Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at the fag end of his two terms in power, has begun scouting around the states where assembly polls are shortly due. On Thursday, he launched projects worth Rs 5,000 crore in Rajasthan. Two days ago, he was in Nizamabad, Telangana, another poll-bound state, to declare his developmental support of over Rs 8,000 crore for the state. Modi would present himself in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram too — days before the EC releases the election schedule — and make similar announcements as is his wont before every election. The Parliament polls are also a call away, where Modi would lead the BJP for the third time in a row to seek the people’s mandate. This would look ludicrous. Questions arise as to why he waited so long to initiate these projects and why at the end of the term(s), and should he rather not be seeking votes on the basis of his and others’ performance in the past 10 years.
The Prime Minister, admittedly, is the strongest in the political spectrum when it comes to oratory. He demonstrated it in ample measure in 2014 and ousted the Congress-led UPA from power by flying around the country. Neither Sonia Gandhi nor Rahul Gandhi nor the other discredited heavyweights in the form of regional satraps could stage a matching performance. In the 2019 polls too, even as Modi failed to implement several of his promises of 2014, he raised the anti-Pakistan feelings via Balakot and won the polls again. There was neither a wave in favour of Modi and the BJP nor against them at that time. As of now, a similar scenario persists. While the Modi government did well on certain fronts and brought development of the highways in several states, it failed to act on multiple fronts to set right the persistent wrongs. Modi played safe in several matters, evident also in the failed farm reform initiatives and in checking the large-scale corruption across the country though no one accused Modi personally of being corrupt. Not yet at least. At the same time, recent reports suggested huge corruption in the massive spend for highway development across the country.
Modi might hesitate to lead the assembly poll campaign from the front this time in the five poll-bound states. He and home minister Amit Shah learnt a bitter lesson in the last West Bengal assembly polls. No Modi magic worked there despite the repeated rounds of campaigning by Modi and Shah, who were seen by the electorate as “outsiders” while their own Didi won the polls hands down. This was repeated in Karnataka too. Big talks alone will no longer help the BJP win elections. What they did or did not do is more important.
