Prabhu Chawla
Ignorance, the old line goes, is bliss. Bliss turns to blisters when ignorance is the only reply to a threat nobody has troubled to understand. That is the weather over Indian politics now. For the first time in 12 years of power, the Bharatiya Janata Party is answering more than it is asking. A jeering youth revolt, a quarrel over the Election Commission and a campaign against squalid village schools have pushed a party that once wrote the terms of debate into the unfamiliar business of explanation.
The BJP’s long advantage was never simply the vote. It was command of the argument. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, a complete compendium of welfare and development medals, and his mighty machine faster than any rival’s facilitated the BJP decide what the country discussed. Around it grew a climate of sympathetic television, retired officials offering public praise, fading celebrities discovering sudden conviction and corporate voices that changed colour with the occupant of power. Criticism existed, but rarely set the terms.
First-time voters
That mechanism wasn’t built for post-2014 India. Unlike the voters who rode the first Modi wave, the first-time voters today are driven by memes and algorithms; they have scant patience for sermons about Nehru or the pedigree of an expressway. They do not reject the past as much as they refuse to be moved by it either. Praise for the new dispensation that once travelled as energy, has frozen.
The first-time voters today are driven by memes and algorithms; they have scant patience for sermons about Nehru or the pedigree of an expressway
The reversal can be validated. A top judicial functionary likening unemployed young activists to cockroaches became, almost overnight, a name, a costume and a crowd. The Cockroach Janta Party began as a satire and then walked onto the street. The trigger was a leaked medical entrance test and the demand that the Union Education Minister resign.
But the ammunition like an examination system that felt purchasable and a job market unable to absorb the graduates it certified. Satire achieved what conventional opposition briefings had not, turning an insult into a uniform and marching it to Jantar Mantar.
The party’s first response was predictable one. For the BJP, the movement was a meme, a proxy, a passing pest. It still believed that the dialect worked against a dynastic opponent with a familiar surname. In reality, it died against students in insect masks quoting the Constitution and filming a classroom without a roof. Only after a protest camp, a hunger strike, a march on Parliament dispersed with tear gas and a Congress demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s residence did the Government change course.
Pressure triumphs
Talks, a resignation, a tougher law on paper leaks and a purge at the testing agency followed. These were concessions extracted by pressure, not a communications triumph. Perhaps, during the past 12 years the party just forgot to encourage constructive and corrective disagreement to deal with the mobile-driven motivated crowd. Now its own allies are questioning the abominable demeanour of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a major source of embarrassment for the ruling party.
A handful of ministers can still fight on this terrain. They occasionally concede a fact before disputing a motive. The party’s public faces just cannot. Too many spokespersons are late arrivals from other parties or from TV studios, who know how to shout. But fail to offer a logical counterpoint. Personal ridicule does not answer a 19-year-old who couldn’t appear in a competitive exam.
Nor does a charge of bad faith answer draft electoral rolls from which a vast numbers of names have vanished, while reports of dissent within the commission itself spill into the open. The commission calls the revision hygiene; much of the young public hears an umpire leaning towards the Government. Rather than looking at the system passionately, the BJP is defending the referee when it once chose the sport.
The leadership has been slow to grasp this perceptive shift. For over 10 years, the charge against Rahul Gandhi was that he was not enough. The generation behind the CJP, with Congress hurrying to stand where the cameras already point has changed the indictment. Perhaps the BJP hadn’t geared itself to effectively win the battles of perception.
Institutional damage
The argument now concerns the institutions meant to guard the vote, the exam, the school and the promise of work. When those fail, young voters hear not a debate about 1955 or 1975, but serious damage done to the institutions that were supposed to give them a fair chance. Young India needs to know who will stand for a clean examination, a safe school, work that is more than a slogan, and an Election Commission that looks independent even to those who voted against the Government.
The party already holds a stronger favourable narrative than the one it deploys. Twenty-five years of the Prime Minister’s executive life can be offered as unfinished service by a leader who will be judged by the next decade rather than embalmed by the last. Weak defence of a disreputable commission, a failing delivery system, a sycophantic bureaucracy and turncoats would only amplify the Opposition’s noise. Such defence thrills a studio, but never reassures a young voter who suspects those who are demolishing institutions to retain their plum posts.
The BJP can still win the war after losing small battles. It can’t be won through the imported spokesperson, but through the ideological foot-soldier. The BJP’s historic gift was the worker who knew the lane, the booth, the grievance and the face behind it. The cadre must set the environment and stop the leadership from asking the booth worker to defend at a tea stall what cannot be defended in public. While in opposition, the BJP never waited to be handed an agenda. It turned inflation, graft and captured institutions into short public debate and forced the Government to yield. Now the power has made it forget the craft. But the craft can be reclaimed without nostalgia or surrender.
Humility to hear
Rahul and the CJP did not invent this anger. They have simply been quicker to occupy the ground created by dissatisfaction. The BJP’s trouble is not a shortage of talent to invoke, but that invocation has replaced listening. Its loudspeakers still work; they no longer decide the pitch. Bliss, in politics, is the luxury of not learning. The BJP needs to adopt the humility to hear contrarian voices from within. The party can still seize the initiative on delivery, on reform and on institutions that look like institutions. If it chooses accusatory rebuttal alone, the blisters will teach the rest.
The BJP can still win the war after losing small battles. It can’t be won through the imported spokesperson, but through the ideological foot-soldier
