A crucial factor is also that the pivot of the coalition is a now-politically weakened party, which has had to accommodate a number of leaders responsible for toppling its government less than six months ago ...
In some ways, the BJP is a victim of its own success. That success, it bears stressing, is modest. The party called the elections to secure a firm, resounding mandate. But it failed to exceed its tally of seats. More vitally, it suffered a 2.5 per cent decrease in its national vote. This happened despite all the presumed advantages it enjoyed ... The trick in these elections lay in tactful alliance-building. The Congress was a non-starter here, and the BJP a master of shrewdness and resilience. But that meant that the BJP won only a hundred seats on its own steam; the rest came from intelligent alliances.
A second root of the BJP's success lies in its near- total consolidation of upper caste support, perhaps unprecedented for any party, especially in the Hindi belt and western India ... But as the party's upper caste vote has burgeoned, its support from other castes, especially OBCs, has shrunk. The further skewing of the BJP's social base means it can now aspire even less to command the strength the Congress once did, and hence come to power on its own. Even at its pre-1977 non-peak performance, the Congress commanded 35 per cent-plus of the national vote. The BJP's percentage now is just 23 ...
The BJP has succeeded in creating a system apparently dominated by two coalitions. But this is far cry from a bipolar or two- party system. India's two biggest parties command a falling vote-share, now a little over one-half. At least one of them (the BJP) is not ideologically dominant within its own parliamentary terrain. And their volatile allies cannot promote systemic durability. The BJP ... hardly set the real political agenda.
The BJP's successes ... are circumscribed by countervailing factors. They do not add up to a strong forward thrust, especially given the party's considerably reduced weight within the NDA. Where the BJP has handsomely succeeded is in two areas. First, in equating the "trident" (mandir-Article 370-uniform civil code) agenda with Hindutva, and then distancing itself from it. This is a sleight of hand. In reality, the party has in no way altered its central programmatic perspective of Hindu primacy or "cultural nationalism", of which the "trident" is only one expression, some others being an equation of Indianness with the dominant majority's culture and nationalism. The BJP is thus consciously following a. three-track policy: a central majoritarian perspective, ambiguity over the "trident" and the limited agenda of the NDA manifesto, Its greatest success lies in getting its allies to hold it answerable for only the last.
Second, the BJP has seized on economic neo-liberalism as its hallmark - to win support from privileged classes here and abroad ...
The BJP's allies could not be happy with ... being passive spectators to its three-track approach. But within NDA power equations, they will find it hard to "moderate" the BJP without threatening to quit the NDA altogether. For, unlike six months ago, the core of a viable alternative does not exist today. The Congress, with 112 seats, cannot furnish it. A new pole of attraction can only emerge once the Centre-Left space expands with social churning and secular realignment, or after the NDA's regional components start centrifuging away, like the TDP. Till then, the NDA will work not because it is structurally, inherently, more stable than its predecessor or the United Front, but by default ... (Source: The Times of India, 20 October, 1999)
