs of this multi-class alliance.
#
And as the economic narrative starts slipping from the government's control, as a sense
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grows that they are not able to deliver on either of these fronts, I think this alliance
#
will become vulnerable.
#
I'm not suggesting that it's happened, but it is something I think the government is
#
also very aware of and is conscious of, BJP is.
#
The second is sustaining the multi-cast coalition and you were right with the UP example, here
#
was a party that constructed an inclusive Hindu coalition in the run-up to the elections,
#
but after the elections, if a sense grows as it has grown to some extent in UP that
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it actually all a cover for upper caste hegemony and while they will use us in elections, but
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after the elections, power will be monopolized by the upper caste, then you will see this
#
alliance break and a Bihar BJP leader actually told me that look, we are no longer untouchables
#
for the backwards and Dalits, but we are not their natural party and this is work in progress.
#
So you look at Yogi Adityanath who is at Thakur, Dinesh Sharma, another deputy chief minister
#
was a Brahmin, the cabinet which is very high upper caste representation or when I last
#
looked at the figures in the UP police, out of 75 districts, 42 were upper caste SPs.
#
So Brahmins and Thakurs and Sirkayas also, so if a sense grows that look, power distribution
#
is not equitable among different castes, multi-caste alliance will get rigid.
#
The third is the tension that I think exists between belligerent majoritarian politics
#
and the ambition to expand and become a truly national party.
#
Amit Shah knows that repeating the performance of 2014 in North, West and Central India
#
is difficult if not impossible, getting 26 on 26 seats in Gujarat, getting 25 on 25 seats
#
in Rajasthan, getting 7 on 7 seats in Delhi, getting 71 along with allies 73 out of 80
#
seats in UP, getting 30 out of 40 seats in Bihar, getting 5 out of 5 seats in Uttarakhand,
#
getting 27 out of 29 seats in Madhya Pradesh, getting 10 out of 11 seats in Chhattisgarh,
#
yet again for a second time running is difficult and therefore the need is to expand in South
#
and East India and they have expanded to some extent, they have both thought and will be
#
formidable in Odisha next time, they will win more seats from the North-East, but their
#
expansion plans hit a roadblock because the kind of politics that they do in North-West
#
Central India also, you cannot continue to do Gaurakshara politics in UP and expect all
#
of Kerala to support you or all of Meghalaya to support you.
#
So how will that trade-off happen within the BJP, I think the third variable and the final
#
variable I think is that as we know it's not just the case that one party wins the election,
#
somebody has to lose the election and Congress in this country has been consistently losing
#
So the state of the opposition will be a key determinant, whether Rahul Gandhi can go through
#
a product reinvention like Modi has gone through multiple times, whether he stops being an
#
object of mockery, a politician can be ignored, hated, liked, but he can't be laughed at and
#
the problem for Rahul was that he was being laughed at consistently.
#
We have seen some stirrings of change in the last two months, I don't know whether it is
#
enough, whether Congress can, Congress is a mass-based party, so when one puts this
#
story of BJP's organization to Congress leaders, they tell us, look, we have never won with
#
an organization, we have always won in the public, no changes, we are a lazy party, but
#
I don't think being a lazy party, it will be easy for Congress to confront the machinery
#
And they do with their organization and in states which are bipolar states, we are speaking
#
at an interesting moment because the next six elections, big elections in India, Gujarat,
#
Himachal, Karnataka, MP, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, till the end of 2018 are all straight Congress
#
So in bipolar states, how does Congress manage to beat the BJP and in states where Congress
#
is weak, does it stitch up a grand alliance of anti-BJP forces?
#
So the state of the opposition, what that should look like at the end of 2018, early
#
2019 will also be an important variable.
#
Every election is open, 2019 election is not a done deal.
#
And predicting an election or the future of Indian politics is a very dangerous enterprise.
#
I will not get into that territory, there are vulnerabilities, but BJP is of course
#
and looks set to remain the dominant Indian political actor for a while.
#
And whether one supports a BJP or is against it, we can all agree that a healthy democracy
#
needs a healthy opposition.
#
And for me, what the opposition needs to do is read your remarkable book and I hope they'll
#
Thank you so much for coming Anish.
#
You've been very kind Amit, thank you so much.
#
If you enjoyed listening to the show, hop over to your nearest bookstore and buy Prashant's
#
excellent book, How the BJP Wins.
#
You can also follow him on Twitter at Prashant KTM.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A and you can browse past episodes of the Scene
#
in the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in Thank you for listening.
#
If you enjoyed listening to the Scene in the Unseen, it makes complete sense for you to
#
check out the Pragati Podcast, a show on public policy.
#
Pragati is a magazine I edit and the Pragati Podcast is hosted by two of my colleagues,
#
Pawan Srinath and Hamsini Hariharan.
#
Every week, Pawan and Hamsini analyze views and news from India and the world and talk
#
to experts and practitioners on a wide range of issues.
#
It's out every Thursday, so there's your mid-week fix right there.
