BHOPAL, 15 December 2003 — India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on a high after scoring runaway victories in the recent state elections in the Hindi heartland and now plans to push into the north — at the cost of its allies there.
After capturing Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the BJP is now targeting Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which are said to decide the fate of the federal government in Delhi.
The new plan has the potential to disturb its relations with the Janata Dal (U), which has a dominant presence in Bihar, and cool the new-found love between the BJP and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP is fielding its general secretary Pramod Mahajan and Law Minister Arun Jaitley as officials in charge of the two states, the men who ensured victory for the party in the Hindi heartland. Support is to be provided by Federal Agriculture Minister Rajnath Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Information and Broadcasting Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in Bihar.
There is also a plan to bring back Lok Janshakti leader Ram Vilas Paswan into the National Democratic Alliance fold.
Sources say the key to BJP success in Bihar lies in wooing back Paswan and promising to project him as chief minister of the NDA combine in the 2005 assembly elections.
“The delimitation of constituencies in Bihar,” a BJP leader said, “demonstrates that 60,000-100,000 voters in each of the 40 parliamentary constituencies are Dalits. Paswan represents the most powerful Dalit community in Bihar, and he could be a rallying point for the Dalits, especially if we project him as a future chief minister.”
It would also mean attacking the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s voter base for the party wins only when a majority of the Dalits vote along with Laloo Prasad Yadav’s core Yadav-Muslim combination.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP hopes to repeat the recent Madhya Pradesh experiment, sources say. Here the BJP and SP decided which seats to contest, ensuring the SP won a record seven seats in the state. The objective is to keep the Congress-BSP score down.
Now the BJP has to convince Railway Minister and JD(U)-Samata leader Nitish Kumar to accept Paswan’s leadership in Bihar, by no means a simple task, as well as to convince Paswan to return “home”.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP’s task is cut out for it. It had hoped to have a tie-up with the BSP to enhance its tally of 25 of the state’s 80 seats, but this game plan went awry when the Mayawati government collapsed earlier this year.
Clearly, the BJP cannot have an electoral arrangement with the Samajwadi Party. Instead the party will likely repeat the recent Madhya Pradesh experiment.
The Samajwadi Party currently has 26 seats in the Lok Sabha (lower house) and is a possible postelection NDA partner.
