BJP to Leverage OROP to Win Support Ahead of Bihar Assembly Polls

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BJP to Leverage OROP to Win Support Ahead of Bihar Assembly Polls

By Deepak Parvatiyar

September 9, 2015

5.00/5 (100.00%) 2 votes

The biggest gain that the BJP seems to have derived out of One Rank One Pension (OROP) is to successfully send across the message that it has delivered on its promise. The party has been quick to pat itself for OROP, saying that the Narendra Modi government had the “courage” to implement the longstanding scheme.

This is significant in the wake of the impending assembly elections in Bihar. Any further delay in the announcement of the OROP scheme would have meant that the government had to withhold it once the dates for Bihar elections were announced by the Election Commission. This would have given an opportunity to the likes of Janata Dal (United) leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his ally (Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo) Lalu Yadav – two formidable opponents of the BJP in Bihar, to exploit it to target their bete noir, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. On the election front, Nitish and Lalu are already taking on the PM directly and are on a spree to sell their “jumla babu” adjective for Modi to the masses. They have been making concerted efforts to prove that the PM only makes promises but never fulfills them. Hence, had the government failed to announce the scheme, Nitish and Lalu would have rubbed it in against the Prime Minister.

Now OROP offers the BJP an opportunity to score some points in the popular perception war, particularly in Bihar. Little surprise, therefore, that the party is heaping lavish praise on PM Modi for the latest initiative, “Prime Minister Narendra Modi deserves all the compliments for the same. He took personal interest…”

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However, OROP’s impact is not yet visible on the surface in poll bound Bihar. The reason could be that the number jawans from Bihar in the armed forces is not as high as compared to those from states such as Punjab, Haryana, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh. But still OROP, along with the minority upper caste votes, could help the Bharatiya Janata Party in closely contested seats.

It may be pointed out here that in the state elections in 2010, there were seven seats where the margin of victory was less than 1000 votes. In these seats, the BJP had won four as against the JD(U)’s two and the RJD’s one. In the nine seats, where the victory margin was less than 2000 votes, the BJP had won only one seat while in the eight seats where the margin was less than 3,000 votes, it could win only three seats. The party had performed poorly respectively winning just one out of six, and two out of 10 seats in constituencies where victory margin was less than 4,000 and 5,000. In such constituencies where the margin was less than 10,000 votes, the JD(U) and RJD combine again had the upper hand respectively, bagging 17 and 5 seats as against the BJP’s 18.

Besides, in the 2014 general elections, even as the National Democratic Alliance had won 31 out of Bihar’s 40 seats, it had polled less (38.8 per cent of votes cast) than what Laloo’s RJD (20.1 per cent), Nitish’s JD(U) (at 15.8 per cent) and the Congress (at 8.4 per cent) had polled individually.

What also weighs behind Modi’s consideration for OROP before the Bihar polls could be the fact that in the Assembly by-elections in the state in August 2014, the Nitish-Lalu grand alliance had won six out of ten seats while the BJP could win the four remaining seats. What was significant was the turnout for the by-elections. At around 44 per cent, the turnout was considerably less than what the related parliamentary constituencies had registered in the Lok Sabha elections only a few months ago.

As it is, the 24 per cent upper caste voters in Bihar find themselves marginalised in Nitish-Lalu’s OBC-dominated politics in the state and are expected to vote for the BJP in upcoming elections. OROP’s significance could also be gauged from the fact that the number of Army personnel from Bihar had increased from 3.5 per cent to 11 per cent by 2011 after the Centre fixed the quota of recruitment in Army, population-wise from each state. (This is significant considering the Indian army has a strength of over 1.13 million). While postal ballot system and proxy voting method are there for armed forces personnel to exercise their franchise, consequently, the number of ex-servicemen, too, has increased in the state as most of them preferred to settle in Bihar after their superannuation. Besides, even as the Bihar Regiment of Indian Army with its headquarter at Danapur near Patna has recruits from Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra as well as the Adivasi tribals from Jharkhand and Odisha, they are allowed to register as voters and exercise their franchise at their stations of posting on condition of having been posted there for three years.

No doubt therefore that the BJP now has extra ammunition to have all its guns blazing — praising Modi for jo kaha woh kiya (did what he promised) and taking on the party’s political rivals with confidence even in evenly-keeled battles.

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