What Was That About Brahmin-Bania, North India-Only Party, Again? 

“The BJP is a party that only people in the cow belt recognize”

“The Brahmin and the Baniya party will not be able to strike a chord anywhere else”

“The BJP phenomenon is restricted to Urban India”

The last standing communist goverment in all of the northern, western and eastern India was defeated on Saturday and Manik Sarkar in his conclusive defeat helped shatter many a political myth. A party which till five years back had been written off as being limited geographically to the Hindi-speaking, north Indian belt with only Brahmins and Baniyas as voters, managed to turn around two decades of Communist rule in the north-eastern state. The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), on Saturday, went from getting less than a two per cent vote share in Tripura in 2013 to forming the government in the state. In north-east India, the BJP is now in power in the states of Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and now will form governments in Tripura and along with alliance partners in Nagaland and Meghalaya.

In the present day, there are BJP governments in 21 states of India. From non-Hindi speaking states like Maharashtra and Assam to less urbanised states like Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, the BJP has been constantly expanding its political footprint across the country. It has finally managed to shed the Brahmin-Baniya image that had been associated with it with a massive support coming from Dalit and tribal voters across the country. From Gujarat to Arunachal, from Jammu and Kashmir to the whole of Central India, the BJP is finally the pan-national party that its detractors had never imagined it could be.

Meanwhile, the Congress has been reduced to less than 50 seats in parliament and governments in the states of Punjab, Mizoram, Puducherry, and Karnataka. The battle in Karnataka is wide open and will be fought by the BJP as the electoral machine that it has turned out to be under PM Modi and Amit Shah. If the BJP does win Karnataka, the call of the Prime Minister to get a ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ might actually turn out to be true.

But, ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ is actually a call to end the old way of things rather than just a decimation of one party in electoral terms. When was the last time that elections in Northeast generated this level of interest nationally? Even as an avid follower of politics, I cannot recall such a time under the UPA government. It is to the BJP’s credit that they have stopped the Congress culture of reducing the politics in the region to electoral footnotes and have attached the utmost importance to the rapid and equitable development of the region. The Congress president, after seeing his party lose on Saturday, is not even in the country to accept the defeat of the party. This is the exact attitude that ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ aims to dispense off. The elections in Northeast are still not important to Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party and that is reflected in his absence.

The disdain of the Congress towards the development of Northeast puts the work of the BJP in the area in stark contrast. One of the lasting legacies of the Modi government will be its work in the region and the sincere focus on ending its political, social and developmental alienation. In the past few years, there has been unprecedented buzz around that part of the country. At least one union minister visits Northeast every 15 days, the concerns of the citizens are accounted for through targeted programmes like the National Bamboo mission and the emphasis on organic Farming and importantly, through the thrust on improving connectivity through rapid rail and road connections. The intention of the new government can be gauged from the fact that Agartala got its first broad gauge connection in the year 2016. Even though the previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was a Rajya Sabha MP from Assam, for three decades no prime minister had attended the North East Council Meeting till PM Modi attended it. The last Prime Minister to attend this meeting was Morarji Desai.

The BJP’s marks a departure from the days of romanticising poverty and speaks to the aspirations of the people. And yes, it is still the only party which is nationalistic in orientation. True nationalism is according equal importance to every area, every community and every individual in the country and the focus of the BJP on Northeast is reflective of just that. The crumbling of the Left citadel in Tripura and the near decimation of the Congress across India shows that the politics of the old days is not resonating with the people.

The ever expanding political footprint of the BJP is not just smart election engineering. It is a potent combination of ambition and intention backed by action which has now made it the only pan-national and nationalistic party.