20 December 2012, 03:17 PM IST
Narendra Modi's third-term victory is a tremendous achievement for both Modi and the BJP. That he failed to get a two-thirds majority or that the BJP's tally did not change dramatically from the 2007 figure does not take away from the magnitude of Modi's success. A third term victory is remarkable for any leader. Of course, to put this in perspective, the CPI(M)'s Jyoti Basu in Bengal and the Congress' Sheila Dixit in Delhi have achieved this feat in the past.
Modi's victory in Gujarat is good news for the incumbent UPA government at the Centre, perversely enough. The Samajwadi Party cannot now take the risk of bringing the government down at the Centre before its term ends — that would be seen by its Muslim support base as helping the BJP. The Congress also hopes that a resurgent Modi, who, in all probability, will stake his claim for leadership at the Centre, will help consolidate Muslim voters behind itself. Since BJP president Nitin Gadkair has already declared that the party would not declare a prime ministerial candidate while going into the 2014 general elections, it is likely that rivalry at the BJP's top would be intense and that it would spill over into the public discourse, hurting the BJP's electoral chances to whatever extent such squabbles can. Thus, by reinforcing his popularity in Gujarat and emerging as the BJP's most potent candidate for prime minister, Narendra Modi stands to help the Congress.
If Keshubhai Patel had not divided the pro-Hindutva vote with his rebel party, Modi's tally would have been much higher, no doubt. He could have hoped to match if not exceed old Congress warhorse Madhavsinh Solanki's tally of 149 seats in 1985. But since Keshubhai Patel's rebellion, reportedly with the tacit consent of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, derived from Modi's centralised, authoritarian politics that leaves no space for collaboration with others, and is thus internal to it, there is little point in looking at the number Modi could have won if Keshubhai had not rebelled.
Is it possible to segregate Modi's administrative excellence and pro-growth policies from his Hindutva politics? Does it make sense to claim that Modi won exclusively on a development plank, without any overtones of a communal agenda? It does not.
Consider three leaders, carrying out serious 'development' in three different parts of the world in the 1930s: Hitler in Germany, who achieved near-full employment and 7% plus growth, building the war machine that he intended to use to get Germans some lebensraum (living room) outside Germany, Stalin in Russia, desperately preparing the materiel for an inevitable war with Hitler, and Roosevelt in the US, trying to rebuild the US economy after the Great Depression with his New Deal: new dams, new highways, etc. All of them were carrying out development. But do we see development in the three countries in the same fashion? Ultimately, what differentiated one country's development from another's was what kind of politics it served to legitimise: fascism socialism or capitalism.
Modi's development serves to legitimise the politics of Hindutva, of excluding minorities from the mainstream, of making their security a function of their good conduct, rather than of their citizenship and the rights that devolve from citizenship.
This politics has worked in Gujarat, but this does not mean that this politics will work elsewhere in the country or even in Gujarat indefinitely.
To sum up, it has been a tremendous victory for Modi, the BJP and the politics of Hindutva in Gujarat, but it is no portent of Modi or the BJP replicating such success outside Gujarat.
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What is good for Gujarat is not necessarily good for India
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