What does 2019 hold for us?

There is much talk on whether the Congress President Rahul Gandhi is ready to take on the BJP and its overly centralised power pack of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party President Amit Shah in the 2019 polls. Ask any BJP supporter, and the arguments you get are simple and reasonable. They are inevitably and essentially centered around two pillars. One is that the Congress president is no match for the much more skilled Prime Minister, with the BJP President working the backroom machinations. The second argument flows from the perceived state of the Opposition. This points out that the Opposition continues to be a khichdi that will not be able to stitch together a credible front, let alone offering comfort that they will hold together in the unlikely event of making it. The mahagathbandhan will be a non-starter because the ambition of many will kill the purpose of all, or so goes the story.

The arguments carry some merit but the interesting twist in the game is that the most diehard of BJP supporters have come down to the point that the incumbent will return by default – not for anything that the government has achieved in particular, but because the Opposition parties will not be able to sink their differences. That is already a battle lost in some sense. Long before the battle lines are drawn more clearly, we have a case that rests on winning not because the lead runner is strong or good or capable but because the other runners will not catch up. Of course, the argument that the BJP offers a good government is added on by the supporters, but it is an add-on, not the primary reason being offered anymore.

To keep its voters and add some more should be a baseline ask – it does not go into any other baggage that the Prime Minister carries from his days as Chief Minister of Gujarat but looks squarely at his conduct as the first BJP leader to have a clean and secure majority.

The strength and quality of Opposition will be whatever the parties make of the situation and whether they smell any victory in sight. Clearly, a less united opposition offers the BJP a greater chance of returning to power albeit (and in any case) this will be with a reduced majority. It may well be true that the Opposition unity fails or is piecemeal and ineffective, and that the BJP returns. But the enduring question that the election will pose is how does the government stand up to scrutiny in terms of the promise of achhe din that gave Modi and the BJP a landslide victory in 2014? More importantly, has the Prime Minister emerged as a leader of stature, capable of carrying along more if not as many people from the days the electorate was fed up with the corruption of the Congress and booted the party out with a vengeance? That time, too, the BJP got 31 per cent of the popular vote, a never before low for any party that has ever won more than half of the seats in the Lok Sabha. The lowest vote share before 2014 was almost half a century back when the Congress won 283 out of 520 seats with around 41 per cent vote share in 1967. The point is that the large BJP majority on the floor of the House sits on a rather thin vote share and is therefore a result of an extremely fractured mandate. That of course does not reduce the end-result of the verdict, which is to give the nation a powerful government that depends on no other party for support, but it does increase the burden on the incumbent to perform and to take all sections of the people along.   To keep its voters and add some more should be a baseline ask – it does not go into any other baggage that the Prime Minister carries from his days as Chief Minister of Gujarat but looks squarely at his conduct as the first BJP leader to have a clean and secure majority.

This controversy (over the Nehru museum) is a good example of the BJP handing back the agenda for the polls to the Congress, in fact inviting and increasing chances of a concerted Opposition front and thus demolishing a key argument of the BJP supporters for 2019, namely that the election will be won because the Opposition unity will not hold.

First, on the corruption front, there can be no denying that this government does not carry a clean image. The first and the most fundamental deliverable for the BJP was to stand up against corruption, particularly the mega loot that has become the order of the day. The mandate was to investigate the hordes of wrongdoing that had turned the Indian people to a desperate hunt for an alternative (for any alternative, in fact) and to offer confidence that this government would be different in its conduct. Today, no one can claim with any conviction that even a sliver of this expectation has been met. Indeed, the direction is quite the reverse with a cloud of suspicion on the many acts of the government, the party President himself being embroiled in controversy over the business dealings of his son and high profile looters like Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi going scot free, way out of the reach of Indian law enforcement. Linked to that are the scams that have rocked the banking sector, leading many ordinary citizens to worry whether money in banks is safe anymore. The BJP establishment likes to argue that the associated mess of the Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) in the banking system, a hole of the order of Rs.10 lakh crore, is the creation of previous Congress regimes. That may be true but it doesn’t help when more violations keep happening, there is no solution in sight and the hole keeps growing. What was required was strong action to bring the guilty to book, to use the force of the law to send a signal that those who have looted public money would not go scot free and a missionary zeal to recover money. It required putting behind bars all those who are wilful defaulters and live on as if nothing has changed. This demands political leadership on key issues of the day, not complex amendments and circulars that only help the methods of “business as usual”.

On the corruption front, there can be no denying that this government does not carry a clean image. The first and the most fundamental deliverable for the BJP was to stand up against corruption, particularly the mega loot that has become the order of the day. The mandate was to investigate the hordes of wrongdoing that had turned the Indian people to a desperate hunt for an alternative (for any alternative, in fact) and to offer confidence that this government would be different in its conduct. Today, no one can claim with any conviction that even a sliver of this expectation has been met.

What we instead have is a missionary zeal in driving a divisive agenda that has led to ugly cases of lynching, polarisation of the kind that may fire the zealot but turns away the average voter and vicious attacks on history and India’s leaders, particularly the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The latest controversy created over attempts to change the nature and character of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) and the Teen Murti complex is an example of a government on a completely wrong track. Former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh’s letter to Prime Minister Modi on Monday (Aug.27) captures the sentiment well: “NMML is dedicated to the memory of India’s first Prime Minister and prime architect of the Indian nation-state who left behind an indelible imprint on our country and indeed on the world.” Singh has correctly argued that NMML “must remain a centre of first-rate scholarship and professional excellence. The museum itself must retain its primary focus on Jawaharlal Nehru and the freedom movement because of his unique role having spent almost ten years in jail between the early 1920s and mid-1940s. No amount of revisionism can obliterate that role and his contributions.” This controversy is a good example of the BJP handing back the agenda for the polls to the Congress, in fact inviting and increasing chances of a concerted Opposition front and thus demolishing a key argument of the BJP supporters for 2019, namely that the election will be won because the Opposition unity will not hold.