New Delhi: The quota agitation led by Gujarat’s Patel community could not have come at a worse time for the BJP. The violence in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state is expected to cast a shadow on the forthcoming Bihar polls, with the Opposition certain to make it one of its major election planks.
With the going getting tough, the BJP and RSS will meet in the first week of September to fine-tune its strategy for the Bihar polls. All Sangh affiliates are expected to attend this crucial meeting.
Internal surveys conducted by the BJP revealed that it has so far not been able to make a major dent in the RJD’s Yadav votebank. If the party fails to attract a large chunk of Yadavs, the going for saffronites in the Bihar election could get “tricky”, a senior party leader said. With the BJP fighting a do-or-die battle in Bihar, the Gujarat quota agitation has only added to its woes.
While Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar lent his support to the Patel community that is agitating for OBC quotas, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi pounced at the opportunity to hit out at Prime Minister Modi. Mr Gandhi on Thursday targeted the PM and described the agitation as a “repercussion of the politics of anger” pursued by Mr Modi.
“Our Prime Minister is doing politics of anger and such politics has repercussions for the country, which you are seeing in Gujarat,” Mr Gandhi said while on his three-day visit to Jammu and Kashmir. On Wednesday, as the violence spread in Gujarat, the Bihar CM told the media in Patna that “someone who cannot control his own state... how come he keeps advising others?”
Read: Patels on the rampage, Narendra Modi's home state burns
The Patel agitation has pushed the BJP on the backfoot as it has put a questionmark on the BJP’s projection of Gujarat as a “model state”. A sluggish economy and a lack of job opportunities are being cited as the main reasons behind the agitation, and the BJP now has a hard task in hand to convince voters of its much-flaunted “good governance” theory, some party insiders felt.
BJP insiders also fear that the Gujarat violence may also affect the “Modi factor”, on which the party is banking heavily. During the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, with the Modi wave sweeping the state, the caste factor had remained dormant in Gujarat. But with the Modi magic now gradually fading, as was evident in the Delhi elections in February this year, the BJP has begun to focus on caste politics. Up against the Nitish Kumar-led grand alliance in Bihar, which has a formidable combination of Yadavs, Muslims and Kurmis, the BJP is trying to consolidate the upper caste and Mahadalit votebanks. Some of the BJP’s Bihar strategists felt that the party has an edge with the support of “dalit icon” Jiten Ram Manjhi, former CM, and that the BJP “will get a major chunk of dalit-OBC votes”.
The BJP is also banking heavily on the religious census card to consolidate the Hindu votebank in its favour. The census showed that the Muslim population in Bihar went up by 28 per cent between 2001 and 2011, as against the national average of 24 per cent. The timing of the release of the census data, that was kept under wraps for over a year, is being seen as a covert bid to play the communal card in the caste-ridden politics of Bihar.
