BJP'S NEW PLAYBOOK

A MORE PRO-ACTIVE RSS, GREATER PLAY TO LOCAL LEADERS AND ISSUES, AND THE POLITICS OF DOLES HELP THE SAFFRON PARTY POST BACK-TO-BACK WINS

- ANILESH S. MAHAJAN

By now, the ruling party's victory celebrations have become a familiar affair for the country. The dhol beats, the firecrackers at the BJP headquarters in Delhi and this time in Maharashtra too-and, of course, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's message of gratitude to his untiring party apparatchiks and workers. After the huge disappointment in the general election this June, where the party fell agonisingly short of a simple majority mark on its own, normal service has been restored.

The turnaround victory in Maharashtra-a major factor in that underwhelming Lok Sabha effort has rubbished any doubts on the core competency of the BJP's election machinery with Modi as its totem. At the heart of the Mahayuti sweep was the BJP's solo tally of 132 seats out of the 148 it contested, a near-90 per cent strike rate and a far cry from the nine LS seats it won out of the 28 it contested some five months back. The Jharkhand results may have led to some hand-wringing, but the national impact of winning Maharashtra, with its outsize influence on India's economy, puts everything else in the shade. Indeed, for BJP enthusiasts, it has been months of cheer, inaugurated by a miraculous win in Haryana against a decade of anti-incumbency, and a creditable performance in the first assembly poll in Jammu and Kashmir since the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019. All of this has ensured that Modi 3.0 can continue to peddle the soft Hindutva line while having enough headroom to dodge any googly by the Congress-led Opposition in Parliament.

All is Forgiven