Hindustan Times

Dhrubo Jyoti

Dipankar Ghose

In an era of scams, the primary opposition finds a new face. There's a battle on the borders. A new strongman emerges.

Scandal, airstrikes, farm plans: 5 key moments

<h2 style="text-align:center;">The scams</h2><p>The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) won an impressive, if somewhat unexpected victory, in the 2009 assembly election, with the Congress crossing the 200-seat mark in the Lok Sabha for the first time in more than a decade.</p><p>Within months, the sheen of that victory was gone as a deluge of scandals and corruption scams threatened to inundate the union government. There were allegations of misappropriation of funds and undue favour around a host of big-ticket projects: the building of infrastructure ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the allocation of coal blocks and 2G spectrum.</p>

<p>The UPA found itself hamstrung and in what many analysts called a state of policy paralysis. The anti-corruption agitation launched in 2011 by activist Anna Hazare intensified the sense that the party had turned a dark corner. It soon became clear that a turning point was coming, for the country.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">A new face</h2><p>It seems almost absurd now, but there was a time, about eight months before the 2014 election, when there was a sense of deep uncertainty even within the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), about whether Narendra Modi would really be picked as its prime ministerial candidate.</p><p>His detractors, led by the veteran LK Advani, argued vehemently against the elevation of the then chief minister of Gujarat. There was even opposition to him being appointed chief of the national campaign, a move that came in June 2013.</p>

<p>Eventually, Modi’s obvious popularity, and the way it energised the party’s troops on the ground, won. In September 2013, party chief Rajnath Singh named Modi the party’s PM candidate, at a press conference that Advani chose, at the last minute, to skip. For the party, of course, it turned out to be the right move.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Strikes on both sides</h2><p>On the afternoon of February 14, 2019, a convoy carrying paramilitary personnel was blown up by a car laden with explosives, in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district. It was the worst attack on security forces in the erstwhile state since the dawn of militancy. Forty personnel died. Two weeks later, India carried out airstrikes against what was referred to as a terror training camp across the border, in Pakistan’s Balakot, prompting a stand-off with Islamabad and the first dogfight between the two nuclear-armed countries in decades.</p>

<p>The escalation in tensions was a major theme ahead of the 2019 general election in April-May. National security became a key campaign plank for the incumbent BJP and its prime minister, Modi. The Pulwama strike, though its impact was never quantified, positioned him as a leader who knew how to hit back, a narrative that contributed to the 2019 win.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">The mega state</h2><p>In 2014, on the back of a nationwide wave, the BJP picked up 71 of the 80 seats on offer in Uttar Pradesh, with its allies winning another two, rounding off a performance not seen in the increasingly fragmented politics of the state since the Congress heyday.</p>

<p>Its 2019 performance — 62 of the 80 seats — was perhaps even more impressive, given that the party was now facing the mathematically formidable alliance of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. In both these victories, Modi’s personal appeal and the party’s painstaking effort to stitch together a coalition of non-dominant backward communities worked wonders.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">The PM Kisan scheme</h2><p>In the winter of 2018, it appeared that everything was going right for the Congress. The main opposition party had first outfoxed the BJP by forming an alliance government in the key southern state of Karnataka, then won three fiercely fought elections in India’s heartland: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. More importantly, it appeared close to arriving at a coherent national electoral strategy hinged on one factor that seemed to stretch across the length of the country and could sway the coming general election: Farmer rage.</p>

<p>This would be the thing that brought the BJP down, it was said. Then, in the interim budget presented in February 2019, the government announced a direct-cash-transfer scheme for farmers. It was called the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana, or simply PM-KISAN. It offered income support for low-income farmers. PM-KISAN worked to assuage farm anger and blunted one of the Opposition’s most potent pre-poll platforms.</p><p>In the national polls in 2019, the BJP swept every state it had lost in the second half of 2018. The party also appeared to have learnt a lesson. The second term of Modi as PM would be dominated by a steady succession of new social-welfare schemes, each with its own acronym and direct link with his identity as prime minister. The farm issue would only come back to roil his government in 2020, as protests erupted in north India over three contentious laws that were eventually scrapped.</p>