What can come in the way of Modi winning 2019 polls
Following the nomination of Ram Nath Kovind as its presidential candidate, most believe the BJP has the 2019 Lok Sabha poll in the bag.
As a respected Dalit from a farmer's family in a small village in Derapur tehsil of Kanpur's Dehat district in Uttar Pradesh, Kovind ticks all three electoral boxes: farmers, Dalits and UP.
Nitish Kumar's JD(U) has decided to vote for Kovind. Others could follow suit leaving the Congress, the Left, TMC and RJD cutting a sorry figure. Meanwhile, the BJP is making inroads into the northeast, into West Bengal, into the south.
Hindu polarisation too is a reality. The poor moreover are now the BJP's captive constituency. Kovind's humble background is an incremental asset. How can you lose elections if upper caste Hindus, Dalits, OBCs, farmers and the poor support you? The answer: you can, if disenchantment sets in.
So far, the disenchantment with the BJP has been confined to the quasi-liberal elite and sections of the middle-class. They disapprove of intrusive tax laws, a still slothful bureaucracy, an inconsistent policy on Pakistan and China, state dictats on beef, cases of cow vigilantism, and illiberalism over censorship and LGBT rights.
These are not issues that win or lose elections in India's heartland. But with 2019 bearing down on him, Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs to guard against over-confidence.
After three years in office, and with 281 MPs, the BJP shows a worrying trend: where it should be firm — as with misbehaving MPs — it is not; where it should be conciliatory — on, for instance, intrusive tax laws, beef bans, revisionist text books stressing mythology above science — it is not.
When Modi took office he said he would not be a pradhan mantri but a pradhan sevak. Members of parliament, he added, are not VIPs. They are servants of the people.
His fellow MPs obviously haven't been paying attention. They continue to behave like feudal lords.
The obnoxious behaviour of the Shiv Sena's Ravindra Gaikwad and the TDP's Diwakar Reddy with airline crew underlines how MPs have misunderstood their role. The common citizen who flies in an aircraft pays for his ticket. An MP does not. He (or she) gets free tickets as part of an MP's perks.
Indian MPs are among the world's least productive and most pampered. British MPs, for example, have to find their own accommodation and pay for it themselves. Most Indian MPs get two-acre Lutyens' zone bungalows with a market rent of between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh per month.
Assuming only 500 out of a total of nearly 800 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs live in Lutyens' zone bungalows, the collective market rent of their accommodation would amount to Rs 100 crore a month (500 MPs x Rs 20 lakh rent per month). That's Rs 1,200 crore a year — the cost to the Indian taxpayer of keeping 500 public servants in Lutyens' colonial luxury.
The real cost to the taxpayer is of course far higher when you compute the other perks that go with this expensive free accommodation: free security guards, free telephones, free electricity, free cars, free petrol, free airline travel, and free secretarial and domestic staff.
In return what does the Indian citizen get? If you're an airline passenger, the worst nightmare is a co-passenger who is an MP, arrives late, delays the flight, complains about the food and (like the Shiv Sena's Ravindra Gaikwad) assaults an elderly airline staffer.
What's the solution? It's quite simple really. The party to which an offending MP belongs must take punitive action against him (it's never a her). That though is the last thing the Shiv Sena and the TDP will do.
So it's up to the BJP to crack the whip. But it won't either because it is consumed with winning elections. It took no concrete action against Ravindra Gaikwad because it didn't want the Shiv Sena to pull out of the Maharashtra government. It won't take action against Diwakar Reddy because it is afraid of antagonisng the TDP ahead of the presidential election.
Both fears are unfounded. The BJP should welcome a Shiv Sena walk-out. It would win a mid-term poll in Maharashtra handily on its own and rid itself of the baggage of a lumpen party.
Similarly, the BJP already has more than 60 per cent of the votes needed to get Kovind elected as president. A TDP abstention would have made no difference.
By not censuring the two NDA MPs, the BJP has given the impression of a party that puts power ahead of principle. Winning elections is the main purpose of fighting them — but not at the cost of fundamental principles that uphold decency and the public interest.
In the life of every government comes a point of inflection. For the UPA government it was the horrific rape of Jyoti Singh (Nirbhaya) in December 2012.
Already reeling under scams, the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh government never recovered. The Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement had already weakened it. The Nirbhaya assault broke the back of the UPA. In less than 17 months, it was evicted from power.
No similar point of inflection has yet appeared for the Modi government. The presidential election will in fact strengthen its vote base.
But there are troubling signs for the BJP which it would be wise to not ignore. The tsunamic wins in Uttar Pradesh and the MCD have lulled it into complacency. The BJP leadership should remember that the electoral tide can turn suddenly, and without warning.
At a time when vested interests are using every device to demoralise the army doing a thankless job in Kashmir amidst Pakistani army instigated terrorism, the last thing Modi needs is unnecessary distractions. His focus must remain on the economy and jobs. The Opposition will be delighted if it can distract him from that agenda in the run up to 2019.
False intolerance campaigns are designed to do just that. In the past they have failed. They will gain fresh legs and currency if the prime minister does not rein in his MPs and tell them their job is to serve not rule.