Tuesday, October 8, 2024 has turned out to be a curious and conflicted day in the life of the Republic – and for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Whereas the BJP and its Modi-Shah leadership can derive legitimate satisfaction from the Haryana mandate, the vote in Jammu and Kashmir can only be regarded as a very good day for the Republic. It is a sobering moment for Indian democracy.
It should be obvious that the outcome in J&K is of much greater consequence than the Haryana vote. In Haryana, the election results are reflective of the dynamics of social cleavages, while the post-‘370 abrogation’ vote in Jammu and Kashmir saw a contestation over continuing national arguments. The Haryana electoral victory for the BJP is mostly a local affair, the re-organized state of Jammu and Kashmir was clearly the electoral theatre for a national and global audience. No one in the BJP or in the larger Sangh parivar is entitled to any kind of satisfaction over the Kashmir vote.
In Jammu and Kashmir the voters were asked, mostly indirectly, to express a view on the acceptability of the Amit Shah-authored truncation of the traumatized state. For five years the Indian State showed its muscular hand, consciously setting out to tame the recalcitrant “Kashmiri” into a reluctant “Indian.” The electoral battle was muddied by a large number of assorted players, many of them propped up by our intelligence agencies. Not a few of them were products of the unfinished “struggle”, both silent and violent, against the Indian State but they – the Engineer Rashids, the Jamatis – had their reservations about the two main Kashmir parties, the National Conference and the PDP, and how these two outfits had negotiated the terms of co-existence with the BJP-dominated “New Delhi.”
Both the prime minister and the home minister made the BJP case for “peace” and “development” in a stridently “nationalistic” idiom. The underlying theme in the BJP’s arguments and assertions was the correctness and permanence of the logic of “abrogation”. The Modi-Shah insistence was on a closure of the debate over the nature of autonomy and authority Srinagar was to have vis-à-vis New Delhi. The BJP hoped that the assembly vote would place a ‘democratic’, electoral imprimatur on this “closed for all time” argument. Unfortunately for them, voters in Jammu and Kashmir have denied Raisina Hill that kind of endorsement. This is a strategic setback, whichever way the Modi apologists may want to slice it.
Understanding the Haryana vote
But has the Haryana voter compensated Modi sufficiently for his drum-beaters to claim that the prime minister has recovered his magic touch with the electorate? Certainly not. If anything, the Haryana vote is a validation of the BJP’s superior political management. The party’s central leadership had the prescience to realise that Manohar Lal Khattar had alienated even BJP karyakartas by his arrogant style, and it had the elbow room to send him packing and bring in a new face as chief minister of Haryana. His replacement, Nayab Singh Saini, authored a different –humbler – style of functioning and evidently succeeded in enthusing the BJP cadres and core supporters.
Yet it would be a mistake to credit Modi or any other BJP leader with the success in Haryana. The voters in their mysterious way exercised their democratic right to register a rebuff to Congress strongman Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s politics of a Jat assertiveness. Haryana is a curious site for unresolved equations between the dominant and domineering Jat community and the others, just like the Yadavs in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Much of party politics in the state has been shaped by this unresolved – and, probably unresolvable – equation. Give them a whiff of possibility of capturing power in the state and rough elements within the community start throwing their weight around in the most boorish ways, alienating the non-Jats who unwillingly find themselves aggravating towards the “Punjabi” formations and leaders.
It now emerges that even before the chickens could be hatched and counted, the Hooda supporters were already making a nuisance of themselves. The much-talked about Hooda-Selja rift drove away many Dalit voters. Not just Dalits, in many areas even Muslims preferred to vote for the BJP candidates. For instance, in Israna, the BJP candidate, Krishan Lal Pawar, was feted with a 101-yard turban by Muslims at the local mosque in Madlauda. This was a simple and straightforward reflections of local resentment and rancor towards the Congress leaders; the BJP candidate won the seat but it has nothing to do with Modi’s charisma or his vote-fetching abilities.
Haryana offers a lesson in moderation, particularly for the Congress leadership. The “Congress high command” has invariably struggled over how much of a “free hand” a provincial strong man should be given and if given, how to ensure that the strongman does not overplay and over-assert himself in the state. The Congress gave, or rather found itself having to give, a free hand to Hooda; and sadly, the former chief minister lacks the gift for accommodative politics.
So, at the end of the day we have two very different outcomes – distinct discomfort for Modi and Shah in Jammu and Kashmir and an unmitigated disappointment for Rahul Gandhi in Haryana – and each will have subtle implications for the national polity. Gandhi and the Congress cannot continue to behave as if they have Prime Minister Modi on the run; nor can the BJP leadership conclude that today’s result is any kind of validation of its Chankaya niti. Above all, the prime minister cannot claim to have dissolved doubts about the unsettledness of his regime. A damaging tentativeness will continue to haunt the polity till the next battle in Maharashtra.