Secret behind Modi’s Maharashtra slog - BJP looks to project itself as ‘alternative’ to Congress, minus regional allies

RADHIKA RAMASESHAN, TT, New Delhi, Oct. 15: The BJP today claimed it was set to get a majority in Maharashtra, exuding confidence about a “shock-wave” verdict and explaining why Narendra Modi had staked his all in the state.

“The verdict is going to send shock waves throughout the country,” a top leader said off the record, adding that the Prime Minister — as the centrepiece of the campaign and the target of the Opposition’s attacks — “deserved 100 per cent credit” if the party wrapped up both Maharashtra and Haryana.

The leader trashed the Congress’s allegation that Modi, by spending time in these states for the past two weeks or so, had done “injustice” to the Prime Minister’s office.

“Modi is not Manmohan Singh. He is a vote-catcher. Does being the Prime Minister mean he cannot work for the BJP? The trouble is, our country has not seen a political Prime Minister in a long time,” he said.

The leader rejected the suggestion that if the BJP came to power in Maharashtra and Haryana, it would feel emboldened enough to unyoke itself from the NDA allies.

A BJP source emphasised that in breaking off with the Shiv Sena on the eve of the Maharashtra polls and earlier with the Haryana Janhit Congress, Modi and party president Amit Shah were reworking the underpinnings of a long-term strategy.

“That is to see to it that, at the end of five years, the BJP emerges seriously as an alternative to the Congress and not merely in an ideological context,” a central minister explained.

“Unfortunately, for too long, the Congress-versus-BJP debate has got stuck in communal-secular polemics. We are determined to lift it out of this frame because, ultimately, an alternative model will be treated with gravity only if it addresses issues of governance and development,” the minister added.

“Also, such a model cannot evolve as long as the BJP is tied to the apron strings of regional parties. These parties no doubt have their own political constituencies and an idea of issues on hand but they lack a national perspective. After a point, the space for a consensus on national policies and programmes between a national party and a regional party shrinks.”

The push to develop into a “serious” Congress alternative made the BJP abandon anything that remotely smacked of divisiveness in its campaigns in Haryana and Maharashtra. “Rise above caste, region and religion. That was the message,” a source said.

The source said Modi, who addressed 27 rallies in Maharashtra, staked his all in the state “with good reasons”.

Maharashtra was the Congress’s first bastion, symbolically and substantively. On December 28, 1885, the party was founded at Mumbai’s Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College with 72 delegates.

Even in the 1978 Assembly elections held in the aftermath of the Emergency, the Congress had managed to keep its head above water by winning 62 of the 288 seats. Mostly, it has had a dream run since the first state election in 1962 to 2009, although since 1999, it never secured a majority on its own and eventually embraced the Nationalist Congress Party as an ally.

The highest the BJP ever got, and that too in partnership with the Shiv Sena, was 65 in 1995, but that tally has to be read in the context that it contested only 116 seats.

Winning Maharashtra on its own for the first time would mean the BJP would hold sway over the western arc, swinging from Gujarat and Goa and northwards to Rajasthan and Punjab (in conjunction with the Akali Dal).

“India’s west carries its own cachet. Think of the overall economy and you think Gujarat and Maharashtra. Together they contribute a lot tangibly to growth and the GDP,” a source said.

Which is why if the BJP wins Maharashtra, Modi, the sources said, would treat it with the same “seriousness and focus” that he brought to Gujarat.

Getting states like Maharashtra, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh would mark the start of the BJP’s project to “prove” that no one party (read the Congress) could monopolise the “Idea of India”.

“Nobody has patented the Idea of India. Everyone dreams of an idea and Modiji certainly has a dream. Let us get the big states and we will show what our Idea of India is to the Left Liberals of the Congress genre,” a central minister said.