BJP's obsession with a 'Congress-mukt Bharat' hits a new low in Goa

A conspicuous feature of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 2.0, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has been the attention, energy, and time invested in engineering majorities to form governments in states where electoral success has eluded the party, by stitching up large-scale desertions in the Opposition to get around the anti-defection law. In recent history, the BJP has not won elections in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and some Northeastern states, while in Gujarat it was perilously over the half-way mark. Yet, the BJP is ruling each of these states with rebels from the Congress and regional outfits and with or without its chief minister.

Even by these norms of legislative adventurism and disdain for propriety and conventions, last week’s events in Goa marked a departure in the BJP’s urge to take the “Congress-mukt Bharat” (a Congress-free India) slogan to another level.

The BJP has 20 MLAs in Goa’s 40-member Assembly, reinforced with the support of two legislators from the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) and three Independents. At no point did the MGP and Independents threaten to pull out of the government. Yet, from day one of winning the election in March 2022, the BJP has been fixated on splitting the 11-member Congress. It came close to it when two MLAs, Digambar Kamat and Michael Lobo, started doing business with the BJP and seemed set to whisk away their “loyalists” to the opposite camp. The BJP required eight MLAs to circumvent the anti-defection law but Kamat and Lobo could not garner the support of more than five. Unlike in MP and Karnataka, where it was caught napping, in Goa, the Congress sniffed the game plan, did nifty footwork, and foiled a breach. However, the BJP is holding out. Its minister Nilesh Cabral said: “We can’t be blamed. There must be an internal fight in the Congress. Our government’s in a majority but if anyone wants to come over, it’s their choice.”

Kamat, who was part of a BJP coalition government in 1994 before returning to the Congress, disowned his role, claiming: “I am not aware of anything.” Lobo formerly headed the North Goa BJP unit. Political sources in Panaji said the alleged BJP-Kamat-Lobo enterprise was devised to “unsettle” the Congress in the prelude to the Lok Sabha polls so that in 2024, the BJP could win both the Goa seats. In 2019, the BJP lost South Goa to the Congress and kept North Goa.

Political scientists who follow the BJP closely said such manipulations were aimed not just at bagging an odd seat or two. Sudha Pai, a fellow at the Indian Council of Social Science Research, said: “It is to destroy the Opposition and emerge as the only party that runs the Centre and the states. The target will be one state at a time.” Former political science professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University Zoya Hasan’s take was: “Political parties have changed significantly. It’s hard to explain why Opposition parties go in bulk towards the ruling party except that they are power-driven. There’s no ideology at work.”

While Hasan said the BJP was “not concerned with striking root into the ground” because “unlike most other parties, the BJP is connected to civil society through the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and its own apparatuses”, in the larger states, the party often sussed out potential defectors and their electoral worth before inducting them. So, can artificially devised legislative majorities help a party gain socio-political agency on the ground?

Gujarat is a case in point. In the Assembly polls of 2017, the Congress won 77 seats -- its highest tally since 1995 -- in the 182-member house. The BJP lost 16 seats and was down to 99, which gave it a wafer-thin majority of seven. The BJP was so distressed with the thought of not having a cushion that it poached the Congress, which lost 13 legislators, the latest being Ashwin Kotwal, who had represented Khedbrahma in north Gujarat thrice consecutively. The north is not the BJP’s strong suit but Gujarat sources said that Kotwal, an Adivasi, will campaign outside the region in the Adivasi-strong districts of Dahod and Dang. Prominent among the Congress defectors were Jawahar Chavda, an Ahir leader; Parshottam Sabaria, a Chunvaliya Koli; and CK Raulji, a Kshatriya, all caste leaders.

Gujarat votes in November-December 2022. The spate of crossovers from the Congress saw Dhirubhai Chavda, once close to the late CM Mad­havsinh Solanki and a backward caste Kshatriya, join the BJP last week with his loyalists. As a former Congressman, Chavda headed the Kheda district cooperative committee, a valuable input to the BJP.

However, not everyone in the BJP thinks the defections will necessarily strengthen the party. “They have definitely enfeebled the Congress, which helps us but we won’t win new seats because of them,” a party source said.

In Karnataka, the deluge of deserters were welcomed with open arms once they quit the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) and helped form a BJP government in 2019. While the immediate purpose of reclaiming a government was served, the “migrants”, as the BJP calls the defectors, included caste representatives with localised influence such as S T Somasekhar, a Vokkaliga; and N Nagaraju, H Vishwanath, and Byrathi Basavaraj, all Kurubas, the community over which the former Congress CM Siddharamaiah held sway.

While there are two aspects to the debate over manufactured majorities — short-term and long-term — K K Kailash, political science professor at Hyderabad University, said “for a movement-driven party like the BJP, legislators are generally expendable. Such parties don’t play to the rules of a parliamentary system because their intention is, do we need an Opposition?”