Should the BJP thank the RSS for Haryana?

The BJP’s startling victory this week in the Haryana assembly election is reminiscent of a similar stunt performed in the Madhya Pradesh assembly election last year. None of the opinion and exit polls had seen the Haryana result coming, and very few political analysts thought the BJP had any chance of winning more than 25 of the 90 seats in the Haryana assembly. Instead, it ended up winning 48 seats, almost twice the predicted number.

This time though, the BJP appears to have won not because of Prime Minister Narendra Modi but despite him. The PM had campaigned aggressively and extensively in 2019, addressing as many as 10 rallies and holding several roadshows. The party managed to win just 40 seats and was forced to form a coalition government with Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janata Party. In 2024, Modi addressed only four rallies and not a single roadshow. Yet, the BJP won 48 seats, eight more than last time, while improving its vote share by 3.4 per cent.

The verdict may bolster the PM’s authority within the NDA. Modi has already started touting it as a major achievement, claiming that he still has enough fire power to lead his party to victory. However, the reality may be less rosy, as the Haryana result is  likely to accentuate the internecine fight within the Sangh Parivar.

After the BJP’s below-par performance in the Lok Sabha election, and resultant acrimony, the RSS apparently took the party’s poll campaign into its own hands, micro-managing it through its village- and ward-level committees. A low-key affair that proved highly effective.

It was the RSS that identified candidates, sorted out prickly issues and contributed to campaign themes. Modi took a back seat. Losing would have given him a handle against the RSS, suggesting that Modi is the only guarantee to a poll success. It might even have covered up the BJP’s loss of 62 seats in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year (compelling it to form a coalition government with the TDP and JDU).

Advantage RSS

The Haryana result has effectively tilted the balance of power in favour of the RSS, which has already started micro-managing the BJP’s election campaigns in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi, where elections  are due over the next four months.

In a recent meeting of  BJP leaders in Ranthambhore, the RSS, led by its joint general secretary Arun Kumar, deliberated on the strategy for the coming Delhi assembly elections. The two-day meeting (25 and 26 September) was attended by the BJP’s national organising secretary B.L. Santhosh and the Delhi BJP president Virendra Sachdeva, among others. The RSS was represented by ‘kshetra pracharak’ Jatin Kumar and ‘prant pracharak’ Vishal. It has been holding similar state-level and district-level meetings in Maharashtra and Jharkhand as well.

This is a departure from the RSS’s hands-off attitude during the general election. Following the Lok Sabha results, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had taken a number of potshots at PM Modi. Even now there is no love lost between the two. Bhagwat is still as critical of Modi’s style of working as he was earlier. In the RSS scheme of things, the organisation is supreme, not the individual, whoever that might be.

The RSS thus took umbrage to a Modi-centric campaign and his grandiose self-identification as a ‘non-biological’ person sent by  God. BJP president J.P. Nadda’s statement that the BJP no longer needed the RSS, being all grown up and self-sufficient, further widened the schism between the parent and child organisations.

Jats vs. non-Jats

Since 2014, when the BJP’s tally jumped from four to 47 seats, the RSS strategy for Haryana was to create a non-Jat vote bank for itself. Jats constitute about 27 per cent of the state’s population. Most of Haryana chief ministers have come from this dominant caste, leading to the notion that no party can form the government in Haryana by ignoring the community.

The BJP’s appointment of Manohar Lal Khattar, a Punjabi Khatri, as chief minister in 2014 did not go down well. Khattar was an excellent organiser but never popular among the masses, which is one reason the BJP’s tally came down in the 2019 polls. In March 2024, Khattar was replaced by Nayab Singh Saini, an OBC, as CM.

The party focused on securing the OBC vote, which makes up about 40 per cent of the population. Saini, who was previously state president of the party, was more approachable than Khattar. The RSS did all the spadework among the masses to neutralise Congress’s kisan-jawan-pehelwan (farmer, solder, wrestler) narrative, dubbing the frustrations of the combine as Jat-centric issues.

The success of this strategy is reflected in the claim that the BJP managed to win over 75 per cent of the non-Jat votes. The BJP also targeted Scheduled Caste (SC) voters, particularly through women’s self-help groups in villages.

While Congress leaders like Bhupinder Hooda pushed for their own candidates, the BJP fielded 60 fresh faces to combat anti-incumbency. In contrast, the Congress re-nominated 17 candidates who had lost earlier, including its state president, Udai Bhan.

The BJP also attacked by claiming that the Congress would once again appoint Hooda as chief minister, which led to the feeling that non-Jats would be further alienated, with Hooda’s stronghold Rohtak becoming the locus of all new jobs and opportunities.

The Dalits who had voted en masse for the Congress during this year’s Lok Sabha elections, felt estranged by the perception of a Hooda-Kumari Selja rift. Kumari Selja’s premature claim to the CM’s chair during the campaign did not help the party. The entry of rebel Congress candidates and smaller parties like AAP, BSP and Azad Samaj Party also weaned some non-BJP voters, especially Dalits, away from the Congress.

The assembly results in Haryana may be a moment of respite for PM Modi and his allies and a setback to the opposition, especially the Congress. An emboldened BJP is likely to assert itself in seat distribution talks with its allies for the upcoming Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly elections. But Modi will still have to reckon with the RSS’s opposition to his self-centred, self-aggrandising politics as it pushes to evolve a collective leadership within the BJP.