Aditya Sinha: Surfing the Modi wave one last time

Citizens in Siliguri protest against the budget on February 2 2018 PicAFPDelhi is abuzz with talk of an early Parliamentary election Even Congress veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad is telling his colleagues to prepare for a November 2018 election instead of in May 2019 when the current Lok Sabha lapses The buzz is that Assembly polls in Mizoram Chattisgarh Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh would be held along with the parliamentary poll The Union Budget presented last week supports this speculation The blowout suffered by the BJP in the Rajasthan bypolls is being extrapolated to predict a twothirds majority win for the Congress in the next Assembly poll and the best way to minimise the damage is to link it to the Parliamentary election and hope that local issues get subsumed by a campaign centered around Prime Minister Narendra ModiHavent Modi and his party chief Amit Shah learned the lesson of 2004 when AB Vajpayee was against his will hustled by the late Pramod Mahajan into an early election that he lost Modi and Shahs immunity to once bitten twice shy stems from the rural distress that has gripped large swathes of India Modi had promised to double agrarian income by 2022 but instead has taken things backwards No wonder the BJP lost the recent byelections and barely scraped home in Modis home state Gujarat He and Shah are under no illusion that they will repeat the parliamentary bumper crop of 2014In Modis and Shahs calculations they must strike while the Opposition is disunited Congress chief Rahul Gandhi experienced a political resurgence during the Gujarat Assembly campaign and he has learned valuable lessons about delegation in Rajasthan but to defeat the BJP he and the rest of the Opposition need to figure out the tricky business of making common cause Things stirred recently with a dinner hosted by Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar and then a meeting hosted by Sonia Gandhi in her capacity as UPA chairperson From these events its clear that the senior leadership in the nonCongress parties need time to get used to dealing with Rahul These unity moves will gather momentum only in April post Holi etcAnd with a new leader as the pivot unity moves will naturally encounter speedbumps several regional parties like the Trinamool Congress and the DMK have stayed aloof from such gatherings Modi and Shah calculate that their best chance lays in going into battle before the Opposition gets its act together their job was half done when Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar returned to the NDA fold However they have to act fast lest NDA constituents like the Shiv Sena or the Telugu Desam jump ship as they have threatenedA sinister factor in Modis and Shahs thinking is the threat within the BJP itself In 2014 BJP senior citizen LK Advani had hoped to become prime minister despite Modi having led the campaign from the front His calculation was that if the BJP did not get a majority then the allies would not agree to the 2002sullied Modi as the NDA candidate and he himself would slip through Advani is no longer politically relevant but there are several leaders younger than him who are Modis contemporaries and are ambitious They hold important posts in the government Relevantly they will be more acceptable to the BJPs allies and may even win the support of regional parties that have stayed aloof Modi knows that if the BJP wins only 200 seats or so he would be the allies last choice It is imperative that to stave off an alternative power centre within Modi and Shah maximise the partys number of seats and thus the logic of early Parliamentary pollsThis does not take into account the possibility that the new voters may overwhelmingly prefer the Oppositions younger leadership to the tired old faces of Modi and Shah and that middleoftheroad voters that chose Modi in 2014 may now experience buyers regret The argument that the wave that swept Modi into power might sweep him out is not an outlandish one Rajasthan proved that no matter how much you let the fringe hijack public consciousness with their antiPadmaavat threats and violence it may not sway a voting population that has already decided to teach the powers that be a lesson Perhaps demonetisation endeared Modi to many poor UP voters last year in the belief that he had stuck it to the rich but now even Modi does not bank on it given that he begs voters not to judge him on that alone Indians are shrewd and see that the more things change the more they remain the same For them Modi no longer represents a break from the establishment even if Rahul is less of a break hes at least fresh Modi is now the establishment and antiincumbency will dictate the timing of the next Parliamentary electionAditya Sinhas crime novel The CEO Who Lost His Head is available now He tweets autumnshade Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Mumbai news current affairs from Mumbai local news crime news and breaking headlines hereDownload the new midday Android and iOS apps to 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