VIEWPOINT
AMITABH SHUKLA
After a series of disappointing
results in bye-elections across the country, the BJP is now in an introspection
mood. It has now come to realise that the “wave politics” was temporary and has
come to an end. For the party rank and file, it was time again for grass roots
politics, hard work and a new strategy to win back the voters.
The immediate task in hand not
only for the BJP but also its rivals is obviously the Assembly polls in Haryana
and Maharashtra next month, followed by Jammu & Kashmir and Jharkhand where
polls could be held in January. Delhi
too faces another round of polls anytime now as there is little possibility of
anyone forming a government without engineering defections.
But what went wrong for the BJP
after Narendra Modi was swept to power in a wave election in May 2014? Was the
party a victim of over-confidence or fell down due to a new political
arithmetic shaping up in north India ?
Take for example Uttar Pradesh
where the party performed rather badly in the Assembly polls. The seats which
it lost were vacated by its MPs after winning the May 2014 polls. The party
lost seven of the 11 seats it held in the bypolls, clearly suggesting that the
ground situation had changed drastically within months of sweeping the State in
May. In fact, NDA constituent Apna Dal also lost Rohania Assembly seat in Varanasi
parliamentary constituency, represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But all is not lost for the BJP
in UP as the bypoll results cannot be seen in isolation from the existence of
multi polar politics in the biggest State of the country. Ask even those
opposed to the BJP and they will admit that had the Bahujan Samaj Party
contested the bypolls, the results would have been entirely different. As it
was a straight contest between Samajwadi Party and the BJP, the ruling party at
the Centre had to face reverses. The vote bank of the BSP perhaps shifted en
masse to the SP, there was a consolidation of the minority votes for the SP and
issues of love-jehad failed to ignite the imagination of the voters.
The message to the BJP was loud
and clear. If the index of Opposition unity is high, it would find the going
tough. Though in UP it was not a case of Opposition unity as the BSP decided
not to contest as part of an electoral strategy but in Bihar
a month earlier it was strong Opposition unity which proved to be the nemesis
of the BJP. In Bihar , the RJD, JD(U) and the Congress
came together on a common platform for the bypolls and won six of the ten
Assembly seats.
Clearly in Bihar
and UP, the altered political arithmetic following the Lok Sabha polls led to
the defeat of the BJP. In the Lok Sabha polls, if the votes of the RJD, JD(U)
and the Congress are added, it was more than that of the BJP. Though polls
cannot be entirely fought on fictional arithmetic, it does help gauze the mood
of the people and suggest the respective strengths and weaknesses of the
parties and their support base in different caste groups. In Bihar, it remains
to be seen if the three parties stick together for the next year’s Assembly
polls given their divergent support base, mutual bickering, aspiration for the
Chief Minister’s post and claims and counter-claims of their leaders.
In Uttar Pradesh, it would indeed
be a wishful thinking to imagine the BSP and the SP coming together. Given
their acrimonious past and bitter rivalry, this cannot materialise in the near
future. But in a hypothetical situation if the votes they poll is added up
along with that of the Congress, a new arithmetic emerges and surely the BJP
cannot be found anywhere in this scenario. The BJP can thrive in UP and Bihar
only in a multi-cornered contest. It remains to be seen whether it can
consolidate the vote base which it got in the Lok Sabha polls and increase it
further. That would be a formidable challenge and the BJP would have to take it
head on if it wants to make governments in the two key States of north India .
The bypolls nevertheless
confirmed that May 2014 was a wave or rather a tsunami and it has subsided in
three months. The party’s disappointing performance in the Assembly
by-elections in Bihar, Uttarakhand, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh last month and
now in UP and Rajasthan clearly indicate that the party needs to re-strategise
and re-group and not take the May victory as ever-lasting.
In Rajasthan, another “clean
sweep State”, the Congress wrested three seats from the BJP, indicating that
its revival was only a matter of time. Of the four seats the BJP won only one
even though all the seats were vacated by the newly- elected MPs. The
score-line of 3-1 in
favour of the Congress was indeed disappointing for the BJP and its leaders
conceded it saying local factors contributed in the defeat.
Last month, the BJP lost all
three seats where bypolls were held in Uttarakhand, suggesting the slackening
grip of the party in a State where it had won all the five seats in a clean
sweep in the Lok Sabha polls. Something indeed went wrong somewhere for the
party in the hill State and it must have found out the reasons by now and may
be taking corrective steps.
As the by-polls indicated that
the BJP was vulnerable, the alliance partners struck when they thought the iron
was hot. In Maharashtra , the Shiv Sena is refusing to
budge from its stand and concede extra seats to the BJP. The bargaining
strength of the BJP has gone down considerably in the State where it did
exceedingly well in the Lok Sabha polls, winning 23 of the 26 seats it
contested. Clearly, the ambition to emerge as the senior alliance partner in Maharashtra
has been the biggest casualty of the bypolls for the BJP. It cannot dump the
Shiv Sena for the MNS as this would give a walkover to the Congress-NCP
alliance and would have to be contented with what has been offered on plate.
In the other poll-bound State of Haryana ,
the alliance with the Haryana Janhit Congress is over as the BJP did not want
to concede more than a dozen seats to Kuldeep Bishnoi. Even as the party
workers hailed the break-up of the alliance, the by-poll results dampened their
spirit. This was a State where they thought the BJP was heading to form the
Government after winning seven of the eight seats it contested in the Lok Sabha
polls. But given the new political reality after the by-polls, where local
factors and issues decided the results and not a pan-Indian factor or a
personality, there is an element of subdued caution amongst the BJP workers and
leaders now. A section of the party is already talking about possible post-poll
alliance with the Indian National Lok Dal. The party knows that the going is
not as easy as in the Lok Sabha polls given the sub-regional issues at play,
and the importance of strong candidates along with caste permutations and
combinations in multi-cornered contests where the margin of victory is expected
to be in a few hundreds. (September
22, 2014 )
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