Uttar Pradesh 2009: BJP's Humiliation; Congress' Moment In The Sun

The summer of 2004 was a weary one, made wearier by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) unexpected loss in the general elections. In an era of coalitions, it also lost the vitally-important tag of single-largest-party in parliament by just seven seats; it got 138 seats to the Congress’ 145. 

And with that, a motley rabble of leftists, arch-leftists, socialists, liberals, secularists, and even the odd, rank anarchists, banded together under the aegis of Sonia Gandhi and her loyal factotum, Manmohan Singh, to form a Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, and flood the power centres of Delhi. 

As the series of scams they concocted in the ensuing decade shows, it was one of the most esurient, venal governments ever to wield power at the centre. A principal reason behind the UPA being gifted this unexpected opportunity for institutional rapine is the BJP’s unequivocally disastrous performance in Uttar Pradesh (UP).

In the 1990s, the BJP had won over 50 of 80 seats in the state in three consecutive elections, but in 2004, they dropped to just ten. This crushing defeat should have been the perfect wake-up call for the BJP to regroup the cadres, to clinically identify and excise the reasons for their decline in UP (and in other large states), and to sternly institute rectifying measures. Unfortunately, quite the opposite happened, and things went from bad to worse.

It was truly an annus horribilis. First, the BJP lost its iron hold over Gujarat by keeping Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the 2004 campaign. Then, after the elections, the party had to endure the fractious exit of Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Uma Bharti.

And, third, although a sulking Kalyan Singh had been brought back into the BJP just months before the 2004 general elections, very little was done to rehabilitate him in the party’s state hierarchy because the central leadership didn’t want to antagonise Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party (SP). 

One reason for this pussy-footing is because an influential section of the BJP’s central leadership believed that the SP’s 35 seats in parliament, plus the three seats of the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), an SP ally, could come into play if the BJP chose to make a pitch for forming the government in Delhi.

This may sound absurd or illogical today, but at the time, the UPA was still very much a rickety work in progress, with the Congress only just beginning to glue alliance bonds with the gum of lucre. 

If the opportunity to form a government in Delhi arose, then the BJP would need to have all its bases covered before it made a move. In that calculus, the SP-RLD’s 38 seats would be crucial. Thus, the BJP cannot be blindly castigated for reining in Kalyan Singh so that it could maintain this odd ambivalence towards the SP.

Unfortunately, these decisions came with a cost, not least because Modi, Bharti, and Singh were popular leaders from the Other Backward Castes (OBC), who had worked their fingers to the bone, trying to transform the BJP from the Brahmin-Bania party to a far more broad-based one. Mulayam Singh Yadav didn’t mind this confusion since he was still in the process of consolidating his position as Chief Minister, after having split the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and dislodging Mayawati from the post he now held.

As a result, the BJP lost vital traction and momentum amongst its hitherto expanding electoral base in three large states. Yet, none of that could compare to the blow the party suffered in mid-2005, when its President, LK Advani, made an emotional visit to his birthplace of Karachi and praised Jinnah on Pakistani soil.

The ensuing tumult, to put it mildly, was not docile. Advani was forced to resign, and Rajnath Singh took his place. With that, the BJP was left effectively rudderless since Atal Bihari Vajpayee had retired from active politics by then for health reasons. Where was the party headed now? What was it to do? Who would lead the show?

The answers should have come from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), but in typical, classical Sangh fashion, they chose to sit this mess out. The reason is that for some years, the intellectual nucleus of the RSS had become rather disenchanted by the BJP’s serial compromises on their core Hindutva programme. Yes, they knew that the BJP’s compulsions were coalitional, but the RSS believed that there had to be some limits on how far one might deviate to stay in power.

It was a sagacious call, since beyond a point, and as with all organisations beset by periodic rot, it is healthier to let the collapse happen and rebuild, rather than struggling in vain to stave off the inevitable. 

As a consequence, the BJP went into the 2007 UP assembly elections with no popular provincial leadership, no dedicated cadre, nothing to rally the voters around, no material programme of worth, and, devastatingly, with a moth-eaten electoral base.

What happened next was as ineluctable as it was stupefying: Mayawati and the BSP won a simple majority with just 30 per cent of the popular vote. While she benefited a fair bit from significant Muslim consolidation under the BSP banner, the push past the post was surprisingly provided by Brahmins who had previously been resolute loyalists of the BJP. 

This event, in which Muslims, Dalits and Brahmins combined to create a social coalition on an avowedly anti-Brahmin plank, was so surreal that even the New York Times made a thing of it.

In a house of 403 seats, the BJP was reduced to just 51, with barely 17 per cent of the vote share. Leaving aside the party’s growth and successes in the preceding 15 years, ironically, its performance in 2007 was even poorer than what it got (as the Jan Sangh) in 1967, in UP: 98 seats with 22 per cent vote share.

What was party president Rajnath Singh supposed to do? The next general elections were due in two years. Any and all choices were taken away from him by the UPA, who implemented a delimitation of parliament and assembly constituencies across the country. This is the smartest political move the Congress has probably ever made since it allowed them a golden, perfectly legal opportunity to benefit from boundaries drawn along ‘interesting’ contours.

Up against a wall, and with few choices left in hand, the BJP sleep-walked into 2009, again without a suitable leadership, or an energised cadre. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that Kalyan Singh gifted the Congress one nail by quitting the BJP in January 2009, barely months before campaigning began.

He vented his spleen in his resignation letter, stating unequivocally that the BJP’s decline was a result of powerful lobbies within having forced the exit of mass leaders like Uma Bharti, Babulal Marandi, and Madan Lal Khurana. Then, he offered another nail to Mulayam Singh Yadav by campaigning for the SP in UP and contesting as an independent candidate from Etah. He won almost half the votes, and the BJP lost its deposit there.

For the BJP, 2009 was a humiliating debacle. Nationally, they slumped to 116 seats with less than 19 per cent vote share. It was their worst performance since 1991. In UP, they won just ten seats again, like in 2004, but their vote share went down by five per cent. The biggest beneficiary was the Congress, which resurrected its fortunes by winning 21 Lok Sabha seats in UP (a gain of 12), and polling more than the BJP.

Between the general elections of 1999 and 2009, the BJP fell from being the single largest party in UP to fourth – in terms of both seats and vote shares.

Gratingly, the BJP could only stand and watch as the SP attracted Dalit votes to win 10 of 17 seats reserved in UP for Scheduled Castes, even as the SP lost a section of the Muslim vote to the Congress and the BSP. How many readers remember that not a single Muslim candidate of the SP won from UP in 2009?

Indeed, the devastation was so acute that the BJP came second in only 10 seats. For good measure, the party also lost its deposit in 33 seats and polled in single digits in 15 seats. In Dhaurahra, which it won in 2014 and 2019, the BJP got only three per cent of the popular vote.

But the BJP’s worst shock was left for the Varanasi constituency, represented since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi: in round after round, for hours, former party president Murli Manohar Joshi trailed behind don Mukhtar Ansari of the BSP, before finally, somehow winning by a meagre 17,211 votes. Joshi polled just 30.5 per cent.

This was the condition of the BJP in 2009, in India’s largest state. Today, that seems like ancient history; a period best forgotten. But, no, there is a lesson in this story for the BJP, and it is two-fold: if the party is set to sweep UP for the third time in a row, it is because the BJP vigorously reorganised itself from the roots up; and, that any material deviation from the Hindutva programme will attract a debilitating cost.