Delhi elections, BJP’s loss and the lessons in defeat

Vibha Sharma
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, February 11

Despite giving the Delhi elections all it had, the BJP could not cross the single-digit mark in the 70-member Assembly on Tuesday, let alone break its 22-year-old jinx in the national capital.

The saffron party saw a good increase in vote share compared to the 2015 Assembly elections.  However, the party that won all seven seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections failed to convert the gains eight months down the line against incumbent Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in a two-way contest it had with the Aam Aadmi Party, with a missing Congress adding to the party’s disadvantages.  

Seen as a verdict on the campaign Home Minister Amit Shah led from the front, Delhi results hold several messages for the saffron leadership, a hint of which came from none other than ideological fountainhead—the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh—a couple of days back. According to Sangh’s second-in-command Suresh “Bhaiyyaji” Joshi, the BJP was not “synonymous” with the Hindu community and moves to oppose the party should not be assumed as opposing Hindus. 

The statement, which came amid the nationwide face-off over amended Citizenship and the onging sit-in protests against it at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh that the BJP made centerpiece of its campaign in Delhi, was read in many ways, including that opposing BJP does not essentially mean opposing Hindus. In fact, this is also the biggest lesson the BJP can draw from the “polarising” campaign it ran to win Delhi.

“It is quite natural that results will be read as the first verdict of the Narendra Modi-led NDA’s controversial decision—amending the Citizenship Act, which Shah spearheaded in its 2.0 avataar,” political observers say. 

Delhi elections hold numerous lessons for BJP’s politics at the national level.

For one, the party’s lack of local leadership and local/legitimate issues are now showing. Though BJP’s new president JP Nadda and state president Manoj Tiwari have taken the responsibility of the defeat in the fight led by Shah, Delhi results are a wake-up call for the leadership  ahead of Assembly elections in States like Bihar and West Bengal. The party can no longer rely on Prime Minister Modi to win state elections. Delhi’s reiteration of this comes after two crucial assembly elections—Jharkhand, which it lost late last year to the Congress, and Haryana, where it barely scrapped through in elections held in October. 

For Shah, whose election campaigns are intense “do-or-die” situations and who had been the “face” of Delhi elections instead of their usual star campaigner—Prime Minister Narendra Modi—BJP’s loss in the elections would mean that the party would now have to rethink its “polarising strategy”.

“People will reward good work, irrespective of religion, caste or creed. The party also needs to groom local/ regional leaders who can connect and take the narrative to masses,” observers say.   

The bottom line is that AAP’s sweeping victory in Delhi primarily rides on the work that the party has done in the past five years.  And although this was the first election that the BJP fought under the leadership of their new chief JP Nadda, it was, by most measures, Shah who was the party’s chief election strategist.

And while the saffron leadership regroups to find out where they went wrong, the party’s performances in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and now Delhi may have given its rivals just the perfect recipe to take on Modi and Shah. 

So what were the takeaways for the BJP these elections?

First was the need for a chief ministerial candidate. BJP went into the elections with no chief minister face, even when AAP had molded its entire election around Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

In Presidential form of elections, voters usually prefer to know who would be at the helm of the government they vote for. So while they vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi for national elections, they would also want a strong candidate for the chief ministerial position. The lesson for BJP here is that the party must groom regional or local leaders so voters would know their chief minister candidate in advance before elections.

Another problem perhaps was the lack of focus on local issues. These elections also show that voters make a clear distinction between national and assembly elections, and that national issues do not make much impact at the local level.  

Another issue that the party needs to understand is that negative campaigns tend to backfire. Polarisation is a double-edged sword. The BJP’s strategy led to counter-polarisation of Muslim votes, which worked to AAP’s advantage. By contrast, Kejriwal ran a positive campaign, taking no position on CAA, instead focusing on development.