While the Bharatiya Janata Party’s overdrive to wrest West Bengal from Mamata Banerjee is frequently making the headlines, the ruling party is not taking it easy in poll-bound Assam either. This in spite of the fact that it is much stronger in terms of organization and winnability than in 2016 when it unseated the well-entrenched Congress. With anti-BJP forces closing ranks, the ruling party, too, has unleashed a publicity, development and largesse blitzkrieg to neutralize the Opposition’s narrative of the BJP being a threat to Assamese identity. Every other day something or the other is launched or inaugurated at massive rallies; every 10 days or so a senior leader visits and attends well-staged rallies to fan the buzz around the party which has set a target to win more than 100 of the 126 seats. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, the home minister, Amit Shah, the national party president, JP Nadda, and the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, have all visited the state since January and more such visits are lined up. The BJP has also toned up its monitoring team by assigning the agriculture minister, Narendra Singh Tomar, as election committee in-charge with the minister of development of north eastern region, Jitendra Singh, as in-charge. The national vice-president, Baijayant Panda, is the Assam in-charge. The top three state leaders — the chief minister, Sarbananda Sonowal, the senior minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma, and the state president, Ranjeet Kumar Dass — are almost everywhere, everyday, attending huge rallies and roadshows to occupy the media space. The Opposition surely has a lot of catching up to do, and fast, if it sincerely wants to stop the BJP from retaining the Dispur crown, said a Congress insider.

Wrong move

It was considered the perfect plan in the saffron circles. The BJP would demand the home department in the Bihar cabinet from its smaller ally, the Janata Dal (United), and its leader and the chief minister, Nitish Kumar, would reject it. Then it would gun for the education department and Kumar would not be able to deny it. A senior BJP leader said that his party really wanted it so that it could provide better, nationalistic education loaded with dollops of Indian culture in schools and colleges, as designed by various organizations affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

But suddenly the party backtracked and there were no takers for one of the biggest departments in Bihar. “Actually... education, more so school education, in the state is in a shambles. Lakhs of schoolteachers are constantly on the warpath against the government for better salary, perks, facilities and service conditions. The state coffers are virtually empty. Nitish bore the brunt of their agitation for the last several years. It dawned upon us that by taking the education department, we would become the target of teachers,” a senior BJP leader said, explaining why his party dropped the idea. Meanwhile, the JD(U), which is happy with not having to part with the home department, is wondering whether to laugh or be sad at having retained the education department.

The cracks are showing

The current regime takes pride in the fact that it now has a strong ‘intellectual force’ to counter the Left-Congress combine. The saffron brigade for long suffered from an inferiority complex, vis-à-vis Leftists in particular. These days, one can hear BJP leaders boasting that they virtually command an army of backers to propagate their Hindutva ideology and counter the Leftists. “You can see now that on all important issues, if they have 100 prominent people backing them, then there is almost double that number pushing our line,” one RSS leader claimed. A sense of overconfidence and an offence-is-the-best-defence mindset has gripped the regime. This overconfidence, many within the BJP believe, was behind the angry pushback over the tweets by the pop star, Rihanna, and the climate activist, Greta Thunberg. Privately, some BJP leaders acknowledge that the government should not have reacted to the tweets, but publicly they justify the government. There is increasing realization in sections of the regime that all this betrays frustration over its political failure on the farmers’ protests.

Weighty problem

All of the BJP in Bihar, barring a few senior leaders, is terrified of a certain ‘heavyweight’ politician. Educated at one of the most famous universities in the country, he came back to his native state at the behest of the late Arun Jaitley, and has now become close to the party’s Bihar in-charge and Rajya Sabha member, Bhupender Yadav. He keeps throwing his weight around, browbeating all and sundry, and shouting at almost everybody in an attempt to establish himself as an important leader managing the day-to-day affairs of the party in the state. “This man keeps picking up fights with everybody and keeps flaunting his closeness to Bhupender Yadav. It seems that with the passage of time he is becoming more and more frustrated on not getting anything significant. We really hope that he gets something this time, else he will keep making our lives miserable,” a senior BJP leader confided. Amen, chorused the others present at the scene.

Footnote

Anyone who has something to do with Karnataka politics is waiting for the ‘tell-all’ biographic account of the turncoat BJP leader, AH Vishwanath. A former state president of Janata Dal (Secular) who was among the 17 Congress-JD(S) lawmakers who brought down the HD Kumaraswamy government in 2019, Vishwanath recently declared that his book, titled Bombay Days, would recount the operation engineered by the BJP. Many in the party feel that he plans to use the book to rattle the BJP, especially the chief minister, BS Yediyurappa.