Dispatch #12: BJP's ascendancy and the politics of welfare
In this dispatch we will see, in the backdrop of Bihar elections, why BJP is a formidable election machine at a time when its performance on economic front is abysmal
In the run up to the 2019 general elections, we thought that the narrative of unemployment and economic slowdown will halt the BJP’s bandwagon.
It didn’t happen. PM Modi asked the voters to trust him when he gave the slogan ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’.
In the run up to the 2020 Bihar assembly elections, we were told that the migrants crisis will affect the NDA in Bihar.
It didn’t happen. Nitish Kumar is poised to return as Bihar CM. There was an anti-incumbency against Nitish government in his third term, but that didn’t stop voters to elect him back. The post election analysis shows that it’s actually the BJP who has become stronger than its ally JD(U).
If you read the analysis that are coming after the election results, you will find that the Mahagathbandhan has actually done very well in Phase 1 of the polls. It’s performance deteriorated from Phase 2 onward. It was the NDA that picked up after the second phase. One of the factors were the marathon rallies by PM Modi after Phase 1. He asked the voters to show trust on Nitish Kumar by reminding them about the ‘jungleraj’. The interesting fact is that despite of the hardships that people faced during the lockdown with loss of jobs and the entire economy coming to a grinding hault, the voters did not punish the incumbent, the NDA. Infact they brought them back. Very similar to the 2019 general elections.
Does that mean that economic policies do not matter for the Indian voters? Are voters deciding whom to vote by considering only personalities? Is a rational voter a myth?
This theme has been explored by several political scientists with a special focus on the BJP and the RSS. According to this body of work, three factors have worked in favor of the BJP and PM Modi specifically:
a) Politics of vishwas, in which democratic accountability is undermined and the voters take decisions based on their perceptions about the personalities
b) The idea of sewa that the RSS has historically deployed to gain support
c) The voters are attributing the welfare schemes to the union government and PM rather than the state governments. This also has the element of over centralization of power
Below are some good articles that capture these themes:
1) BJP’s undiluted power at the Centre has weakened the bargaining position of regional parties: The electoral performance of the BJP, and the popularity of Narendra Modi, has weakened the bargaining position of regional parties. The BJP’s undiluted power at the Centre has allowed for greater centralization of power in matters of governance. Centralization lies at the heart of the BJP’s ‘hegemonic’ project. This in turn has generated greater distinctions between regional and national politics. The popularity of Prime Minister Modi fueled by discernible powers and government schemes attributed to the national government generates a national politics that can be easily separated from regional politics for the voter. This increasingly separate form of national politics weakens the role of regional parties in national politics, both in electoral terms and in bargaining power, as regional parties rarely have well-defined, credible national policy platforms in India. It does however create conditions for entrenching regional parties at the State level.
2) Murkier the data, easier it is to control narrative: Political scientist Neelanjan Sircar says, “In 2014, people were upset with corruption, there had been a decline in economic fortunes. So maybe that is what explains the Modi-Shah win. Right? Fast forward five years, to 2019, people no longer believe that. I think even the most ardent supporters are grappling with how do we make sense of what is happening today. And I boil it down to two standard features of the political system:
One is that there is a lot of uncertainty about actual information that is out there. And you can see that certain decisions by the government have reinforced that, like taking away the NSSO. Now, the reason why that matters is that it essentially creates a vacuum of verifiable objective information. So those who are able to craft a narrative are in a stronger position in a world in which information is present.
The second thing is that when you are in a position where politics is starting to become narrative-driven – personalities, charisma, individuals start mattering a lot. And the conditions under which you are willing to essentially allow an individual to decide your political take are places where you are upset with negotiation in ethnic terms and religious terms in federal terms. “I simply don’t want to deal with all this stuff anymore. I want somebody who’s going to decide quickly and decisively and do what’s best for India.”
The two sides of the same coin have divided into nationalism and also putting your trust and hopes in a single individual. So that’s the politics of vishwas.”
3) Not vikas, Modi’s 2019 election was built on politics of vishwas: Neelanjan further argues, “Just as the 2019 national election drew to a close, Prime Minister Modi went to meditate in a cave near the holy Kedarnath shrine. As he emerged from the cave on voting day, wearing a saffron robe, Modi was thronged by the media. He spoke deliberately, like a sage. While lesser mortals were busy doing the business of politics – getting people to the polls, checking for campaign violations from the opposition, making sure the voting process was fair – Modi seemed above it all. In contrast to the dirty, corrupt world of politics, here was a man who projected purity and clarity. As voters went to the polls, they didn’t think about Modi’s promises or his performance, they thought about who he is.
Charisma and religion have long been a part of Indian politics, but never had we quite seen something like this on such a large scale. It required careful choreography, a compliant media, a party organisation that could mobilise voters around such an image, and a man in whom voters could place their trust. This represented the culmination of the politics of vishwas. People would vote for Modi (and the rest of the BJP) because of their vishwas in him.
