Hit, but not politically: Water mission gives BJP planners food for thought

BJP's internal surveys reveal that voters give full credit to Modi government's housing for all scheme, but are indifferent about the Jal Jeevan Mission.

New Delhi: One of the findings of Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) internal surveys in the lead up to election season has the party’s top bosses puzzled: voters give the Modi government full credit for the government’s flagship housing for all scheme, PM Awas Yojana, but are indifferent about the Jal Jeevan Mission, considered a game-changer by analysts and party strategists alike. This is taking up a lot of mind space especially as the party finalises not just the campaign for 2024 but also their strategy in the election-bound states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chattisgarh.

HT Image

HT learns that this was one of the key findings of the booth sashaktikaran abhiyan, or the booth strengthening initiative done, over the past year in 100,000 polling booths, giving BJP strategists information about what voters feel. When asked about what central government schemes they liked, respondents repeatedly brought up the Modi government’s scheme to build homes but there was no buzz about the ambitious piped water initiative to take piped water to every home by 2024. The piped water scheme was announced by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in 2019 soon after the BJP returned to power . Of India’s total of 190.4 million rural households, 122 million or 63.2% have so far been connected with a functioning tap water connection under JJM. At the start of the mission, a baseline survey showed that less than 17% or 32.3 million households had a connection. The Jal Jeevan Mission is one of the largest social infrastructure programmes in the country, which involves installing source-to-household water tap connections.

“We are working it out,” said a senior leader who is part of the decision-making process said about the puzzle the party needs to resolve. “The strange thing is that women-centric schemes are ones that have the maximum impact but even though this scheme targets women who have to travel long distances in order to get water, we are not getting the kind of reaction we expected for it,” added this person who asked not to be named.

Some senior leaders have theories about why this is so. One is that because water is a state subject and the scheme is implemented at the panchayat level, voters are not linking it to the Modi government.

​ “Before 2014, sanitation was never seen as a priority. It is only after PM’s Swachh Bharat or Clean India call, that people realised and beneficiaries’ consciousness grew. So, for the target population to become aware will take some time. That’s why compared to the housing scheme, something which is tangible and gives people a home of their own, the benefits of piped water are less alluring,” said BJP national secretary Anupam Hazra.

The feedback system has also thrown up other details which is helping BJP formulate their strategy. For example, the 2016 scheme to give women below the poverty line cooking gas cylinders called the Ujjwala Yojana, was a vote-getter in 2019 . “Now our feedback shows that people want to know where the money will come for the refill,” the BJP leader cited in the first instance added.

In 2019, and again during the Uttar Pradesh elections last year, the BJP wooed beneficiaries of its welfare schemes. “After Narendra Modi became PM in 2014,a new caste has emerged in the country, that of beneficiaries. This new caste has broken all the previous bindings of caste,” home minister Amit Shah said in an interview to HT last month. Termed “labharatis”, beneficiaries of schemes such as the PM Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana which provided free grain to the poor were acknowledged to be a major factor behind the wins in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Tripura elections.

“Yes, we need to work more on the Jal Jeevan Mission to get the electoral response,” said Hitesh Bajpai, spokesperson of the party’s MP unit. “It is difficult to fight an election on the basis of development issues but we would like to keep that our primary focus. Then we will expose the corrupt governments of the Congress-ruled states.”

Experts called the water programme a “complicated and ambitious” initiative.

“Schemes like Swachh Bharat and PM Awas have been fundamental to the BJP’s growth in the Modi era, but in the early years, the party was careful in how it projected them at the centre stage of its political communication until they were proven as harbingers of a new voting constituency. Jal Jeevan is a much more complicated and ambitious initiative in many ways and it is understandable that the party would be analysing all its aspects carefully as it crafts the nuances of its electoral messaging,” said Nalin Mehta, political scientist and author of The New BJP.