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The right turn: Why BJP’s sweep in 4 out of 5 states is a game-changer for India’s electoral politics
The Gandhis of India’s grand old party Congress fails to hold sway over voters as its successive drubbings show.
Hyper nationalism, hardline Hindutva, and welfare Hindutva model are the three big takeaways in India’s assembly poll results, which were announced on Thursday, as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre is set to sweep four of the five states, including the country’s most populous Uttar Pradesh (UP), which went to the polls between February 10 and March 7.
The elections, which were largely fought on various social platforms amid a ban on campaigning because of the resurgent Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2, which causes the contagious Covid-19, underscored how Indian voters have had the last laugh, and in some cases, perplexed the country’s pollsters.
Arvind Kejriwal’s guts & glory in PunjAAP
The Congress-ruled Punjab is a classic case in point, where the contender Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), under the astute leadership of Delhi Chief Minister (CM) Arvind Kejriwal, a rank outsider in the border state politics, proved to be an electoral tsunami. The AAP’s avalanche of popular support swept away political bigwigs like former CMs such as Congress’s Amarinder Singh and the Shiromani Akali Dal’s (SAD) Parkash Singh Badal and his son and former deputy CM Sukhbir Singh Badal in their pocket boroughs.
Similar fate befell outgoing CM of Punjab — Congress’s Charanjit Singh Channi and the party’s state chief, cricketer-turned-politician Navjyot Singh Sidhu.
On the contrary, Bhagwant Mann’s spectacular political journey, which finds echoes in the embattled sixth President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, from a stand-up comedian to a CM-designate, shows that Indian voters have little patience for non-performance and has thrown their lot behind a newcomer political outfit that had caught the national imagination in Delhi assembly polls in 2013.
The AAP’s Punjab conquest shows obfuscation and whataboutery has little place in India’s politics as the BJP’s electoral juggernaut crushes a fractured opposition in successive assembly polls.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) data shows that the AAP’s vote share in the 117-seat Punjab assembly has been over 40 per cent, where the party that had made its electoral debut five years ago had polled votes in a low single-digit.
BJP makes history in UP
India’s politics has taken a right turn, if the unabated saffron wave in UP is any indication.
The Hindutva outfit, which is all set to retain power for the second successive term and has secured 39 per cent of the votes, is riding high on the new interpretation of India’s secularism and has clearly mastered the art of caste and religion (read Hinduism), which in local parlance stands for 'mandal' and 'kamandal'.
It is noteworthy that no party has come into power consecutively since the 1980s.
The electoral trends show that the UP election was reduced to a binary between the incumbent BJP and the contender Samajwadi Party (SP), while the other two opposition forces — the Bahujan Samaj Party led by Dalit leader Mayawati and a dispirited Congress, which fell back on the charisma of the Gandhi scion, Priyanka Gandhi scion, coming to a cropper.
Did Mayawati strike a deal with the BJP to ensure the corruption cases against her would be dropped? Will she get a plum portfolio in the Narendra Modi-led Indian government at the Centre.
These are the whispers that are doing the rounds in the corridors of power in Delhi.
But the election results clearly show that a less than 2 per cent swing in the votes polled between the BJP and the SP is enough to let the incumbent extend its vice-like grip on power and the challenger putting up a fight that proved to be not good enough in the end.
The ravages of Covid-19 and a plummeting economy has had no impact on UP’s voters who have again reposed their faith in the state’s CM Yogi Adiyanath, a champion of the Hindutva cause. The CM’s alleged divisive politics have been roundly endorsed by most of the voters in India’s Westminster model of first-past-the-post electoral mechanism.
Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur
The BJP is set to retain power in the hill state of Uttarakhand, despite the ruling party changing three CMs in its five-year term amid swirling allegations about how its ‘double-engine’ proved to be a non-starter.
Similarly, in Goa — the country’s tiniest state — the saffron outfit will hold its sway over power, despite newest entrants like the Trinamool Congress and the AAP.
In the true tradition of turncoat politics, the BJP looks set to retain power by backing the winnability quotient at the expense of denying ticket to the deceased CM Manohar Parrikar’s son Utpal.
While in militancy-ravaged Manipur in India’s remote northeast, the BJP continues to ride high and anti-incumbency proved to be a pre-poll rhetoric.
So, what’s next?
Modi’s BJP is set to consolidate in the years to come and looks invincible after Thursday’s election results.
The writing is on the wall for the Congress. In a political earthquake of sorts, the Gandhi family — referred to as the high-command in the party’s inner circles — has lost it's moral authority to be a constructive opposition amid a rump of disgruntled leaders.
Simultaneously, the dissidents’ exit from the party — in dribs and drabs at this point of time — may well turn into an avalanche.
The AAP and the TMC could emerge as an alternative to the Congress in the opposition space.
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However, the BJP still has some more electoral grounds to cover. It’s still a no-show in states such as West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana, where sub-nationalism has been subverting the BJP’s hyper nationalism.
But these citadels, too, will crumble, as these states are ruled by regional leaders, whose lack of succession plan and organic growth of their parties, are likely to prove their undoing, much to the BJP’s advantage that has emerged the world’s largest party under the muscular leadership of Modi and his trusted aide, Amit Shah.
joydeep@khaleejtimes.com
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