This Article is From Jul 03, 2015

BJP's Premature Joy at Third Place in Kerala

A by-election in Kerala has political pundits all excited, because it seems to point to a dramatic new trend in national politics.

On the face of it, it's difficult to see why.

The by-election to the State Assembly, in the rural constituency of Aruvikkara, was won by the Indian National Congress, retaining the seat it had won in 2011. The Left Front, running a CPI-M candidate, had again come second, and the BJP was once again third. At first glance the results suggest the continuation of a familiar pattern.

And yet, BJP supporters on social media were cockahoop, celebrating a result they saw as a moral, if not electoral, victory. The reason? In undergoing his ninth successive electoral defeat, BJP veteran leader O Rajagopal got 34,145 votes - a 23.96 per cent vote share. This represented a significant increase from his predecessor candidate in the same seat, who won 7,690 votes in the 2011 assembly election (six per cent), and even from the BJP's vote share of 14,890 in the 2014 Lok Sabha election (11 per cent). The BJP, they exulted, had quadrupled its share of the vote since 2011. The Congress may have won, but the momentum, they argued, was the BJP's.

I was sceptical when bombarded with such comments on social media. "The BJP came third," I pointed out on Twitter. "Third with a higher vote share is still third."

Political commentators, however, have sat up and taken notice. It is not merely the increasing BJP vote share they are remarking upon - it is the fact that it has come largely at the expense of the Communists. Kerala is a state where anti-incumbency sentiment plays a notoriously major role in the hustings; this was the biggest danger to the Congress, which has been ruling the state for the last four years. But the anti-incumbency vote didn't just go, as in the past, to the alternative major party, the Communists; it was divided between the CPI-M and the BJP, and the Congress scampered home by a majority of more than 10,000 votes.

A similar phenomenon has already been witnessed in Bengal, where the traditionally anti-Congress vote of dispossessed East Bengalis and others has moved significantly from the Left to the BJP. This suggests two things. First, it shows that support for Communism in India actually has very little to do with Communist ideology - a fact brought home to me by a tea-shop encounter in Aruvikkara with a BJP office-bearer who in the previous election had been a CPI-M worker. If someone can vote CPI-M in one election and BJP in the next, he's no Marxist: the jargon of class struggle never penetrated beyond a very thin layer of misguided intellectuals. Second, it suggests that voters looking for a change from politics-as-usual (the customary choice in Kerala, for half a century, has been between Fronts headed by the Congress and the CPI-M) are hoping to find it in the BJP.

If this trend continues in both Bengal and Kerala, the two major remaining bastions of Indian Communism, it will not be long before the Communist Parties are relegated to footnotes in India's political history. One young Congress MLA told me he was convinced that he would spend the bulk of his future political career fighting the BJP; the Communists, he said, would before long find themselves minor constituents of a Congress-led front opposing the BJP.

So are we witnessing the beginning of the end for Communism in Kerala?

The Communist movement in Kerala was never purely about the ideology of class struggle. It also drew strength from being seen as the voice of the lower Hindu castes, particularly the numerically-strong Ezhava community, which, despite being OBCs in national parlance, suffered discrimination almost as oppressive as that undergone by Dalits elsewhere in the country. Mass movements against some of the more iniquitous practices relating to temple entry and temple worship, notably the Guruvayoor Satyagraha, consolidated the Communist position as the party of oppressed groups within the Hindu fold.

Since, as elsewhere, Hindusim's lower castes vastly outnumber its "forward" castes, the Communist Party became the flag-bearer of a large Hindu voting bloc. "The largest Hindu party in Kerala", one very senior Congressman explained to me soon after my entry into Kerala politics, "is not the BJP but the CPI-M."

This explained the paradox that a party ideologically committed to secularism rested on a solid phalanx of Hindu voting support. Since the organized political interests of Kerala's sizeable Muslim and Christian communities never had much sympathy for the iconoclasm of the Communist movement, the CPI-M was able both to preach secularism and portray itself to Hindu voters as the defender of their interests against the minorityism of the Congress (led by several prominent Christians) and the Congress's allies (notably the Christian-dominated Kerala Congress and the Indian Union Muslim League).

That space, as the defender of Hindu interests, has now been occupied by the BJP. It always enjoyed some upper-caste Hindu support, tempered by voters' awareness that since the BJP didn't stand much of a chance, it was wiser tactically to vote for the Congress. The ascent of Narendra Modi has enabled the BJP to credibly seek OBC support as well. He has made three visits as candidate and Prime Minister and always spoken to largely Ezhava audiences. The CPI-M, officially godless, attacks the BJP's bigotry, but despite its championing of the Ezhavas, it has not been able to promote a new leader from that community to supplant the 92-year-old VS Achuthananthan, an Ezhava and former CPI-M Chief Minister now at odds with his party leadership.

Achuthananthan is the most popular CPI-M leader, but he is also criticized daily by the official CPI-M; every time that happens, more Ezhavas turn away from the party. And they flock to the BJP.

The Communists' dilemma is fundamental. For the last 50 years, they have won elections in Kerala by consolidating Hindu votes against the "minority-dominated" Congress. If the BJP continues to expand, such consolidation would become impossible in the foreseeable future, with Hindu votes being split three ways; even if the Congress gets the smallest of the three portions, it attracts enough minority votes to win. The Sangh Parivar will continue aggressively to seek votes on a communal basis, thereby shrinking the CPI-M's base further, especially among the Ezhavas.

Where do the Communists turn to compensate for this political erosion? It is unlikely that the Muslim and Christian clergy will help godless Communism make inroads into their flock. Since the Congress remains the principal standard-bearer of secularism nationwide, there is little point in weakening it by supporting a Communist party that counts for very little in Parliament or at the national level. The Communists have in the past flirted with radical Muslim splinter parties opposed to the Muslim League's pro-Congress politics, but fear of alienating the Hindu vote has always limited the extent to which they were prepared to go with groups like Abdul Nasser Madani's People's Democratic Party (PDP) or the Indian National League (INL).

The Communists' strength remains their organizational muscle, the ability to win funding through extortion, and the willingness to resort to violence and even murder in the pursuit of their political ambitions. With petty power struggles, multiplying cliques and bitter factional fighting diluting the movement, however, the Communists are ripe for the BJP to make inroads into their voter base. In the short run, the obvious beneficiaries of this development will be the Congress.

BJP supporters can celebrate all they want on Twitter, but in the next elections it is likely to be the Congress that laughs all the way to voting booths. We could even swap one letter with the BJP media cell and start a new Twitter trend: #SelfieWithLaughter.

(Dr Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)

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