Decoding the politics behind Amit Shah’s three-day Kerala visit
As part of his 95-day "Vistaar Yatra" across the country, BJP president Amit Shah has landed in Kerala. The BJP has been trying hard to extend its footprint across the country and Kerala remains an Achilles heel for the party. Kerala has 20 parliamentary seats, which, for instance, is more than the cumulative number of seats in Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.
Despite the "Modi wave" across the country in the General Elections of 2014, BJP didn’t fare well in Kerala, losing deposits in most seats despite giving a close fight in Thiruvananthapuram. With only two years to go for the 2019 elections, the BJP has planned well in advance to give itself a chance in tough seats in the east and the south of India to compensate for the seats lost in the cowbelt, where they had almost swept the polls in 2014.
The problem for the BJP in Kerala is that its brand of politics of polarisation is seen through by an educated electorate. The existence of two rival fronts led by the Congress and Communist Party of India (Marxist) with strong grassroots connect is also a challenge. But it is learned that the party has devised multiple strategies to combat these challenges.
The BJP already has an unprecedented three Rajya Sabha members from the state — including nominated MP (and actor) Suresh Gopi, Anglo-Indian representative Prof Richard Hay and Kerala NDA vice-chairman Rajiv Chandrasekhar.
There is a proposal to promote one of its Kerala leaders to a minister of state in the central government and former state president V Muralidharan is supposed to be among the frontrunners. The party expects that it would help them to reach out more to the common man and gain further acceptance. The party had a minister of state in the Vajpayee government from Kerala in O Rajagopal.
The BJP also had plans to expand the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the state by including smaller allies, but its hopes of getting the KM Mani-led Kerala Congress to join the alliance has almost reached a dead end. Its existing major partner, the Bharat Dharma Jana Sena (BDJS), which contested 36 of the 140 seats in the state in 2016 and returned a vote share of 4 per cent, is sulking as none of the promises made to them to accommodate their representatives in the central boards and corporations have been fulfilled. It is expected that in the NDA meeting presided by Shah in Kochi today (June2), such issues would be ironed out.
Apart from the NDA meeting and the BJP core group meeting in the afternoon, Shah is also slated to meet the representatives of the Syrian, Latin and the Orthodox rites in the Renewal Centre at Kaloor today. BJP president Kummanam Rajasekharan had personally invited Syro-Malabar church head Cardinal George Alenchery and Verapoly Archbishop Joseph Kalathiparambil.
With a Hindu population hovering around 55 per cent and majority of them not identifying with the issues close to the party, it calculates that only by appeasing the Church and a significant number of Christians would it be in any position to emerge as a force in the state.
The BJP’s central leadership maintains that the party has not made any significant progress in the state after holding the national executive meet in the state in September 2016. The leadership of Kummanam Rajasekharan might also come for criticism. It is no secret that Rajasekharan has many detractors in the party and he is still perceived as an outsider, having mostly served in other outfits of the Sangh.
The result of the Malappuram bypoll has been a significant dampener in the attempts at reaching out to Muslims as they barely managed to retain their vote-share and polled nowhere close to the targeted one lakh figure. Shah is also expected to meet the leaders of the RSS in Kochi before he leaves for Thiruvananthapuram.
Another perplexing issue for the BJP is that despite employing desperate tactics, the party has not been able to get defectors from the Congress to its fold like elsewhere in the country. The reason being, Congress party is in much better shape in the state compared to other states and has popular leaders and grassroots workers despite a rout in 2016 Assembly election.
The extent of the BJP’s desperation to get Congress leaders can be gauged from the fact that even a 90-year-old former governor, MM Jacob, was being courted to join the BJP. This was revealed by Jacob himself at the Congress state executive recently.
It is learnt that the BJP is talking to figures from the social, cultural and artistic spheres in its attempts to reach out to the masses. It is a strategy successfully employed by the Marxist parties in the past when they backed independent candidates to wrest tough seats from the Congress.
The Hindu consolidation project has also been a work-in-progress with the mission to reach out to the Nair Service Society (NSS) in limbo unlike the deal struck with the political arm of the Ezhava community’s Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam (SNDP). Attempts to co-opt the Scheduled classes and the Adivasis have failed miserably as was evident when tribal leader CK Janu blasted BJP’s beef politics in the presence of senior BJP leaders, including the prime minister, at an NDA meet held in New Delhi just a couple of months back.
The local media has reported that Janu has once again aired her disagreements at the NDA meeting today.
How to utilise the 5,000-plus RSS shakhas (second only to Uttar Pradesh in sheer numbers) in the state to make a mark at the hustings is the million-dollar question plaguing the BJP for a long time now.
Meanwhile, the gazette notification issued by the Ministry of Enviornment, Forests and Climate change on May 23, prohibiting the sale of cattle at markets for slaughter has put the local BJP leaders in a catch-22 situation. This is also likely to induce a backlash from many other quarters.
Even as I type this, #AlavalathiShaji (roughly translated to mean "troublemaker"), a play on a character from an old Malayalam movie, is trending on Twitter. It remains to be seen if his three-day stay in the state goes smoothly or whether he would have a tough time.