The once-confident BJP is finding it difficult to find its feet after the disastrous show in the Assembly elections. The soul search has been both bitter and acrimonious.
Begusarai MP Bhola Singh blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party chief Amit Shah for the loss. Party MPs such as Shatrughan Sinha have made the recovery process even more difficult. It looks like the party is falling apart. Meetings to take feedback from party workers have seen angry exchange of words. "You decided to field an outsider in our constituency, so we decided to defeat the candidate," an angry BJP worker told Sushil Kumar Modi at one such meeting.
The party is striving to revive itself while the Lalu-Nitish bromance continues.
"Right now, we are holding block-level party workers' meet. It is natural that many are angry. But we are going to overcome this sense of defeatism and work as a strong opposition. There will be no dearth of issues as long as the Congress and the RJD are in the government. We have already announced agitations in support of total prohibition and the government's failure to announce bonus in foodgrain procurement for farmers," said Modi, while talking to The Telegraph.
The defeat may look humiliating when taking into account the number of seats, but in actual vote numbers, it is not as disappointing, BJP leaders pointed out. "The NDA got 1.3 crore votes. The BJP, which contested 167 seats, bagged over 90 lakh votes on its own. The average number of votes per Assembly seat of the BJP will be around 60,000," pointed out another senior leader, stressing that the space of the Opposition traditionally gets bigger and bigger as anti-incumbency grips the state government. "In other words, we are expecting governance to slip," he said.
However, even the BJP knows that winning elections in Bihar is about caste configuration. Their mathematics went horribly wrong. "The number of votes we got from the Kushwahas, the Dalits and the Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 slipped in the Assembly polls in 2015. We have to ensure that they get back to our fold and strongly consolidate the votes belonging to these sections in our favour," said the BJP leader.
The party is going to hold functions in memory of EBC, Dalit and Kushwaha icons in a major way in 2016. It has already started to woo members of the EBC by replacing Nand Kishore Yadav with Prem Kumar as Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. Prem hails from an EBC community.
The BJP leaders are putting up a brave face. But they realise that the climb up is going to be difficult. Their allies - the LJP, the RLSP and the HAMS - have failed to deliver.
"The party must rely on its own strength than depending on its allies," said another senior party leader, pointing out that the allies won only five of the 86 seats they contested. The party's "overdependence" on the upper castes also needs to be revised.
With the Congress making a revival, the BJP has to worry that the upper castes may be returning towards "their old home" - the Congress - as is reflected from the fact that upper castes voted for Congress candidates in several Assembly seats.
In 2016, the party will spend considerable time and efforts to revitalise workers at the grassroots level.
However, the biggest hurdle is throwing a leadership, which can take on and match the political standing of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar. So far, its known leaders - Sushil Kumar Modi, Nand Kishore Yadav and others - have failed to live up to voters' expectations and match the Lalu-Nitish aura.
"But for now, the central leaders' focus on Bihar is over. In the next three years, we will hope that a leader or at least a few of our leaders grow in stature," said a BJP leader wistfully.
