The BJP dumped its alliance partner, the JJP in Haryana earlier this week, which had the deputy chief minister’s position in the government.
The decision, most likely, is driven by an unwillingness on the part of the BJP to share any of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in the state with the JJP in the forthcoming general elections. The alliance with the JJP, as we have argued in these pages, was perhaps meant to prevent it from joining ranks with the Congress after the 2019 assembly elections led to a hung house in the state.
The unceremonious decoupling, which the JJP has had to face is not the first example of the BJP riding roughshod over its allies in the post-2014 phase.
In the neighbouring state of Punjab, the Shiromani Akali Dal, one of the oldest constituents of the NDA, was left with no option but to walk out of it after the BJP brought in the three farm laws in 2020.
In Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) was ‘cut to size’ via a friendly rebellion by Chirag Paswan fielding LJP candidates against the JD (U) in the 2020 assembly elections. Paswan, while doing it, was always a part of the NDA at the national level and some of the candidates put up by his party were known BJP leaders in the state.
In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena was made to realise after the 2014 Lok Sabha victory that the BJP was in no mood to adhere to the earlier tradition of the Sena keeping the chief minister’s post in the state as part of the NDA. When the Sena tried to jump ship in order to keep the chief minister’s chair, it suffered a split with the pro-BJP faction ending up as the official party.
One could go on adding examples and scenarios which could follow vis-à-vis other alliance partners to the list discussed here. That, however, is not the point. What these examples tell us is a clear change in the BJP’s political attitude towards alliances in the post-2014 phase when it emerged as the national political hegemon.
While the BJP is always happy to stitch new alliances – even one-person parties are entertained by no less than the top leadership of the party – its alliance partners should not expect to have any kind of political agency, either ideological or organisational, which is greater in scope than what the average BJP rank and file enjoys.
Gone are the days of the BJP adhering to ‘coalition dharma’ during the days of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Anybody who allies with the BJP today must be resigned to the ‘coalition karma’ of becoming a junior partner without much agency.
While a part of the commentariat might look at the BJP’s new-found high-handedness with alliance partners as a sign of arrogance, it will be a wrong reading of the situation. Politics is not a business for the kind-hearted or do-gooders. What the BJP is doing to its alliance partners is entirely along the lines of what hegemonic parties do to their smaller allies in politics.
The only comparable example of this is how the CPI (M) used to deal with its Left Front partners during its dominant phase in West Bengal.
This is a more interesting and perhaps provocative question to answer. There is a large section of political commentators in India who have argued that the only way to challenge the BJP’s current dominance is to build a diverse challenge from regional parties in India. While such arguments sound woke and politically correct, they are very far from the truth as far as realpolitik is concerned. The reason is simple.
At the moment, there are only three large states (with at least ten Lok Sabha MPs or more) where the BJP is not a number one or number two political party and no regional party in a strong position is willing to do business with the BJP. They are Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Telangana.
Put together they account for just 66 Lok Sabha seats in a house of 543. Even if the BJP does not win any MP from these states, it does not pose any problem for its parliamentary majority. In other states such as Uttar Pradesh or West Bengal, the BJP has proved to be resilient to a coming together of regional parties or overcome its state-level debacles during national elections.
For the regional parties who are not aligned or rather adverse to the BJP, running a state government is increasingly becoming a difficult task due to the squeeze via the fiscal federalism route even if one were to ignore the growing ideological traction for the BJP across the country. While one can debate the magnitude of BJP’s ideological traction in its non-stronghold states, there can be little disagreement that the trend is a rising one.
Would we see some of the regional parties who are currently opposed to the BJP joining its ranks? While parties such as the DMK and BJD have done business with the BJP in the past, an alliance with today’s BJP will only entail surrendering political space in the short or medium term. not allying with the BJP is inviting the wrath of the political executive as well as the hegemonic political force in the country.
This can only change if the BJP’s current hegemonic strength at the national level were to start eroding. The only way that can happen is to build a national challenge to the BJP rather than attempt to weaken it at the level of the states. Crafting such a challenge requires a lot of unlearning from what India’s post-independence democratic trajectory so far has taught political players and commentators. The crux of it is as follows.
Unlike the Congress, which came into being as a political party when India did not have universal suffrage and was therefore lopsided in terms of caste and class representation, the BJP’s growth has been organically linked to the widening of Indian politics’ social base.
It is no surprise that the BJP has had the largest share of OBC chief ministers among major political parties in the country. Similarly, while it would be foolhardy to argue that India’s latent linguistic and ethnic tensions have disappeared, the material glue, which the union can apply to keep the states together is significantly larger thanks to the rapid capitalist development and its fiscal gains in the post-reform period.
With the social – the BJP has wide representation of caste groups in the country – and the ethnic – the only non-Hindi states it has not been able to conquer alone or in alliance are not enough to prevent it from getting a parliamentary majority – out of the reckoning, the only game in town, as far as building a national coalition against a hegemonic political force is concerned, is the fault line of class which looks beyond the landscape of fiscal palliatives.
The reason is simple. While the BJP has indeed worked hard to push the envelope on welfare and its delivery, it is still seen by the rich as working in their interests. Nothing else explains the kind of political funding the BJP receives.
Embracing this wholeheartedly, however, will require a significant sacrifice of class interest on the part of the political leadership across the spectrum in India. Whether or not the existing leadership of the opposition will bite the bullet on this question remains to be seen. No such change is possible unless the biggest opposition party in the country, namely, the Congress realises its importance and sheds its obsession with the social justice/federal challenge modes of challenging the BJP.
Unless that happens, we will continue to see politics where regional political actors, either with or against the BJP, are fighting a battle of survival and relevance rather than doing justice to their rhetoric of building some diverse challenge to the hegemonic force that the BJP is today.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa
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