All eyes are now on the upcoming elections to state assemblies in Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam in the course of 2016 after Bihar handed down a snub to the BJP which could mainly be ascribed to the consolidation of forces opposed to it.
While in Kerala there is a set pattern of incumbent governments being voted out and the beneficiary of that could well be the Left parties this time around, in West Bengal Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is sitting pretty. The Left’s decision to ally with the Congress in principle poses no real threat to Trinamool because the CPI (M) and the Congress have in the past fought bitter feuds and even at present they are at daggers drawn in Kerala.
There is no mistaking the fact that Natesan has become the darling of the Hindutva forces in Kerala after his call for Hindu unity and the unstinted support he extended to the Ghar Wapsi campaign of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad last year aimed at converting non-Hindus to Hinduism.
Clearly, it would be an uphill task to convince the voter that there is anything beyond political expediency in the move to align with each other. The credibility of the alliance would indeed be low. It would therefore be foolhardy to add the 30 per cent vote share of the Left in the last elections to Congress’ 10 per cent in the event of an alliance between the two parties. Electoral arithmetic is not as simple as adding two and two.
Many would, however, argue that the success in Bihar of the electoral alliance between the Janata Dal (U) of Nitish Kumar and RJD of Lalu Prasad Yadav, who were bitter rivals for long before that bears testimony to how the electorate reacts. Yet, the vital thing is that the Left front and the Congress continue to be bitter rivals in Kerala.
In Tamil Nadu, despite Jayalalithaa’s seeming invincibility before the devastating floods struck Chennai during which she botched things up, falling sharply in public esteem in the process, she still has a headstart against her arch-rival, Karunanidhi, of the DMK. Assam is the only state in which the BJP seems to have a major foothold among these four poll-bound states in 2016.
Of the other three states if there is one state in which the ruling party at the Centre is making a major effort to open its account in the assembly with considerable help from RSS cadres, it is Kerala where the Congress-led front and the Left front have monopolised power for decades.
Recently, when the results of the by-election to the Aruvikkara assembly seat were declared, the BJP’s share had swelled from 6 per cent to 24 per cent reflecting a new hope for the BJP.
There is an undoubted groundswell of disgust with the two fronts among people at large due to rampant corruption and mismanagement but is the Kerala BJP equipped to make a mark at the head of a possible Third Front? This is a question on everyone’s lips in the State today.
It is hardly surprising that the BJP is targeting the State’s 54 per cent Hindus (as per the 2011 census) who are disorganised to a woeful degree. The Hindus have largely been voting for the Left Democratic Front which is headed by the CPI (M), in preference to the Congress. No attempt to consolidate the Hindu vote bank has so far succeeded but even partial consolidation will give the Hindus the leverage they need to be counted upon as an important vote bank.
The state has 26.56 per cent Muslims and 18.3 per cent Christians, as per the 2011 census.
People at large are doubtlessly wary of the BJP because religious polarisation has not been part of the State’s ethos.
While the BJP’s handicap is that it has no towering leader in Kerala, it is banking on the president of the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana Yogam, Vellapally Natesan, who professes to be a strong votary of Hindu consolidation but has not declared his support for the BJP. Natesan in fact insists that he will not contest the assembly elections.
The Ezhavas and Nairs are the two major Hindu communities in the State. The Ezhavas, which the SNDP represents, form the majority among the Hindus. More than 20 per cent of Kerala’s Hindus are Ezhavas. Though Natesan speaks of Hindu unity, the Nair Service Society chief, G Sukumaran Nair, is not in favour of such unity. The Nairs are 14 per cent of the state’s population. Efforts to unite the SNDP and NSS have been undertaken earlier as well but the NSS has always been against it.
Natesan’s visit to New Delhi recently to meet Prime Minister Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah led to understandable speculation about a possible alliance between the SNDP and the BJP but for the record Natesan has been denying that there is anything going on between the two parties. He insists that he had gone to Delhi only to invite Modi for a function in Kerala.
There is however no mistaking the fact that Natesan has become the darling of the Hindutva forces in Kerala after his call for Hindu unity and the unstinted support he extended to the Ghar Wapsi campaign of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad last year aimed at converting non-Hindus to Hinduism.
The BJP’s real success would lie not merely in weaning away the Ezhavas from the Left in substantial numbers but also in convincing a sizable section of Nairs that they must come under the Hindu vote consolidation umbrella. That would be a huge challenge especially in a state like Kerala where religious cohesion among Hindus seems a far cry.
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