There is no use of the BJP targeting Mamata Banerjee and M K Stalin, directly by the party's political bosses, both in Delhi and the respective state capitals, or even using the Raj Bhavans to fire those salvos from. Successive elections have proved that it's counter-productive, if anything.
But the BJP is yet to understand it, acknowledge it, points out N Sathiya Moorthy.
Two out of 13 is not a tally that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre would have liked, even if anticipated, in the recent assembly by-elections spread across the country.
Yes, it cannot be called a referendum on Modi 3.0 but it indicates the continuance of a trend set in the nationwide Lok Sabha polls, wherein the victorious ruling combine was made to feel as if it had lost while the third-time loser, in the form of a combined INDIA Opposition, could think that it had 'won'.
Where does the problem lie for the BJP? It's a mindset problem, or a problem of the party's inability and/or unwillingness to change the mindset from a distant past to an unpredictable future through a predicative present.
Between the Lok Sabha polls and the by-polls, nothing seemed to have changed on the ground for the voter to take a re-look.
This was true of the parliamentary behaviour of the BJP, whose leaders, starting with Prime Minister Narendra D Modi and Home Minister Amit A Shah, convinced the voters that nothing in them had changed, at the very least.
Between them, the BJP leaders and ordinary MPs were busy trying to score debating points.
This at a time when their own supporters outside had been convinced that the party had 'actually' lost the Lok Sabha poll, and were trying especially to decipher why and how the BJP lost Uttar Pradesh, despite the colourful Ram Mandir consecration by the PM ahead of the election.
Yes, the Opposition too did the very same things, at the very same expected moments, and even in a predictable manner like the ruling party. But here, a Rahul Gandhi pulling out a picture of Lord Shiva re-energised his party cadres and those of the thus-far united INDIA cadres, who alone were possibly watching the parliamentary proceedings as keenly as their BJP counterparts (alone) used to do through the past decade and more.
For the Opposition cadres, as different from the apolitical voters, some of whom might have sided with them in the parliamentary polls, all of it signalled that their parties and leaders have finally shed their defeatism and lethargy, and were now ready to take the bull by the horn.
It is again a mirror image of what was happening to the BJP supporters as different from the future bhakts of Narendra Modi, the man and the leader, who was yet to arrive on the national scene, in the long run-up to elections 2014.
That was when the 2-G scam, the Commonwealth construction fiasco and the 'Nirbhaya case' caught the nation's imagination, alongside many other such instances and incidents.
In a way, Modi was the right person at the right place at the right time. He holds the unique record of being the only political leader in the country to enter a state assembly (only) as chief minister and Parliament directly as prime minister.
His determination and political astuteness (call it 'cunning', if you want) repeatedly won the day for him. His twin record may not be matched, leave alone beaten, for a long, long time to come.
Maybe, for the very same reason, Modi is unable to or unwilling to acknowledge the shifting sands under the feet when it happens.
His long journey since before the Emergency has always tempted him to refer to that dark era in the nation's post-Independence history.
In the process, he and his BJP compatriots who are at the top of the heap in party and governmental affairs tend to forget that his own generation has only a fading memory of those days, and Gen X, Y and Z among the voters do not know what it was all about, for them to worry about it and vote on it, yet.
These voters are always on the move and move forwards with time, and not backwards -- and unfortunately so, at times.
It is not about politics and the BJP's views of events and developments from the past, or about the Opposition harping on the RSS's 'anti-Independence' stance in what is now a 'forgotten era' for NewGen voters.
These are the voters who constitute a majority and they vote on live issues that are current.
That's how the ruling BJP lost in 2004, and the Congress lost 2014 while in power.
It was again the same approach that the voter had adopted to give the ruling party and its leader a thumping victory in 2019 but one with a reduced margin in elections 2024.
Truth be told, the BJP needs the kind of shake-up that it faced in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, when a man from Gujarat landed in Delhi without notice, and his name 'Modi' was enough to rupture the national fabric in (positive) ways that had been thought impossible since the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi less than a century earlier.
The comparison should stop there, as the ideologies preached and practised by the two made up different and distant poles in social transformation of the Indian society of their times -- and reflected those realities, too.
In the reverse, neither may have worked. The telescoping of time, especially in our era of social media, which the 'Modi magic' exploited in full at a different time, cuts both ways -- and the BJP leadership has not acknowledged it, as yet.
Today, there is a grudging respect for Rahul Gandhi's determination to stay and fight back, despite 10 long years of lampooning from the rival BJP that was designed to destroy not only his personal image and political pedigree, but also his self-confidence even more.
Just as there was/is no equivalent to Modi's ascent and arrival on the national scene just over a decade back, there is hardly any parallel now or ever to the indomitable spirit of the man that is Rahul.
Yes, the story of the late DMK veteran M Karunanidhi, who sat out and fought friend-turned-political foe in breakaway AIADMK founder MGR through the 1970s and 1980s is there.
For the present generation, even in Dravidian Tamil Nadu, that is what myths and mysteries are made of.
They know Stalin, EPS, OPS and a few others of their generation -- and their political knowledge and electoral needs stop there.
Less said about their counterparts across the country, who have had no way of knowing enough about the life and times of Karunanidhi than they may have got to know about his minister-grandson, Udhayanidhi, in the context of the Sanatan Dharma row attaching to his name.