In politics, it’s not only a matter of which party wins, it’s also a matter of how the party wins. How a party wins has implications for the mandate given to the winning party and structures the incentives of newly elected leaders. The politics of vishwas is a form of politics that engenders centralisation of power. Thus, not only because the BJP had a thumping victory, but also because of how the BJP won, an extraordinary amount of power has been arrayed to the Prime Minister. The sort of popular authority given to Modi means that he no longer has to negotiate with other political actors, or even many of India’s institutions, to execute his political will.”
4) Do government’s welfare schemes influence the patterns of voting? Louise Tillin further argues, “Since 2014, however, there has been a marked centralisation in the design and implementation of welfare programmes. Prime Minister Modi has also relentlessly claimed the credit for welfare programmes. Therefore, the first question we were interested in was whether there has been a shift in how beneficiaries perceive which level of government is responsible for the delivery of different welfare schemes and entitlements.
The survey results demonstrate there has been a marked centralisation of credit attribution in 2019 compared to 2014. The centralisation is especially clear for the BJP’s new schemes such as the Ujjwala and Jan Dhan Yojana, where upwards of 70% of respondents give credit to the central government. Interestingly, the number of voters who think the central government, rather than their state government, is primarily responsible for the MGNREGA and the Awas Yojana has also increased compared to previous elections.”
5) Will welfare schemes help BJP retain rural votes? Before the 2019 general elections, Sanjay Kumar from CSDS and Pranav Gupta from UC Berkeley did a survey in 3 then poll bound states- MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh and found that the awareness about central schemes among the people is very high. They claimed, “shifting the narrative away from crop prices and wages to its bundle of welfare schemes may be a favourable option for the BJP. Though, even this may not guarantee electoral success as it would partly depend on public satisfaction with the government’s services. The voter is also often prone to punishing incumbents despite crediting them for work. A massive upsurge in rural support was instrumental in the BJP’s victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The next few months will reveal if it has done enough to retain this expanded support.”
6) Modi and the politics of welfare: Explaining the split-ticket voting phenomenon, Neelanjan Sircar says,"In the 2019 national election, the NDA won 53% of Bihar’s vote. In the recently-concluded state election, the NDA (admittedly minus the LJP) won around 37% of the vote. This continues a trend of the NDA performing at least 15 percentage points worse in state elections as compared to the 2019 national election — something witnessed in Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, where elections have happened either before or after the national polls. What explains this disjuncture? Why are voters increasingly choosing opposing parties in state and national elections (what political scientists call “split ticket voting”)? We boil it down to two conditions. One, voters must be able to separate what is given by the Centre and what is given by the state. And two, voters must distinguish between regional and national preferences. This is what allows a voter to support Narendra Modi at the Centre while supporting his political rival at the state level.”
7) How welfare schemes and their speedy implementation helped BJP win big in Uttar Pradesh? UP is also following the same template. “BJP’s assembly elections sweep of 2017 was widely attributed to the Centre’s Ujjwala scheme, under which free gas cylinders were distributed to the poor. Over 55 lakh (now 1.29 crore) connections, the maximum for any state, were given until March 31, 2017, government data showed. What seems to be supplementing BJP’s chances this time is the Yogi Adityanath government’s speedy implementation of the other two flagship schemes for houses and toilets, which were faltering under the Samajwadi Party’s administration. A big chunk of beneficiaries under both schemes have been backward castes and Dalits, who have traditionally voted for either SP or BSP, but have been wooed by BJP.
8) Modi’s Covid-19 lockdown battered Indians – so why are they still voting BJP? In general, Indians were highly satisfied both with the state and the Centre. While 74.7% report that they were satisfied with the steps taken by the Modi government to deal with the Coronavirus epidemic, an even higher number – 77.7% – were happy with their state government for the same. This data tells us two things: one is that even as Indians suffered grievously during the lockdown, they did not choose to blame the Indian state much for it. There thus might be no great link at all between the lockdown and Tuesday’s results. This would of course explain why despite suffering as a result of Modi’s lockdown, Indians said they were happy with his Covid-19 response and eventually went on to vote for his party. Instead a better way to explain Tuesday’s results might be in what political scientist Neelanjan Sircar calls the “politics of vishwas” – trust or belief in a strong, charismatic leader. Sircar argues that standard models of democratic accountability would be hard pressed to explain BJP’s sweeping 2019 Lok Sabha win, despite a slowing economy and disasters such as demonetisation. Instead, a better explanation for the BJP’s winning streak is the trust Indian voters respose in Modi – built up by Hindu nationalism as well as the party’s control of the media and its strong organisational machinery.
