JOIN USRam Mandir: Is BJP set for UP 2022, India 2024?
‘Ram Mandir’ has been a central theme of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) politics for over three decades. It is no surprise, therefore, that the party wants to make as much of a spectacle of the iconic bhoomi pujan as possible despite a looming pandemic.
The selection of August 5 for the laying of the foundation bricks is also significant. Exactly a year earlier on August 5, 2019, the Modi government had fulfilled another important item on the Hindutva agenda – that of scrapping Article 370. That Prime Minister Narendra Modi will himself attend the event and lay a silver brick at the Ram temple is also significant. Now that one of its long-time promises is close to fulfillment, it’s worth charting out how the event will fetch the BJP dividends in the months and years to come.
The UP picture
Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls in 2022. The single biggest impact of the Ram mandir construction – although the actual completion of the grand temple may take up to 2024 – will be on the politics of India’s most populous state and one with the power to influence the political narrative in the Hindi belt.
In 2017, BJP won a resounding victory in the state after a gap of 15 years. Since then, the party has consolidated its gain in the heartland state. It had 43 per cent of the vote in UP in the 2014 general elections. This went down by two per cent in the 2017 Assembly polls in the course of a triangular fight with the Congress-Samajwadi Party on one side and the Bahujan Samaj Party on the other. In the 2019 general elections, the Saffron party got a whopping 50 per cent of the vote in another triangular fight against the BSP-SP alliance and the Congress.
Even at the peak of its popularity in the 1993 Assembly polls, when the BJP was riding high on a Hindutva wave months after the demolition of the Babri masjid, the BJP could win only 177 of 403 seats and 33 per cent of total votes. An SP-BSP alliance came to power after the BJP failed to muster up majority numbers. Compare that to the current scenario and it is clear that something has fundamentally changed for the BJP in UP since 2014.
Also Read: Ram Temple 'bhoomi pujan': Historic moment vs Covid-19
One aspect has to do with the projection of Narendra Modi as the ‘Hindu hriday samrat’. His contesting and winning from the ‘holy’ city of Varanasi has been a political masterstroke. But it wasn’t the Modi persona alone that did the trick for the BJP. In a new kind of social engineering, the BJP was able to gain significantly among the non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits, even as the two dominant caste groups i.e Yadavs and Jatavs, continued to remain loyal to the SP and BSP respectively. Along with the BJP’s existing support base among the upper castes, the BJP was able to achieve a Hindu rainbow coalition that had not been seen earlier in the state. In many ways, the success or failure of this coalition is likely to determine the BJP's ability to dominate the state’s politics in the future.
It is interesting to note that while the BJP has often found itself in a corner on Dalit issues, it continues with its special reach to community, as it did even in the run-up to the bhoomi pujan for the Ram temple. Then there is the rivalry between Thakurs, the community CM Yogi Adityanath hails from, and Brahmins. Given the many differences between the various caste groups in the state, 'Mandir' is likely to become a key symbol in its quest to forge a lasting pan-Hindu coalition.
Lok Sabha 2024
When the ruling party faces the next general elections in 2024, 40 years after its disastrous show of winning only two Lok Sabha seats in 1984, the political landscape would be a completely altered one from what existed then.
The Congress is now a shadow of its former self after the battering it has received in the last two general elections. In the meanwhile, leaders of several regional parties have become old – from Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra to Naveen Patnaik in Odisha and Mayawati in UP. In parties where there is a next generation in the picture, like the SP in UP and the RJD in Bihar, sons have failed to find the kind of popularity that fathers did. The BJP has emerged as the behemoth of Indian politics and the Ram temple is proof that the BJP has arrived, so to speak, and is here to stay.
Of course, this picture is incomplete without mentioning Modi. While 2014 was a vote for change against Congress as much as a vote for Modi, and the 2019 general elections was a vote for ‘Moditva’, the 2024 battle will be about showcasing what it means to have a Hindu party and a Hindu PM at the helm for 10 years.
When the BJP goes to polls in 2024, it will be showcasing the Ram temple, the jewel in its crown, among other achievements such as the Citizenship Amendment Act, the abrogation of Article 370 and mainstreaming of Jammu and Kashmir, and the passage of triple talaq bill, which many consider a step forward towards a Uniform Civil Code.
The BJP’s showcasing of its Hindutva achievements much more aggressively also needs to be seen in the background of a growing recognition that there is something amiss in the government's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy tanking and showing no signs of reviving and a sense that the Chinese aren’t about to go back quietly in Ladakh. These are factors that may still linger on when the next general elections, and before that a string of state elections from Bihar in 2020 to West Bengal in 2021 to UP in 2022, roll around.