BJP will need more than PM Modi’s charm to win upcoming Lok Sabha Elections

As there is hardly any Narendra Modi wave this time, the importance of candidates as well as regional parties have increased.

This is one reason as to why the Bharatiya Janata Party is taking so long to finalize the names of their candidates from all over the country. As the party cannot take the risk of putting up any Tom, Dick and Harry, it burnt so much midnight oil to come out with the list. The Prime Minister, according to reports, himself sat in the meeting till 2:00 AM on March 17. Later on the same day party chief Amit Shah held a long meeting. This was happening when the Congress has already released its fourth list of candidates.

The saffron party is planning to drop some important names. And some others have been shifted to different constituency. Union ministers like Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharati had, for reasons best known to them, already opted out of the contest. They have done so notwithstanding the fact that they are not old enough to be ‘elevated’ to the Marg Darshak Mandal.

A sizeable section of the media may be busy sketching a larger than life picture of Modi to highlight the fact that he would prevail over his rivals.

But since there is little hope for a Presidential type of election in the parliamentary form of government, the fight will be for each and every constituency. And it is on this account that the BJP is finding itself in a difficult situation across the country, even in the strong bastion of Gujarat. This is a significant departure from 2014.

The media is overlooking this fact. It committed the same mistake in 2004 and on several other occasions in the state Assembly elections.

In the similar way the BJP, unlike in the last election, is relying heavily on the regional alliance partners. It is not that in 2014 it did not go for alliance.

While in the last election, BJP helped several of the smaller NDA constituents to win. For example the Apna Dal, Lok Janshakti Party, Rashtriya Lok Samata Party etc would never have performed so well then.

This time the saffron party is depending heavily on those very parties.

That is why the saffron party once again went into an alliance with the Asom Gana Parishad and accepted its condition on the Citizenship Amendments Bill.

In Bihar it gave up 13 seats on which it contested the last time and agreed to accommodate Janata Dal United and that too on its own terms. Similar is the situation in Maharashtra where it finally conceded to the demands of the Shiv Sena, which had throughout the last five years been in a rebellious mood.

The picture is more or less same in many other states.

The biggest problem for the BJP this time is that it cannot trust these parties for too long. In different post poll situations these parties can easily switch sides.

All these factor are having its impact on the rank and file of the cadres, who are not putting forward their best foot in the election campaign.

There is no Chai Pei Charcha at various nooks and corners of different cities and town; the RSS cadres are not fanning deep into the interiors of the countryside as in 2014. They are just relying on the speeches of Narendra Modi and the social media campaign.