The ongoing election campaign for the legislatures of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh tend to underscore a less than wholesome trend in our politics of late that does no service to the idea of democracy. Even important leaders have not hesitated to thoroughly personalise their campaign. There is to be found hardly any discussion around important policy issues or on social or economic matters that have affected the general populace.
These three are Hindi heartland states where the BJP has had a strong presence traditionally, and in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh the party has been in power for long. In general, the chief ministers in these two states have enjoyed a measure of personal popularity. And yet the campaign has not been on the presumed achievements of their governments. In the Gujarat Assembly polls a year ago, the ruling party’s leadership had spent more time attacking its opponents on a personal basis, unfortunately inviting counter-attacks on a similar basis. The real issues before the state were duly obscured.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on the campaign trail on Sunday, attacked the Congress Party saying that it had shown a “dalit” party president, Sitaram Kesri, the door to make Sonia Gandhi party chief. The shallowness of the assertion becomes clear from the factual inaccuracy of the statement.
First, the late Mr Kesri was not of a dalit background. He came from a wealthy trading family of Bihar and had held the crucial position of treasurer for decades in the Congress. Two, under him the party had performed poorly in national elections and the political circumstances of the day impelled the Congress to approach Mrs Gandhi, who had been out in the cold for some time.
Interestingly, unlike in the Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi state elections, this time around the PM has not engaged in a carpet-bombing campaign, although BJP president Amit Shah appears to have been active. He too has made the polls in the Hindi states about the Nehru-Gandhi family, or about divisive issues like the refugee question of Assam or the Ram Mandir and Rahul Gandhi’s supposedly false devotion to his faith.
Apart from addressing far fewer meetings than he is wont to do in Assembly elections, Mr Modi’s image is not on campaign posters all over, as used to be the case in the past. Possibly, anticipating a drawing down of popular support for the BJP due to anti-incumbency in these states, the party leadership may be cautious about projecting the Prime Minister, who is still widely seen as the party’s ace of spades, in state-level polls. It is much better tactically to save the real trump card for next year’s Lok Sabha election.
