The essential story of this election is that brand Modi with its “teflon coating” of invincibility has been shattered, says Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj K. Jha. He says the NDA today is a coalition of contradictions. Excerpts:
The INDIA bloc and, especially, the RJD fell short of the target it had set for itself in Bihar. What went wrong?
We were expecting at least 20 seats. Our seat tally is below our expectations and we will introspect. If you look closely there are 8 to 10 seats that we lost by a margin of a few thousand votes. We need to compare the margin of our loss in 2024 with the 2019 data and therein lies the story. There may have been regional variations, there are certain regions where we have done extremely well and certain others where our performance was not up to mark. But in each region, our vote share has gone up and new communities have joined us. We are headed in the right direction and you will see the impact in the upcoming Assembly election in the State. And you will appreciate, it was an unequal battle. We had one helicopter and there were days we weren’t sure about fuel for the next day. Most of the candidates didn’t have any money. People fought this election. In 2019, we had only one seat and, today, the alliance has nine seats. But the essential story of this election is that brand Modi with its teflon coating of invincibility has been shattered. We won in spite of the vitriolic campaign run by BJP. The results, therefore, have to be seen in this context.
Tejashwi Yadav at the beginning of the campaign coined the phrase “MY-BAAP” (Muslim, Yadav-Backward, aadhi aabadi (women), agda (forward caste) and the poor, in an effort to cast your net wider beyond your regular vote bank. Did you fail in this endeavour?
No, we did not fail. You might say we didn’t succeed to the extent we expected. So far, booth-wise data is not available, but once the data comes it will illustrate that almost every community has voted for us. The quantum could have been different. And let me tell you, Tejashwi Yadav is not going back from here. He is committed to this path. And that is why you will see, within the Backward castes, new groups have been added to our vote base. We have fielded Dalit candidates in general seats. And these kinds of experiments were not done over a single night. This is going to be part of our DNA and our political strategy going ahead.
Many are comparing the candidate selection of the RJD with that of Samajwadi Party. While the SP fielded only Yadav candidates in five out of the 62 seats they contested, nearly 40% of your candidates were Yadavs. Could you have stitched a better social coalition in terms of candidates?
When success is not as per expectations, such analysis will be made. But you have to remember, the community you referred to has different strengths in Uttar Pradesh and different ones in Bihar. Then there is legacy too… that particular community has been part of our strategy together with other communities. I think this comparison has no merit. The fact of the matter is that in both States a larger social coalition was stitched. In U.P., it delivered better results. In Bihar, there have been regional variations, but in each of the constituencies we are on an upward swing. And this shows that we are relevant and that we are going to impact the political arena much more powerfully in the coming days.
What is the way forward for the INDIA bloc? Do you quietly sit out this term or do you work actively on dislodging the NDA government?
No political party can sit quietly and wait for things to happen in the natural course. We won’t sit quietly because we believe this is a coalition of contradictions. Mr. Narendra Modi is a majoritarian Prime Minister who today has to work without a majority. Can he really contain his majoritarian streak? This will decide the future course of action, not only for us but even for the ones supporting him. The two dominant supporting partners of the government — Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar — do not share the Prime Minister’s communal vision. They don’t believe in destroying institutions or in vendetta politics. In the last ten years, we have seen that these are the pillars on which BJP was built by Mr. Modi and Mr. Amit Shah. Also, I am very glad that the BJP is now talking about “NDA”, which had disappeared from their lexicon in the last ten years. And now it is no longer “Modi sarkar” but “NDA sarkar”. This is a paradigm shift. This is a revival of the collective in politics, which is exactly what we had been campaigning for.
Democracies should never be about an individual. Coalition governments are climatically better suited for Indian conditions.