[Reproduced below are two detailed accounts/comments. The first, and earlier one, is penned by a knowm Modi-backer. The second one by one who's definitely not. Yet, on one point, they seem to be converging.
What'd be its implications for the coming L.S. poll? That's crucial. <<It is easy to over-read posters on the wall but they also reflect the subliminal messaging a party wants to project to voters, especially for a party like BJP that has always been more sensitive than anyone else to the subtle meanings and finer details of political communication. It is clear that for BJP, both MP and Chhattisgarh are turning out to be very different campaigns from assembly poll contests in the past year in Karnataka and Gujarat. Unlike Karnataka, where the PM’s rally blitzkrieg towards the end clearly provided a late surge to BJP or the campaign in Gujarat which was entirely fought on his legacy in the state alone, MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan are largely turning out to be battles of the regional satraps. Modi remains the unquestioned political ‘sarve sarva’ of BJP but the party, for whatever reason, has changed its ground tactics this election. ... Their central praxis is turning on the BJP’s chief ministers and what voters see as their delivery record. Whether it is 50 lakh smartphones distributed in Chhattisgarh or MP’s scheme for Rs 4 lakh compensation if a family member dies or direct benefit transfers under Rajasthan’s Bhamashah scheme, the basic BJP model in these states is the same: largescale social spending fronted by a charismatic local satrap. It is this model that is on test before an aggressive Congress campaign rather than a larger referendum on Modi.>> (Excerpted from sl. no. I below.) <<Starting from the fateful summer which saw the Congress being decimated and the BJP forming the first majority government at the Centre after three decades of alliance rule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had become a centrifugal force that enveloped all and everything in every election held since 2014. Whether it was Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra in the immediate aftermath of the Lok Sabha polls, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat in 2017 or Karnataka earlier this year, in every election, the PM had been the focus and the star campaigner who swung voters and influenced poll outcomes. The second significant aspect of electioneering in all these polls was the BJP’s ability to create a meta narrative that was organically articulated by the PM through his powerful polemic. The BJP successfully crafted the narrative for each election — from Achche Din that continued to be the central theme in the Assembly elections following the last Lok Sabha polls, to Uttar Pradesh polls where demonetisation was successfully marketed as the PM’s “surgical strike” on black money against the “Bua-Bhatija (reference to Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav)” duo stained with the taint of corruption and Gujarat where the PM was successfully marketed as the personification of development with the slogan Mein Hoon Vikaas (I am growth). *Moment of departure* The present tranche of elections present a sharp difference from these two critical frames of reference. ... Coupled with the BJP’s inability to set the political discourse and tone of the campaign is the fact that it is the individual chief ministers, be it Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh and Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, whose personalities would make or mar the elections for the BJP in these States. If the BJP manages to win in Madhya Pradesh, it would not be because the PM succeeded in creating a virtual reality with the force of his personality. In the face of acute agrarian distress and anti-incumbency that plagues several sitting MLAs and ministers, if the voters still depose faith in the BJP, it would be because Shivraj Singh Chouhan delivered tangible results and people-oriented policies.>> (Excerpted from sl. no. II below.)] I/II. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/academic-interest/test-for-bjp-satraps-not-modi-the-pm-remains-bjps-galvaniser-in-chief-but-local-issues-dominate-mp-chhattisgarh-polls/?fbclid=IwAR01pBdouuJp57F36FI2TbPcX162z9rfkg3cXQbetxXqN8fbzNswr-v7__k Test for BJP Satraps, not Modi: The PM remains BJP’s galvaniser-in-chief but local issues dominate MP, Chhattisgarh polls November 22, 2018, 7:00 AM IST Nalin Mehta in Academic Interest | Edit Page, India | TOI If poll posters ever tell a larger story, the most striking thing about BJP’s campaign in Chhattisgarh is the re-emergence of Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the party’s election publicity. BJP billboards across Raipur and the Chhattisgarh central plains are dominated by mega-size cutout images of chief minister Raman Singh in the foreground, emerging from an equally large silhouette of the late Atal Bihari in the background. To be sure, the poll posters also sport the visages of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, party president Amit Shah and other state leaders, but these appear in much smaller squares on the side. Uday Deb The PM undoubtedly remains the party’s chief vote catcher and galvaniser-in-chief but the local political messaging is clear: in Chhattisgarh, BJP’s longest serving current chief minister in the country is the mascot, fighting on his governance record, all packaged within the Atal lexicon: from the Atal Drishti Patra, a vision document for what BJP calls ‘Navya Chhattisgarh’ 2025 to the renaming of Naya Raipur as Atal Nagar to Raman Singh’s Atal Vikas Yatra, flagged off from Dongargarh by Amit Shah in September. The recourse to Vajpayee is absent in BJP’s positioning in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, but the ‘great leader’ imagery of Raman Singh repeats itself with respect to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Here