Haryana Polls: BJP & the urgent need to make state governments perform

"It’s not about Jat votes, Muslim votes and Dalit votes anymore. Put against development and effective welfare schemes, caste based voting would lose any day. Governments have to perform to win elections. Haryana has given a scare. Delhi could just prove the point"

Haryana Chief Minister, Manohar Lal Khattar boards a helicopter to Delhi in the morning of the counting day. He has been summoned by Amit Shah. Several exit polls have been proven wrong. Haryana is heading toward a hung assembly, a result that is disheartening for BJP considering its humungous victory in the Lok Sabha polls. Not even a year after the national triumph, what exactly is causing breaks in BJP’s powerful juggernaut? Has Manohar Lal Khattar been summoned too late?

There is a reason why BJP was overly confident about Haryana and Maharashtra –lack of a credible opposition. And similarly, there is a reason why BJP is slightly wary about the impending polls in Delhi. The opposition in Delhi is quite strong in Aam Aadmi Party. The reason AAP manages to be a strong contender for a second term is exactly the reason why BJP has lost a lot of ground in Haryana. While, the Arvind Kejriwal government has won hearts with his public-oriented schemes, the Khattar government clearly lacked innovation or simply put the will to perform.

The question here again is, was the national leadership too late in reprimanding the state leadership of Haryana? What was the overconfidence about? People clearly are now differentiating between the Lok Sabha polls and state assembly polls. You just cannot win an election entirely based upon your performance in the centre. The public has increasingly started limiting their vision to their immediate leaders. BJP manages to be a strong opponent in states like Haryana where the local leadership is archaic and incompetent is just because of the aura of Narendra Modi. But for how long one can expect people to vote for Modi and ignore the inefficiency of the representatives at state level?

It’s not about Jat votes, Muslim votes and Dalit votes anymore. Put against development and effective welfare schemes, caste based voting would lose any day. Governments have to perform to win elections. Haryana has given a scare. Delhi could just prove the point.

Amit Shah and company need to understand that people these days are carefully analysing the work done by the government. Gone are the times of one-party loyalty. And gone for good, it makes representatives more answerable. With the strong wind of Narendra Modi behind him, all that Khattar needed was something to show as his work from five years. But he barely had anything.

The time has come for BJP to transform local structures by bringing in people who are hungry to perform. Winning elections is not always about those few months of campaigning, it’s more about the perception you have created in people’s mind in your tenure. The hunger for change and the willingness to work that is quite visible at the centre has to be replicated in state leadership. And the way things are going it appears impossible with old horses that just refuse to run a different course.

Get the work done. Use those five years as an opportunity. Bring in innovation. Care for people. Elevate standard of living. Let your work speak for you. Do all that and one day you wouldn’t even need Narendra Modi to campaign for you.