At a meeting of the Maharashtra BJP held in 2013, just after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been declared the NDA’s candidate for that post, he asked leaders of the State unit as to why then ally, Shiv Sena’s workers were deputed to polling booths where the BJP candidate was in play. After some hedging and hawing by leaders, Mr Modi declared that only BJP booth level workers would be at seats where BJP candidates were fighting.
This was one of the first indications that the BJP would be pushing some boundaries in a two decade old alliance. That alliance subsequently broke and last week in Bihar, for the second time, the BJP also lost its old ally the Janata Dal (U), having lost one of its oldest ally, the Akali Dal while in the throes of the farmers protest.
These breaks from its legacy allies have invited allegations of BJP being predatory with regard to the support bases of its allies, or plain old hubris. That BJP is not amenable to playing nice anymore has been made very clear, but political scientist Rahul Verma, associated with the Centre for Policy Research says it’s the logic of power at work.
“The behaviour of the BJP vis a vis its allies of the past is a function of power, of negotiating from a position of strength, rather than any emotional disconnect. It is an electorally dominant party, and is aggressive in wanting to expand its base. If the BJP is not behaving like the party with 138 seats that it had in 2004, there is a cold hard calculation to back it,” he says. “In Bihar, the particularities of the situation may differ, but the nature of the BJP is now that of a dominant party,” he added. He emphasizes that this is a characteristic of the fact that India has now incontrovertibly entered the Fourth Party system.
The Fourth Party System
The first and second party system in India was dominated by the Congress party in the years following independence, from 1947 to around 1989, when even in 1967 when the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD) governments and the 1977 Janata government came about, the Congress remained the main pole around which party politics revolved.
From 1989 to 2014, India saw an era of coalition politics, its third party system, where the BJP and the Congress were the main poles for alliances, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and where, beyond the brief United Front government of 1996-98, most of the socialist and Left parties too aligned.
This era came to an end in 2014 with the advent of Narendra Modi at the helm of affairs in the BJP. With back to back majorities in the Lok Sabha in 2014 and 2019, and more than a dozen and a half State governments, the BJP has become the main pole of Indian politics. Much of this was elaborated upon in a 2019 interview to The Hindu by political scientist Prof. Ashwani Kumar.
Prof. Ashwani Kumar says that the situation is not an exact replica of what was the “Congress system” of the past, that is, the BJP “electorally dominant, but not hegemonic” but that socially it was en route to being hegemonic.
“BJP’s electoral dominance is frequently challenged in State elections, as the Aam Aadmi Party did in Punjab or the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-Congress alliance did in Jharkhand or Mamata Banerjee did in West Bengal. But a combination of what I term ‘Hindu welfarism’, along with the charismatic leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a deepening of the BJP’s appeal among subaltern classes which is evident in electoral outcomes, shows a steady increase of BJP’s social footprint,” he said.
What it means, in the short term at least that the current allies of the BJP and those aiming to tie up in the future have been warned that there is no warm and fuzzy in the alliance, only a commonality of interests served.