too BJP’s ‘Mamaji’, in power since 2005, is fighting on a similar brand of welfare politics. Jobs remain his biggest challenge but he is banking big on schemes that give the poor a flat Rs 200 electricity bill (for a bulb, fan, cooler, power socket), waiver of past electricity bills, Rs 12,000 on childbirth, Rs 5,000 for last rites and Rs 1,000 per month for fruits and milk to tribal families. It is this model of big ticket social welfare spending through schemes like the Sambhal Yojana that he hopes will keep the urban poor, Dalit and tribal voters on his side, along with his OBC tag, turning back the fatigue of anti-incumbency even though farmers remain divided after the 2017 Mandsaur incident. The imagery of ‘Mamaji’ and phool-chaap is what is driving the BJP campaign in MP’s hinterland while party posters in Bhopal have two dominant visages – Chouhan and Narendra Modi. It is easy to over-read posters on the wall but they also reflect the subliminal messaging a party wants to project to voters, especially for a party like BJP that has always been more sensitive than anyone else to the subtle meanings and finer details of political communication. It is clear that for BJP, both MP and Chhattisgarh are turning out to be very different campaigns from assembly poll contests in the past year in Karnataka and Gujarat. Unlike Karnataka, where the PM’s rally blitzkrieg towards the end clearly provided a late surge to BJP or the campaign in Gujarat which was entirely fought on his legacy in the state alone, MP, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan are largely turning out to be battles of the regional satraps. Modi remains the unquestioned political ‘sarve sarva’ of BJP but the party, for whatever reason, has changed its ground tactics this election. Modi addressed 34 election rallies in Gujarat, 21 in Karnataka. In contrast, TOI’s election tracker shows that he only addressed 5 rallies in the now finished Chhattisgarh campaign, one public meeting in Rajasthan so far (though he will do more) and is scheduled to hold a total of 11 rallies in MP. It is Amit Shah who has been the lynchpin of the BJP campaign so far, holding 10 rallies in Chhattisgarh, 14 in MP (with more to come) and 3 so far in Rajasthan. In contrast, Rahul Gandhi has been carpet bombing these states with more rallies than the Modi-Shah combine: 43 public rallies so far (18 in Chhattisgarh, 19 in MP and 6 in Rajasthan) with more to follow. Given that the three Hindi heartland states account for 65 Lok Sabha seats between them and BJP won 62 of these in 2014, the characterisation of this contest as a semi-final before 2019 is but natural. It could also be a tad simplistic. The semi-final portrayal is partly due to the fact these are the last major direct Congress-BJP faceoffs before the general election. It is also because, at the highest stratosphere of the election, campaign rhetoric has focused a great deal on meta-national narratives like Rafale, CBI vs CBI and charges of crony capitalism on one side and ‘naamdar’ vs ‘imaandar’ on the other. This has fuelled the positioning of these polls as yet another Modi vs Rahul Gandhi contest whose outcome will be read as signs of the endurance of Modi magic or harbingers of a changing national mood. The resurrection and sheer prominence given to the Vajpayee persona in Chhattisgarh show that for BJP, this election is more than just about Modi’s voter connect. In that sense, these state assembly elections in the Hindi heartland mark a return to ‘traditional’ contests we saw before the Modi wave upended India’s political chessboard. Their central praxis is turning on the BJP’s chief ministers and what voters see as their delivery record. Whether it is 50 lakh smartphones distributed in Chhattisgarh or MP’s scheme for Rs 4 lakh compensation if a family member dies or direct benefit transfers under Rajasthan’s Bhamashah scheme, the basic BJP model in these states is the same: largescale social spending fronted by a charismatic local satrap. It is this model that is on test before an aggressive Congress campaign rather than a larger referendum on Modi. II. https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/is-modi-losing-steam-as-a-campaigner/article25615900.ece?fbclid=IwAR357zEt79dThbFx8zmnvhLPp8G1H8bV7YA2gYt0TaxsfWocTnpo5Ep4_t8 Is Modi losing steam as a campaigner? POORNIMA JOSHI CMs to the fore The BJP will have to rely more on the Chief Ministers’ record than on the Modi magic - AM Faruqui A tougher fight ahead for BJP *In the five poll-bound States, it is the individual CMs’ credibility that will make or mar elections for the BJP* >From farm distress, MNREGA payments, Aadhaar-linked benefit transfer to minor administrative failures and successes, the ongoing Assembly elections, particularly in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, have underscored many points for political observers to ponder. But a bigger picture is emerging here which presents a sharp contrast to the two central features that have thus far characterised electioneering and the BJP’s successive poll victories since 2014 general elections. Starting from the fateful summer which saw the Congress being decimated and the BJP forming the first majority government at the Centre after three decades of alliance rule, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had become a centrifugal force that enveloped all and everything in every election held since 2014. Whether it was Haryana, Jharkhand and Maharashtra in the immediate aftermath of the Lok Sabha polls, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat in 2017 or Karnataka earlier this year, in every election, the PM had been the focus and the star campaigner who swung voters and influenced poll outcomes. The second significant aspect of electioneering in all these polls was the BJP’s ability to create a meta narrative that was organically articulated by the PM through his powerful polemic. The