NE elections: BJP’s ease with ‘appeasement’ for votes

There is no dearth of political pundits who are of the view that the Bharatiya Janata Party has learnt the art of navigating in the political waters of the states which have insignificant population of Muslims. Till a few years, back its strength was confined to the Hindi heartland states where Muslims do matter electorally.

In contrast, two of the states which went to poll recently––Nagaland and Meghalaya––are numerically dominated by Christians. Does this suggest that Christians now have no issue whatsoever with the BJP?

The answer lies somewhere else. Christians living in states having overwhelming population of this community may have little problem in accepting the BJP. But that may not be the case where they are in small minority, for example, Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka etc. Even in states like Kerala and Goa, where they form a significant minority, and are skilled and educated, the situation is somewhat different from Nagaland and Meghalaya and even for that matter another Christian-dominated state Mizoram, where assembly elections are due later in 2018.

Christians of Nagaland and Meghalaya are secure in their identity and sheer numbers and know very well that the BJP is incapable of imposing its own cultural agenda on them; thus they have no problem whatsoever in voting for it or even joining it.

As power has its own advantage, regional political leaders—particularly in the North East states where economies are largely dependent on Central government grants—have no real difficulty in embracing the BJP. As it is in power at the Centre, they perhaps have no option either. Thus they will make political deals with BJP to try to extract maximum concessions for their respective states.

This has been the strategy adopted by them in the past too when the Congress used to rule in the Centre. Thus the BJP leaders raised the rhetoric of cultural nationalism in Tripura, but not in Nagaland and Meghalaya.

This is not the case only with the Christian dominated states of North-East. Even the Peoples Democratic Party of Jammu and Kashmir had no problem in forming an alliance government with the BJP––and that too when the situation in the Valley is totally different.

Why only PDP? Even the National Conference of Farooq Abdullah was a constituent of the National Democratic Alliance when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was in power.

Similarly, the BJP is one of the oldest allies of Shiromani Akali Dal and had been sharing power with it in Punjab till last year. This is so in spite of the fact that several Akali Dal leaders were sympathetic towards pro-Khalistan elements.

Some of them even glorify the assassins of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The BJP then forgets that while dealing with the above named parties they too are, in one way or the other, indulging in minority appeasement. Had this not been so, the saffron party would not have offered a free trip to Jerusalem to Christian pilgrims as reported in the media during the election campaign last month. It is ironic that BJP is currently going hammer and tongs against the Congress government in Karnataka, accusing it of minority appeasement.

This is another instance of classic Machiavellian politics in which political parties often indulge.