Kushan Mitra
Modern wars are usually large, multi-theatre events with tens of smaller battles taking place across different fronts. A victory or defeat in one battle may not signify much and could have little to do with the eventual outcome of the war even in the short-term. This is a gross simplification but this is in essence the difference between a tactical and strategic battle. However, a huge number of tactical victories, even in different fronts can lead to a strategic victory. Tactical battles are usually fought by local commanders with an understanding of the overall strategic picture but not beholden to it and sometimes even indifferent to it. For the most part large strategic moves are few and far between in wars because commanders have seen the diminishing returns from such moves, a lesson learnt after the horrors of the Western Front and Gallipoli in World War 1. That isn’t to say they don’t happen, Israel’s pre-emptive airstrike in 1967 was a strategic move aimed at crippling the enemy. Yet, the next war in that region the October War of 1973 was immensely tactical highlighted by Ariel Sharon’s masterstroke at the end. Using huge megaton class warheads on cities or an entire front is strategic. Using smaller kiloton weapons to attack particular battlefields is
tactical.
The reason we have diverted to wars is to draw a metaphor with the Gujarat elections.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the Narendra Modi and Amit Shah duo fights massive strategic wars, carpet bombing the enemy with weapons of mass destruction, fighting a massive image war and effectively defeating the enemy before the battle even begins. Just think of the 2014 General Elections and the Uttar Pradesh elections, these were fought with massive nuclear strikes on the enemy. And paid the BJP huge dividends. But Gujarat was different. For one, it was the first time the BJP fought a defensive war, Goa aside, since 2014. The BJP had become accustomed to storming citadels, but could it keep up in what was effectively its home state, where a large part of the ‘young’ India that Narendra Modi likes to reference had never known a party other than the BJP, ‘Fortress Gujarat’ was crumbling and ripe for the taking. But the BJP unused to anything but all-out attack, being on the defensive against a clutch of young local leaders and a population yearning for change was not something that they were used to.
However, it appears the Congress, which was the BJP’s only opposition in Gujarat realised that it would not win in an all-out strategic war with the BJP. This was not like the Cold war where the principle of ‘MAD’ or Mutually Assured Destruction applied, the Congress was a far weaker force than the BJP and it had learnt that lesson the hard way in state after state, the BJP outgunned the Congress and in Narendra Modi they had the ‘Tsar Bomba’, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. This was a war that Rahul Gandhi could not hope to win. Or could he? Could a series of well-thought out tactical battles while conserving resources and staying out of the limelight win them this war? Because that is the war that Rahul Gandhi and the Indian National Congress chose to fight. They were the Viet Cong to the United States in the Vietnam War, they were in electoral terms a Donald Trump to the Hillary Clinton machine.
There is much talk of the Congress hiring the services of US analytical firm Cambridge Analytica whose services the Trump Campaign and the Brexit Campaign successfully used. It is unlikely that their main contributions were in these elections, but looking at the margins of victory it appears fairly clear that the Congress fought this election on the lines of a General Election in the United Kingdom and United States. In the UK and US, both parties have a list of ‘targets’ and a list of safe seats, they realise that unless there is a massive ‘wave’ or crippling controversy of some sort, safe seats will almost never change hands. It is therefore better to pour limited resources, and the limiting resource is rarely money but the time of star
campaigners and outside volunteers to do door-to-door campaigning in those ‘target’ or marginal seats.
The skill in tactical electioneering is realising that elections, particularly first past the post elections by their very nature are not fair. Unless one can figure out a German-style combined direct and indirect electoral process that would work as a replacement. Unfortunately, as Germany is proving right now, a system that condemns a nation to coalition after coalition will fail as well. The biggest realisation of this is that not every voter is equal and not to chase the wasted margin. Sure, the BJP won close to 50 percent of the popular vote, but had the vote been distributed better they could have won 90 per cent of the seats. Indeed, the BJP could easily have suffered a Hillary-conundrum, where they won the popular vote by a substantial margin and lost the election because the opponent was cleverer. While the Congress won several seats by very small margins they also lost over 20 seats by very small margins, margins that combined are less than half of Vijay Rupani’s victory margin on his seat.
Donald Trump deployed his resources smartly, in Florida, a pivotal state he went all-out but he also went to several states in America’s Rust belt which were democratic for a long time — states like Pennsylvania and Michigan that no-one thought he could flip and states that Clinton’s strategic bombing of Trump’s base in other states ignored.
In the Brexit campaign, which was a pure yes-no election, the Brexit campaign ignored London and stayed under the media’s radar. Similarly, Rahul Gandhi played a series of clever tactical battles and chose his allies carefully and attacked the BJP fortress through a series of poorly defended weak points. He might not have been able to capture the fort, as the BJP’s citadel of urban seats provided them with just enough reserves to win the war, but the fort was breached.
This is not a strategy that will work for Rahul or the Congress in Karnataka, where they are the defenders against an army skilled at attack. But the lessons from Gujarat 2017 could well apply to March-April 2019, a BJP defeat, much like Gujarat seems unlikely as of today and the BJP will likely use the tried and tested nuclear option of deploying Narendra Modi ten places at once, a smart election fought by the Congress could make 2019 a lot more interesting than expected. Then again, the BJP’s greatest skill under Modi and Shah is their ability to learn. They learned their lessons after Bihar and maybe the greatest lesson that their home state will teach them is how to win 2019.
