The BJP needs to sweep the remaining three phases of voting to be able to get close to its performance in 2014; this tagging has given its workers another talking point.
Nearly
70 per cent of the Lok
Sabha polls is over with polling completed in 373 of 542 Lok
Sabha seats (Polling for Vellore seat will take place later).
However, elections have now entered their most crucial juncture since
much of the Hindi heartland will go to polls over the remaining three
phases.
If
it has to return to power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would
need to maximize its gains in the remaining 170-seats that will go to
polls on May 6, 12 and 19. The BJP had accomplished this in 2014 when
it swept the Hindi heartland.
Until
now, the BJP’s election campaign has focused on the “decisive”
leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and stoking “nationalism”
sentiment centred on the Pulwama terror attack and Balakot terror
strikes.
Increasingly,
however, the BJP’s
discourse has shown diminishing returns on the ground with local
issues coming back to dominate, including questions being asked about
the performances of incumbent BJP MPs.
For
example, in Uttar Pradesh, Pulwama and Balakot gave BJP’s core
support base a reason to continue to keep their faith with Modi.
However, enough people are also asking inconvenient questions on the
security failure that had led to Pulawama, and why the BJP leadership
contradicted each other in their claims about the numbers killed in
the Balakot strike.
It
is also common to find voters who believe Modi government announced
demonetisation on November 8, 2016, primarily to win the Uttar
Pradesh Assembly polls, and view the party’s current discourse
around nationalism through the prism of it seeking potential
electoral gains in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.
It
is in this context that the BJP will use the tagging of
Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood
Azhar as a UN designated terrorist as an achievement of its
policy of “zero tolerance” against terrorism. It will be the
BJP’s counter to the opposition’s narrative of the sundry
“failures” of the Modi government, particularly in tackling job
losses and farm distress, and Congress party’s promise of ‘Nyay’,
or minimum income guarantee to the poorest 20 per cent.
In
the next three phases, 21-seats of Bihar, 41 of UP, 4 of Himachal
Pradesh, 11 of Jharkhand, 23 of Madhya Pradesh, 13 of Punjab, 10 of
Haryana, 1 of Chandigarh, 12 of Rajasthan, 24 of West Bengal and 7 of
Delhi go to polls. Apart from Bengal and Punjab, the BJP had swept
all other states in 2014.
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