Elections Round-up: BJP Dominant but Opposition Must Not Roll Over and Die

The overall results have demonstrated the internal resilience of the Sangh Parivar when it acts in unison.

While the NDA’s landslide victory in Maharashtra and the ease with which the INDIA bloc retained Jharkhand have hogged the headlines, the results of 46 assembly bypolls across the country held together tell their own story of the state of Indian politics today.

The most important takeaway from these bypolls is from the country’s most populous and politically crucial state, Uttar Pradesh, in which, not too long ago, the ruling BJP was stunned by the Samajwadi Party in the Lok Sabha elections, with the former winning only 33/80 seats.

Winning seven out of the nine assembly bypolls is a huge comeback by the BJP, underscoring the political heft of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and that of the state BJP unit when it sorts out internal differences and works in collaboration with the party’s ideological mentor and electoral buttress, the RSS.

There is little doubt that after its dismal performance in the Lok Sabha polls, the BJP’s central leadership, as well as the ever-triumphalist duo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, were humbled into a far more collaborative, if not conciliatory, relationship with Yogi Adityanath as well as the RSS ahead of the assembly bypolls. The bypolls were given top priority with everyone realising that if the BJP started badly sliding in Uttar Pradesh, the party’s hold over the country would become increasingly shaky, particularly in a Lok Sabha where it is well short of a clear majority of its own.

As for the Samajwadi party, which had shown great promise in the Lok Sabha polls, its leader Akhilesh Yadav appeared to have underestimated the BJP’s ability to reinvent itself and crawl back into the game. It is clear that the Yadav chieftain is still far from attaining the political acumen of his father Mulayam Singh Yadav. Look at his party’s baffling rout in the Muslim majority assembly constituency of Kundarka, which should have been in the Samajwadi Party’s bag.

This shows the perils of taking for granted the palpable and justified antipathy of the Muslim minority towards the BJP as a blanket guarantee for electoral victory.

While the BJP will no doubt be relieved at setting its house in order in Uttar Pradesh, it cannot but be distressed at the hammering it has taken in the hands of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the six bypolls held in West Bengal. This was the first electoral test of the feisty chief minister after enduring months of a campaign against her by both political opponents and the media, spearheaded by the BJP, for being personally responsible for the horrendous rape and murder of a woman doctor in a Kolkata hospital several months ago.

Mamata Banerjee and her party apparatus have shown that despite the hundreds of protests and demonstrations against her, they failed to dent the popular support for her that was evident in the Lok Sabha polls as well.

The results speak for themselves. The victory margin of the TMC candidates was huge: two of them won by more than 1,30,000 votes, massive in assembly election terms, and its lowest win margin was by 28,168 votes in Madarihat, a seat that was with the BJP for the last eight years.

The BJP, which has spent so much time and money over the past decade to oust Mamata, appeared to be nowhere in the picture, showing why the party still has a long way to go before it can realise its dream of conquering West Bengal.

As for the Congress, the results present a mixed bag.

There was good news from the South, with Priyanka Gandhi's massive victory in her debut to the Lok Sabha from Wayanad in Kerala, a contest that she won by a record margin of more than 4,00,000 votes. Again, it showed that the BJP has failed to make much headway even against the Congress when faced with strong local leaders, like Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar, and in Kerala, where it is unable to cross the political firewall created by the United Democratic Front and Left Democratic Front.

In Rajasthan, however, the Congress was humiliated, finishing third in as many as four constituencies, allowing the BJP to win five out of the seven assembly bypolls. The party also lost in the sole assembly bypoll in Chhattisgarh but put up a slightly better fight in Madhya Pradesh where it defeated a BJP cabinet minister, and significantly reduced the victory margin of the BJP candidate standing from former CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan’s constituency.

For Prime Minister Modi and the BJP, with the NDA winning not just the prestigious state of Maharashtra but also bagging 26 out of the 46 assembly bypolls, along with a huge comeback in Uttar Pradesh, and a clean sweep in Bihar and the Northeast, it will be a welcome reprieve from the question mark that hung over the regime after it got clearly weakened during the Lok Sabha polls.

It has demonstrated the internal resilience of the Sangh Parivar when it acts in unison, quietly working on the ground without solely depending on the pyrotechnics of a supreme leader.

Nevertheless, this is no reason for the Opposition to roll over and die. As shown by Heman Soren in Jharkhand, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, and the Karnataka Congress leaders, it is possible to fight the Delhi Sultanate and its cohorts across various states through sound grassroots politics, not ideological posturing or parliamentary rhetoric.

Most importantly, Rahul Gandhi and other Opposition leaders need to recognise that the fading appeal of Prime Minister Modi as an invincible wizard after a decade, is not enough to ensure victory because he may well be the tip of a saffron iceberg far more difficult to dislodge.

(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)