2024 For BJP In 2 Halves: Ditched The Over-Confidence Bullet, Made Huge Comebacks

Last Updated:January 02, 2025, 12:30 IST

The BJP ended the year with a photo-finish Maharashtra win where a neck-and-neck battle turned into a one-sided affair with the party alone winning 132 seats

Haryana and Maharashtra were supposed to be BJP’s Achilles’ heel; instead, they’ve become its crown jewels. (PTI)

TS Eliot, in one of his iconic poems ‘The Hollow Men’, where he portrays a bleak hopeless world after World War 1, said, “This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper." As we stare into a new year and look back into the year gone by that has been nothing less than dramatic for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), it is safe to say, that the year may have started with a whimper but ended with a bang and unlike Elliot’s doomsday predictions of gloom and hopelessness, the BJP has only cemented its position better than it was when 2024 began.

This year can be a year of two halves for the BJP — of ditching the bullet of over-confidence and overcoming it with strategical hard work, precision and discipline in the second half that not only delivered them states no exit polls predicted like in Haryana but also sweeping new states like Odisha, ending decades of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) rule. The magnificent Maharashtra win has been the icing on the cake before the year ended.

But there’s no denying that the year did not start this easy. When asked about BJP’s Lok Sabha tally, Home Minister Amit Shah recently commented that it has been more than Congress’s 2014, 2019 and 2024 tallies. Regardless of Shah making fun of the Congress now, on the afternoon of June 4 — the day of the result — the BJP felt it narrowly dodged the bullet with 240.

BJP STARTED WITH A ‘WHIMPER’

240 was a sharp decline of 63 seats in terms of BJP’s 2019 performance, to begin with. However, the decline seemed bigger and sharper because of BJP’s ‘400 par’ target which many BJP leaders started believing after repeating endlessly. Hence, the decline wasn’t just seen in terms of BJP’s 2019 performance but how BJP projected it would win 400 plus. After a bull run for a day in the market riding on exit polls suggesting BJP sweeping India, the market crashed on 240. The sentiment of a weakened Centre made the market wonder about the possibility of any further reforms in the next five years.

The BJP, on every election result evening, invites Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who delivers a speech to the cadres and leaders alike. That evening wasn’t any different either. He tried to sound enthusiastic and reason that the entire INDIA bloc tally is less than BJPs 240. But what was eye-catching and was a first since 2014, was the background of Prime Minister Modi that read Democratic Alliance (NDA) instead of the BJP, in spite of the venue being the BJP headquarters. The government was now heavily dependent on two allies — Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Janata Dal United (JDU).

When the Budget session came, the submissive BJP was visible. For key allies like the JDU and the TDP, many of their key wishlist costing a bomb were okayed without much question in this year’s annual budget by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. She, in her budget speech, announced Rs 15,000 crore financial support for Andhra Pradesh to build its capital city, Amaravati. The FM promised the Hyderabad-Bangalore industrial corridor and Vishakhapatnam-Chennai industrial corridor to name a few. Appeasing another key ally, JDU, in this budget, Sitharaman, announced several schemes for Bihar. The schemes are a part of a larger plan titled “Purvodaya", which covers the all-round development of eastern states including Bihar.

Both TDP and JDU, a month ahead of the budget during pre-budget consultations, asked for about $6 billion in funds for their home states, pressuring the Centre to raise spending, reported Reuters citing a document. This only shows the strain the Centre was under during that tenure.

When the going gets tough, even the small allies like the Lok Janshakti Party (RV) started taking opposing stands to that of the BJP over thorny issues like lateral entry and Waqf reforms.

BUT IT ENDED WITH A ‘BANG’

The first major taste of success this year that the BJP received was from Odisha — a complete sweep, ending Naveen Patnaik’s 24 years of rule making him the second-longest-serving chief minister of any Indian state. While it is pertinent to point out that the Odisha Assembly election result came along with the Lok Sabha elections, it deserves a separate mention for the saffron surge in Odisha this time — the BJP stormed into the BJD bastions in coastal, central and southern Odisha.

But the real success, the proverbial turnaround that can be called BJP’s come back which unsettled the equation with its allies and cemented its lost position of authority, was the Haryana election. The Congress was certain it was coming to power, social media pundits were certain about it and a vast section of exit polls were predicting in that direction. But four BJP leaders — Dharmendra Pradhan, Satish Poonia, Biplab Deb and Surendra Singh Nagar quietly worked on the ground falling back to conventional campaigning while a Congress’s divided house delivered BJP its first big success — third consecutive win despite farmer unrest and jat anger. Rahul Gandhi’s Congress, which increased its tally from 47 to 99 in the Lok Sabha and took a very aggressive stance on a variety of issues, had to back off. It was the BJP’s first win.

The BJP’s other win was the Jammu and Kashmir elections. Omar Abdullah’s Conference may have won the election, but it was the BJP’s best performance ever in J&K — winning 29 seats.

The BJP ended the year with a photo-finish Maharashtra win where a neck-and-neck battle turned into a one-sided affair with the BJP alone winning 132 seats — a sharp jump of 25 per cent. Perceived to be PM Modi’s blue-eyed boy, Devendra Fadnavis is back at the helm at Maharashtra again. After some reported hiccups and disenchantments at being demoted, Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde is now also content with portfolios or so it seems. NCP Ajit Pawar is happy that Shinde hasn’t got power beyond his party tally. Finally, everyone is looking to Amit Shah for any arbitration.

Essentially, the BJP is back in the position where it was in the beginning of 2024 — of command and authority.

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News politics 2024 For BJP In 2 Halves: Ditched The Over-Confidence Bullet, Made Huge Comebacks