Yet, there is the reality that this very card did not help the BJP win even a single extra vote either in Tamil Nadu or anywhere else in the country in the Lok Sabha polls that followed, despite the Mo-Sha campaigns against them.
Otherwise, too, the repeated BJP haranguing of the Nehru-Gandhi family, going back to decades and decades, that too by the likes of Modi and Shah, only meant that the first-generation tech-users got to Google those names, and got to know that there was more to them than what they were being sought to made to believe.
Between them, Jawaharlal Nehru and daughter Indira Gandhi were the ones who laid the foundations for an industrialised nation, from one of 'snake-charmers'.
India's very many space odysseys that the BJP spin doctors made out to be Modi's individualistic achievements as PM, and also the advent of the atomic age in Indian history, all had commenced there -- and the 2K kids too got to know about it.
Before Pokhran II under BJP's Vajpayee, there was Pokhran I, during Indira Gandhi's time. And there was the 'Bangladesh War' victory, too, under her, that kind of offset at least a part of the China disaster of 1962 under her father.
Yes, Hindutva was not the issue in the Lok Sabha poll and Hindutva was not the issue in the assembly bypolls.
As anti-Modi, anti-BJP social media activists had punned to make fun of them both, the party lost the 'Ayodhya' seat (Faizabad, to be precise) in the Lok Sabha poll, despite the temple consecration, and Badrinath, another Hindu pilgrim centre, this one in Uttarakhand, in the assembly by-election.
The message was very clear: People had real problems and they wanted real solutions. They had lived through 10 years of the Modi raj, with the fond hope and clear expectations that after initial hiccups and hitting back at the Congress predecessors, this government would create jobs, add to family incomes, check price rise and ensure availability of essentials, and such other things that are within the ambit of the common man's legit aspirations.
Instead, harping on the Congress's past, as if the present-day voters care, was the greatest of strategic errors that the BJP committed in the Lok Sabha polls.
Even if they do not do any new things for the voter, even if they do not talk about their own credible achievements that the voter can touch, feel and measure, as long as the BJP continues to criticise the Congress and various regional party rivals in their respective turf, it is not going to work. Rather, it's going to work in the negative, for sure.
Today, there is no use of the BJP targeting the likes of Mamata Banerjee and M K Stalin, directly by the party's political bosses, both in Delhi and the respective state capitals, or even using the Raj Bhavans to fire those salvos from. Successive elections have proved that it's counter-productive, if anything.
But the BJP is yet to understand it, acknowledge it. The fact is that the party is going through the inevitable transition phase, or it has already begun.
It could be Amit A Shah, or someone else, if Modi's era as PM runs out with his current third term.
At the end of this term, he would have also overtaken Nehru as the longest-serving PM -- that is if he decides to stay on till the end, and does not desire to move upstairs as the next President.
But any BJP prime ministerial candidate in Modi's place, in 2029 or even five years later, will not get the kind of launch that he had when he arrived in Delhi, rather reluctantly in 2012 or thereabouts.
It means that the party has to begin working almost from scratch. Then and then alone would the leadership know if the grassroots-level base it has put in place over the past decades and strengthened under Modi's care, was useful or useless, productive or counter-productive.
It should be done with the full realisation that Modi won the party and won for the party, and that the party still needed Modi more than the other way round. His successors might not be blessed as much as he is.
It's the kind of dilemma that the Congress led itself into after Indira Gandhi took over the leadership by storm, post-1967.
Her open revolt against the old and worn-out Syndicate leadership of the party, but fought more forcefully and in the open, as always has been the Congress trait, has had its parallels, later, when Modi side-stepped his mentor and guardian angel, in Lal Kishenchand Advani, equally effectively and even more effortlessly.
There is a repeat value in all this, and so also in issues that mount one by one, one after another, in the voter's mind -- to form a cumulative view of the previous five years a government and leader are in office. In recent memory, it was the 2-G scam, Nirbhaya and the rest for the Congress-led UPA-2.
It's still Agniveer, unemployment, and amusing the super-rich in Modi's time. And Agniveer was/is not what the BJP had assumed the youth in north India would especially make out to be -- as they had correctly pre-judged in the case of post-demonetisation woes in 2016 and the Covid lockdown and the consequent long trek back home, only a couple of years later.
The voter had changed, his mood had changed, but the ruling party was not wiser to it.
What made this ground level shift and its inability to measure it adequately is for the national leadership to be more concerned about than anything else.
Suffice to point out how on assuming office in Modi 3.0, Steel and Heavy Industries Minister H D Kumaraswamy, stirred the pool by declaring that an American firm was getting a Rs 3.2 crore subsidy for every job they created in Modi's Gujarat.
That the Janata Dal-Secular leader from Karnataka might have said it on the sly, to indicate that his progressive state was losing out to Gujarat on the industrialisation index on uneven scales like this one, only owing to such politico-administrative sleight-of-hand.
The media mostly ignored it, but on social media across the country, 2K kids yearning for those jobs, would have taken note of the storm in the teacup.
Such piling up of individual grievances, when left unaddressed, is going to be the ruling party's bane in elections 2029.
Yes, that is a long way off, and that is also the time for more grievances to get added on to the common man's endless list, from government to government, generation to generation, and election to election.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff.com