9) How did RSS become Hindu messiah in India? Disaster relief since 1947? Malini Bhattacharjee in her book ‘Disaster relief and the RSS tells, “Following a series of negotiations between senior leaders in the RSS such as Eknath Ranade and Golwalkar and Patel and Nehru in the central government, the ban on the RSS was lifted in July 1949, on the condition that the organization adopt a written constitution, maintain transparency in its activities and confine itself only to doing cultural work. The organization therefore maintained a low profile and the rapid expansion of shakha activities that had acquired momentum in refugee camps in northern India was briefly stalled. It was at this stage that Golwalkar ‘reoriented the RSS by playing down its paramilitary past’ and charted out a new form of social involvement for his organization (Beckerlegge 2003, 49). Between 1949 and 1954, the RSS participated in a range of varied social movements such as the bhoodan movement of Vinoba Bhave and the Satyagraha movement to liberate the Portuguese colonies of Dadra and Nagar Haveli while also continuing to offer relief after riots and disasters. After providing refuge to Hindus fleeing from East Pakistan in 1949–1950, in 1950 again, RSS swayamsevaks participated in providing relief after the Assam earthquake. Jaffrelot (1996, 261) suggests that the social welfare strategy of the RSS also helped it find common ground with new political allies. He cites the example of Jayaprakash Narayan joining hands with the RSS in 1967 to collaboratively provide relief to drought victims in Bihar. He explains that one of the reasons for the Hindu nationalists to formally join the JP Movement in 1974 was because both the parties regarded ‘social reform as a priority in comparison with work within the political arena’. The participation of the RSS in these various relief activities brought it in direct contact with a large number of people who were introduced to the concept of Hindu nationalism through either RSS shakha activities, camps or community discussions.”
10) Why is the RSS’s brand of humanitarian work or ‘seva’ so easily accepted in ‘secular’ India? Malini Bhattacharjee further argues,"How does the provision of seva help in consolidating solidarities across religious groups and ethnicities? What is the relationship of the “secular” state vis-à-vis cultural organisations like the RSS? How do the beneficiaries of seva “repay” this debt? This book focuses on the political implications of the humanitarian work of the RSS in disaster situations. Humanitarianism in the most parts of the world is imbued in politics and therefore this is not a dimension that is novel to the RSS. However, what is interesting to observe is that, in recent times, the realm of humanitarianism has seen a resurgence of religious/cultural groups that are usually considered illiberal and conservative by several analysts.”
11) For the RSS, “sewa” is a means to achieve the Hindu Rashtra: Gwilym Beckerlegge, a professor at the department of religion at the Open University in United Kingdom, published a research paper in 2006 titled, Swami Vivekananda and the sangh parivar: convergent or divergent views on population, religion and national identity? The paper stated that it was the second sarsanghchalak, MS Golwalkar, who imagined the Sangh’s ambitions against “the threat of Christianity and Islam.” Beckerlegge wrote, “The Sangh Parivar has responded to its reading of the predicament facing India by attempting to foster a unified Hindu culture, to revive a society that has become only superficially fragmented.” He added, “It has sought to achieve its goal through a range of activities including extensive sewa (service to humanity).” According to the RSB’s five-yearly report, as of 2014, the sewa vibhag was running at least 1,37,000 projects in the field of education, health, and vocational trainings, through the national wings and the RSB’s network of registered NGOs. These were in addition to the Sangh’s disaster-relief interventions, such as during the super cyclone in Odisha in 1999, and the earthquake in Bhuj, in Gujarat, in 2001, among many others.
12) The social service wings of RSS played a big role in BJP's rise to power: In his seminal book Elite Parties, Poor Voters, Yale professor Tariq Thachil explains how the BJP deploys non-state actors to win confidence of the voters. Thachil says, “The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh have sought to reach out to marginalised groups for decades through a variety of strategies, most of which have delivered very limited successes. The party has always been highly aware of its reputation as a “Brahmin-Bania” party, and therefore the necessity of expanding its appeal among non-elite voters. In the book, I emphasise one particular strategy’s efficacy in improving the BJP’s performance among lower castes: the provision of basic social services by “seva [service] wings” of the Sangh Parivar. Of course, the Sangh has a long history of social service, but many of its earlier efforts were episodic, specifically relief efforts for natural (cyclones and earthquakes) and man-made disasters (the violence around Partition). The groups I focus on – Sewa Bharati and Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram – are involved in providing everyday service to marginalised communities. Both wings were established many decades ago, but their organisational footprint was quite small. It was only in the 1990s that they proliferated substantially. In the book, I argue that this expansion was a key part of the BJP’s expanding support among Dalits and Adivasis in central India. Equally important, I show why the strategy failed to produce similar successes in other Indian states.”
13) Towards social politics: This politics of governance submerged in the politics of development. The politics of development was a complex affair that needed experts of various kinds. Many of these experts began to acquire key positions in government due to their proximity to politicians. These politicians had become dependent on these experts, since on their own they lacked the expertise to run the development machinery. However, these experts-turned-leaders were disconnected with the public and in the name of doing the politics of governance, emerged as arm-chair politicians. Thus, politics in the time of the neo-liberal state became a politics of power, governance and development and in the process, lost its social moorings. Many politicians stopped having a direct connect with the people. They became dependent on experts and white-collar political advisers. These political pundits of Lutyen’s Delhi, the term used by PM Modi extensively during the election campaign, had no connect with the people. Social media, TV debates and big rallies at the time of elections were their only channel of communication to the public.