A ruling party often gets a bloody nose in by elections. Can the BJP take comfort in this truism, wipe the blood off, and get on with its life? That will be difficult. The results of the latest round of by elections are a continuation of the last two held in Uttarakhand and Bihar. To get punched on the nose thrice in 100-odd days is not just bad luck for the BJP, it is blow to the image of Modi, Shah & Co. who have taken over the party. Somehow the fulsome praise of the Indian media about Modi's foreign jaunts and its coverage of his alliterative public pronouncements have had very little impact on the voters. The successive by election results have shown that Modi does not have a sure fire recipe for success. This makes Modi vulnerable, not so much in Parliament as within the Brotherhood of the Khaki Knickers and in the wider sangh parivar.
The sangh parivar is a not a harmonious family. Though in theory its members are tied together with the rope of a common ideology, in practice they pull in different directions and fight with each other for being the standard bearer of the saffron revolution. This well suits the RSS, the paterfamilias, which can play the role of an arbiter or an instigator when the situation demands it and all the while keep its hands hidden and therefore seemingly clean.
The by election results have created such a situation. The first shot in the clan war was fired by unnamed senior leaders of the BJP who said that the defeats in UP was provoked by the unnecessary
comments on love jihad made by Swami Adityanath, the party's election campaign leader in the state. The swami whose fortune is his tongue hit back at once and said that the party lost because he was forced to confine his campaign to a few constituencies: the problem was not his tongue but the restraint placed on it.
The war now took a curious turn. Instead of addressing the unprecedented setbacks in Gujarat, UP, and Rajasthan where the BJP won just 10 seats out of the 24 contested, Modi, Shah & Co. asked the party cadre to look East and see the glorious victory of one seat each in West Bengal and Assam. However the peculiar arithmetic of making a molehill look bigger than a mountain didn't click with some in the party. Maneka Gandhi, for one, still held that love jihad is a serious issue, because in her parliamentary constituency there have been seven to eight instances of love jihad. (Here we have another example of the BJP's peculiar arithmetic: 7-8 cases of love jihad in a constituency of approximately 12-lakh plus people become a serious issue!) Jokes apart, what is actually serious is that a cabinet minister of a political party believes that love marriages (genuine or false), are more important than other issues like public health, education, sanitation, housing, etc. to the millions in this country. The voters felt differently.
The sangh parivar's idea of India and its history, culture, and society bears very little relation to truth, or the reality of India. It is an all-male story of victimhood and triumph which even after over 50 years the BJP and the Jan Sangh ( its earlier avatar ) have been unable to sell to most Indians. The politicians in the BJP know this, but they cannot convince the sangh parivar and the demagogues within the BJP. Modi's real enemies are within his parivar and now that the by elections have revealed that his broad chest is resting on weak legs he should be careful.
Keep your enemies close but your family closer.
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