Shikha Mukerjee | Cynicism versus principles: Will voters reward venality?

The high probability of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party sweeping the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2024 would be an extraordinary endorsement of the victory of cynicism and the defeat of the politics of principle. Bihar’s permanent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s decision to break with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress and return to the alliance with the BJP was a measure of the confidence the partnership exuded that venality would be rewarded by the voters with depressingly low expectations.

Having sworn tremendous oaths of the “over my dead body” variety when parting company in 2022, the mutual decision to join forces by the BJP and the Janata Dal (United) makes complete nonsense of principles in Indian politics. Neither side spared a thought about principles as each pursued an agenda of holding on to power.

On the contrary, both are confident that public perception will not reject the reversal and it may even reward the partnership with a higher number of seats for the BJP in the 2024 general election, that is, up from its current level of 17 Members of Parliament from Bihar. The likely increase in the BJP’s seat haul would be probably at the JD(U)’s expense. In choosing to switch back, Nitish Kumar’s goal is to remain as chief minister in Bihar and vent his peeve against the Lalu Prasad Yadav-led RJD by creating obstacles to its future expansion. As an experienced politician, Nitish Kumar has clearly calculated that his loss would be the BJP’s gain and he seems thrilled with the idea that at some point the JD(U) may dwindle to a dusty signboard in the not-too-distant future in Patna.

Political calculation is not the same as the extreme cynicism of the parties and leaders of the new Bihar alliance. That move does, sadly, reflect a profound contempt for public opinion, which is not the same as voter preference. Voters may and probably will vote for Narendra Modi and his proxies across North and East India. The BJP’s vote share, however, will not reflect public opinion; it will merely underscore the absence of a viable alternative, with voters stuck in a trap between the formidable force of the BJP on the one hand and regional-smaller parties fighting it alone on the other, because the I.N.D.I.A. bloc has turned out to be a non-starter. The three separate decisions in Bihar, in West Bengal and in Punjab cannot be compared. The outcomes have certainly, though not fatally, damaged the I.N.D.I.A. bloc. The bloc looks more unviable as the allies, for reasons specific to the ruling parties in West Bengal and Punjab, rejected the Congress as a liability rather than an asset in the fiercely competitive elections against the BJP’s planned incursions.

The difference between Mamata Banerjee’s decision for going it alone in West Bengal because the Trinamul Congress, the Aam Admi Party’s decision in Punjab and the revision of the Samajwadi Party’s decision in joining forces with the Congress in Uttar Pradesh is none of them have announced their exit from the I.N.D.I.A. bloc as an anti-BJP platform. Unlike Nitish Kumar, the AAP, Trinamul Congress and the Samajwadi Party consider the BJP as the enemy. The willingness of Mamata Banerjee, for instance, to risk West Bengal sinking deeper into debt is illustrative of how hard the Opposition is prepared to fight. West Bengal’s announcement that it would pay out the Rs 3,181 crores outstanding dues to 21 lakh MGNREGA workers by February 21 is calling Prime Minister Modi’s bluff of dedicated service to women, poor, farmers and youth, iterated as recently as February 1. Her promise to pay 11 lakh listed beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana who have not received any money is the difference between fighting the BJP and torpedoing the idea of a determined opposition to Mr Modi.

The decisions erase the difference that Mr Modi has talked up between social security schemes by the states that he christened as “revdi” or sops and his own programmes for “labharthis”, or beneficiaries. The message which it conveys to the poor and voters is that the Trinamul Congress is pro-people, whereas Mr Modi uses poverty as a pawn in the political war he is waging to establish total dominance of the BJP in India after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

The parties that are in opposition to the BJP will remain so, because they were so even before the I.N.D.I.A. bloc came into existence, and even as it is on the verge of disintegrating. Oracular pronouncements about the 2024 general election as a critical and defining moment, perhaps an election that will signal a rupture with the idea of a democratic, secular India may all turn out to be more or less correct. Regardless of whatever transformations await the polity, the Opposition will have a life and a role and a responsibility that it is obviously prepared to fulfil, as Mamata Banerjee’s decision indicates.

All punditry about the saffron tsunami that will deliver 400 Lok Sabha seats to the BJP are framed within the geographical north of the Vindhyas. The bastions of the Opposition in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and less firmly embedded but alive in Karnataka and Telangana, are not part of the calculation.

The discourse on the demise of the Opposition and the invincibility of the BJP does not hold as true for states across the Vindhyas, as it does for the Gangetic plains. The visions of Viksit Bharat that offer hope and raise expectations in the states that export labour to the southern states of India does not work as well in those southern states. This is not to argue that social and economic inequities that are so all pervasive in the North are not equally pervasive in the South. They are; but there is a difference. The baseline of deprivation, poverty, discrimination and despair is different in the South from that in the North.

If that points to the alarming scenario of an unbridgeable divide, that is one of the many serious problems for which Mr Modi and the BJP he leads must take responsibility. As they, Mr Modi and the BJP, must take responsibility for the hard-right majoritarianism and its concomitant anti-minority swing in Indian politics that transforms critics into anti-nationals. Any acceleration of more exclusion via the Uniform Civil Code, Citizenship Amendment Act, challenges to the minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, and Hindu rituals inside the Gyanvapi Masjid basement has the potential of triggering the Newtonian law that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.