BJP moves to rebuild NDA ahead of 2024

The ruling party’s recent moves in Maharashtra, Bihar, UP and Karnataka show it is looking to broaden its tent.

To understand the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rapid political moves across India this week, think back to 1996. That year, sagging under the weight of a raft of corruption scandals and internal defections, the incumbent Congress went into the polls weakened. This allowed the BJP to vault into pole position, becoming for the first time the single-largest party in the Lok Sabha. With unprecedented success in the heartland, Atal Bihari Vajpayee took oath as prime minister (PM) but quickly found that navigating the quicksand of coalition politics was far trickier than the heat-and-dust of the campaign trail. For 13 days, the party hunted for allies to push it past the majority mark but to no avail, eventually forcing Vajpayee to resign. By the time the United Front government, formed in its stead soon after, wobbled two years later, the party had learnt its lesson. Though the 1998 elections only gave it 20-odd seats more, it stitched together a coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), that the Opposition was unable to match electorally or politically. And though allies had a substantial say in this first iteration of the NDA between 1998 and 2004, it ensured a stable non-Congress government (of course with one blip, when Vajpayee’s government fell by a single vote in 1999, due to the tactics of J Jayalalithaa) for the first time since Independence.

In the past week, the BJP engineered a split in Maharashtra’s largest regional party, the Nationalist Congress Party,(ANI)

Think also back to 2004. That year, riding high on a string of policy successes and positive ratings of the PM, the BJP called for early general elections.

Yet, it ignored quiet moves by the Congress – having slumped to its lowest tally in half a century – that painstakingly stitched together seat-sharing arrangements in state after state. It emerged that feedback from the ground was either flawed or was inadequately addressed. When the results were announced, the Congress was able to spring a double surprise – not only did it do much better than what was expected, but it was also able to leverage its pre-poll legwork into establishing a stable majority coalition, the United Progressive Alliance.

The contrasting examples of these two general elections proved to the BJP the importance of grassroots feedback and coalition building – two connected and intertwined concepts that are driving the party’s current push to recruit allies and expand its footprint across India.

Sample this – in the past week, the BJP engineered a split in Maharashtra’s largest regional party, the Nationalist Congress Party, made overtures to lure the Janata Dal (Secular) into the NDA, reached out Samajwadi Party (SP) ally Om Prakash Rajbhar in Uttar Pradesh (UP), inducted Hindustan Awam Morcha into the NDA, and set off talks about instability within Bihar’s ruling Janata Dal (United). And, it is in talks to get back into the alliance two big parties that it had a bitter falling out with – the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) in Punjab and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh. Even in Telangana, which goes to the polls later this year, there is buzz that the Bharat Rashtra Samithi may keep its distance from the Opposition grouping and keep channels of communication open with the BJP.

Note that these efforts are not limited to regions where the BJP is unsure of its prospects. It includes UP – where the party is in a comfortable position, with the SP struggling to expand its social coalition and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) a shadow of its former self, but continues to focus on the eastern districts with two existing allies and a third in the works, to keep backward communities in its fold – and Maharashtra, where it appears unsure about the prospects of the new Shiv Sena and may be hoping to tide over possible losses with Ajit Pawar, who has an established base in western Maharashtra. And it includes Punjab – where protests around farm laws forced the BJP out of state politics and cost it its oldest ally, the SAD, only for the party to now try and claw its way back – and Andhra Pradesh, where the party has little presence and has held a transactional relationship with the ruling YSR Congress Party.

These seemingly disparate efforts add up to three main takeaways. One, is that the waxing and waning of the NDA, is now part of a pre-election pattern. 2014 gave the BJP the first single-party majority in a generation and an upper hand in dealing with allies, who became supplementary forces. Yet, before the 2019 general elections, the BJP gave in to demands by Nitish Kumar, and brought on board smaller allies to take on the apparently formidable combination of the SP and the BSP. The bigger verdict in 2019 emboldened it to sideline allies further (the SAD and Sena even left) but in the run up to 2024, the party is expanding its base again.

Two, the party appears aware that in India’s currently polarised polity, it will need to maintain its electoral dominance and achieve a full majority. Hence, it is ensuring that it can repeat its impressive performance in large states such as Karnataka (where it won 26 of the state’s 28 seats but where the Congress’s recent landslide victory has raised the prospects of a substantial erosion); Maharashtra (where it won 41 of the state’s 48 seats but where its new ally, Eknath Shinde, is an untested prospect without the backing of the Thackeray legacy) and Bihar (where the coming together of the Mandal giants JD(U) and RJD will almost certainly dent the NDA’s tally of 39 out of 40 seats) while picking up some seats in smaller regions such as Punjab (where it won just one seat) and Andhra Pradesh (where it has no presence).

And three, the expansion of the NDA achieves two important objectives. It puts a spanner in the Opposition camp’s efforts to bring together parties and overcome internal rivalries and ambitions. And by removing certain regional parties from the battlefield, it ensures a more favourable field because, as the past two general elections have shown, it prefers the Congress as an adversary in direct contests (its strike rate drops from the 90s against the national party to the high 60s against state-level outfits).

Of course, this strategy is not without its risks. Top-down alliances aren’t always ideologically compatible and cannot overcome grassroots contradictions, and voters can also be unhappy if parties derided by the BJP as dynastic and corrupt suddenly find a place in the NDA.

But the BJP’s recent moves show that even though its dominance has changed the grammar of Indian politics, the party is working hard to keep its feedback channels robust and keep the option to activate allies open. Keeping the NDA alive as an entity, even if notionally, showed that the party knew it may need others again, and by expanding the tent as elections approach, the party is again exhibiting a certain self-correcting approach that it has demonstrated when the one thing that matters is at stake — elections. As a result, it is not just the opposition anymore that is approaching the Lok Sabha polls as a state-by-state affair. State-level calculations are back at the helm of political dynamics in 2024.