BJP successfully crafted the narrative for each election — from Achche Din that continued to be the central theme in the Assembly elections following the last Lok Sabha polls, to Uttar Pradesh polls where demonetisation was successfully marketed as the PM’s “surgical strike” on black money against the “Bua-Bhatija (reference to Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav)” duo stained with the taint of corruption and Gujarat where the PM was successfully marketed as the personification of development with the slogan Mein Hoon Vikaas (I am growth). Moment of departure The present tranche of elections present a sharp difference from these two critical frames of reference. To begin with, the BJP has not been able to set the tone or narrative. Not, of course, for want of trying with the VHP and its cohorts in the media unsuccessfully building a hype around their sustained campaign on the Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. The PM and his deputy, BJP President Amit Shah, have joined the chorus with the rather outrageous claim that the Congress has influenced the Supreme Court where the title suit in Ayodhya is currently pending. The VHP’s current working President Alok Kumar, a PM loyalist, is on record asserting that they had been “assured” that the judgement title suit would facilitate temple construction but former Chief Justice Dipak Misra did not deliver according to the plan. Thus, says Alok Kumar, the VHP is constrained to renew its campaign for Parliament to pass a law in the upcoming winter session to pave the way for Ram temple in Ayodhya. These claims are, however, being publicly refuted by the former working President of the VHP, the loquacious Pravin Togadia, who has repeatedly accused the ruling BJP in UP and at the Centre of “betraying Bhagwan Ram”. While the Sangh Parivar is engaged in these internal struggles even as they peddle the temple campaign, the reality, as this correspondent sensed in travels across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, is that Ram temple has simply not gained any currency as a poll issue. Perhaps the law of diminishing returns has caught up with the VHP and its temple campaign while the exhausted voter is preoccupied with more mundane concerns, especially the raging rural distress which has now emerged as the single most important issue in the ongoing elections. Be it Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan or Chhattisgarh, the voters are more concerned with their input costs with fertiliser, pesticide and diesel prices going up and incomes suffering a blow with demonetisation shrinking liquidity flow in rural markets for cash crops and low MSPs and fall in bonuses depleting revenues in crops like paddy and wheat. The price of garlic which the farmers in all these three States sold previously at anything between ₹85-150 per kg is now being sold at ₹4-6 per kg, leading to widespread resentment among farmers. Coupled with the BJP’s inability to set the political discourse and tone of the campaign is the fact that it is the individual chief ministers, be it Shivraj Singh Chouhan in Madhya Pradesh, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh and Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, whose personalities would make or mar the elections for the BJP in these States. If the BJP manages to win in Madhya Pradesh, it would not be because the PM succeeded in creating a virtual reality with the force of his personality. In the face of acute agrarian distress and anti-incumbency that plagues several sitting MLAs and ministers, if the voters still depose faith in the BJP, it would be because Shivraj Singh Chouhan delivered tangible results and people-oriented policies. Rural discontent With falling MSPs and withdrawal of bonuses, when international soya bean prices fell and oil imports were enhanced, Madhya Pradesh witnessed widespread agitation with the police resorting to opening fire at the farmers in Mandsaur last year. The Chief Minister moved fast, announcing Bhavantar Bugtan Yojna in October 2017 which was aimed at paying farmers the difference between the government’s MSP for any crop and the corresponding trading rate at the mandis. The Madhya Pradesh government made payments of ₹1,952 crore to farmers in the 2017-18 Kharif marketing season. Additionally, the local government has conceptualised and implemented the Mukhyamantri Krishak Samruddhi Yojna for the 2017-18 Rabi crops. According to the Mayor of Jabalpur, Swati Godbole, the Chief Minister has personally supervised the grih pravesh of 5,500 families in houses constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna this year. Even after 15 years in power and visible agrarian distress, Chouhan is still a formidable force in Madhya Pradesh. His neighbour and colleague, Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh is caught in a very close fight with the Congress which has run a spirited campaign in a State won by the BJP in 2013 with only 0.75 percentage point difference in their vote share. The PM’s rallies in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have made little or no difference to the BJP’s poll prospects this time. At the same time in Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje’s dismal performance and image as an arrogant ruler has received no boost from the PM’s public performances. The BJP’s difficulties in Rajasthan persist despite the PM addressing a spate of rallies there. Clearly, the centrifugal force is suffering from a slowdown in its velocity. The Assembly elections in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh would be won or lost on individual CM’s performance and the one issue that trumps all is agrarian distress. This is the most distinguishing feature of the last Assembly elections before the country braces for the Lok Sabha polls next year. Published on November 28, 2018 -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
