Terror plank doesn’t pay for BJP

One of the messages from this round of elections is that terrorism is not a partisan issue. Voters refused to hold the ruling dispensation solely responsible for the spate of terror attacks. Nor did they swallow the BJP’s claim that it could beat back this challenge to the country.For the BJP, which turned the continuing terrorist violence into a major campaign plank—with grim advertisements and hoardings coming up after the Mumbai attack—the outcome sounds a caution and should force it to re-think its campaign for the Lok Sabha poll.For the Congress, which was fearing the worst following the Mumbai attack, the results are reassuring—the spurt in terrorist violence has not been stapled onto it. Besides, it won’t be under pressure to take dramatic steps to be seen to counter terror—steps such as hanging convicted terrorist Afzal Guru in a hurry or stepping up the sabre-rattling against Pakistan. Two of the three states that went to the polls after the Mumbai attack have rejected the BJP’s “soft on terror’’ charge against the Congress, with its defeat in Delhi, in particular, marking the failure of the last-minute effort to capitalise on the audacious jihadi attack. After the Mumbai attack, the Congress, save diehard Shiela Dikshit supporters, had virtually given up on Delhi. The BJP’s win in MP cannot be attributed to popular anger against the Congress because of the Mumbai strike. Besides, polling in MP on November 27 had got under way hours before the full impact of the terror strike sank in. While terrorism was a key part of the BJP’s campaign arsenal for all the four states from the very beginning, in the national capital it trumped everything else in the last 48 hours, with the party moving fast to advertise the November 26 attack on Mumbai as validation of its terror campaign theme. It put up hoardings, inserted newspaper ads and sent out lakhs of text messages in the hope that this would make up for the listless campaign the party had run until then. The higher voter turnout in middle-class colonies on polling day was interpreted as the tactic having paid off. The results show it was all self-delusion. While the Rajasthan defeat was caused by multiple local factors, the failure to wrest Delhi from the Congress had, in a very large measure, to do with poor traction of the terror card. The issue would have played well for the BJP here because of a number of factors—frequent terrorist strikes in the city and a sizeable constituency receptive to Hindutva themes, to name only two. Any honest audit by BJP should include a few key questions—did the party appear too eager to cash in on terrorist attacks?