The state assembly polls this month in five states across the country have acquired special significance as a kind of semi-final match between the ruling BJP and the recently formed Congress-led INDIA alliance before next year’s Lok Sabha polls.
While in three states Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, it is a direct contest between the two national parties, in Telangana and Mizoram, the Congress is facing ruling regional parties and would score a major political point over the BJP if it were to do well.
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, these elections are an acid test of whether he has been able to carry out of his earlier promise of a Congress mukt Bharat, snuffing out India’s oldest party.
BJP's Congress-style High Command Culture
Five years ago, in the previous round of these elections, the Congress while losing miserably in Telangana and Mizoram had a remarkable windfall in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan sweeping the first and winning close contests in the other two ousting three BJP governments.
But barely a year after that, the BJP managed to snatch back power in Madhya Pradesh, engineering the defection of Congress stalwart Jyotiriditya Scindia with a large number of legislators and for a long while, seemed on the verge of repeating a similar coup in Rajasthan, exploiting the infighting between the state chief minister Ashok Gehlot and his party rival Sachin Pilot.
This time around, the BJP, largely because of a Congress-style high command culture that has seized the party after the ascent to power by Prime Minister Modi and his close aide Home Minister Amit Shah, appears visibly confused and tentative in its approach to the assembly polls in the three states.
The main problem seems to stem from the reluctance of the central leadership to let regional party stalwarts Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, Shivraj Singh Chauhan in Madhya Pradesh, and Vasundhara Raje in Rajasthan, spearhead the BJP poll campaign.
At the same time having suffered from a similar strategy in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh where it lost power to the Congress, there are indications of a rethink in the top BJP hierarchy and last-minute efforts have been made to placate these three leaders.
The Big Difference Between BJP and Congress in Rajasthan, MP, and Chhattisgarh
For instance, in Chhattisgarh, ever since he was routed by the Congress in 2018 the erstwhile three-term chief minister and local pillar of the BJP Raman Singh has been marginalised by the BJP high command and it wasn’t sure whether he would even get a ticket for the assembly polls till the last stages of ticket distribution.
But at the very end, he was given a ticket almost as an afterthought. However, there seems to be no bid to project him as the BJP’s candidate for chief minister if the party wins unlike his Congress counterpart sitting chief minister Bhupesh Baghel.
Similarly, in Madhya Pradesh, another long-serving chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan has been side-lined repeatedly and is not certain of retaining his post should the BJP win. Here again, the central leadership seems to be caught in a dilemma on how to cut Chauhan to size without damaging the party’s prospects in the elections.
What has made this task even more complicated is the waning influence of Jyotiriditya Scindia whose erstwhile loyalists who had defected with him from the Congress to the BJP have been coming back to their original party in a steady procession.
In Rajasthan, which should have been a walkover for the BJP, where the Congress chief minister Ashok Gehlot faces both anti-incumbency and a sulky rival Sachin Pilot, the party is in a quandary over how to diminish the veteran and still influential former chief minister Vasundhara Raje without her sabotaging the polls.
At one point last month, it seemed that the BJP top brass had decided to take the plunge and deny her loyalists tickets for the assembly polls. However, faced with an increasingly rebellious Raje, the central leaders swiftly changed tack and accommodated her candidates in the latter stages of ticket distribution hoping that this would reassure her.
The big difference between the BJP and the Congress in the three states is that the former has pointedly refused to project a regional stalwart as the face of its election campaign and instead asking for votes in the name of Prime Minister Modi whereas the Congress has clearly identified their chief ministerial candidates.
It remains to be seen how this ironic reversal of historical roles between the BJP and the Congress plays out in the elections. But the recent victories of the Congress in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka ousting BJP governments under similar circumstances should worry the saffron party.
And Mizoram and Telangana?
For Prime Minister Modi, the emerging poll scenario in Telangana and Mizoram is also a source of worry even though the BJP itself is a minor player in the two states.
The Congress shows remarkable signs of recovery in Telangana underlined by the large number of leaders from all parties in the state including the BJP are joining it. An unimaginable victory in Telangana or a huge spurt of numbers in the assembly from the motley few the Congress has at present will certainly galvanise the party in the state.
As for Mizoram, despite the BJP's pre-poll bluster that it would win a majority in the state or with regional parties like the ruling Mizo National Front and the Zoram People’s Movement, the electoral scenario is extremely complicated.
There is considerable anger with the BJP among Mizos, who are mostly Christian and share ethnic tribal links with the Kukis in neighbouring Manipur about anti-Christian atrocities by Hindu fundamentalists and the pogroms against Kukis.
To some extent, this anger is also reflected in the disenchantment with the ruling Mizo National Front for not protesting enough with the central government despite belonging to the BJP-led National Democratic Front. The main beneficiaries of the popular mood in Mizoram could be the Congress and the main Opposition party Zoram People’s Movement.
A good performance by the Congress in both Telangana and Mizoram, along with victories in at least two out of the three north Indian states going to the polls, poses a serious threat to Prime Minister Modi’s bid for a third successive term.
Coming after Congress victories in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh this would hugely boost the party’s claim to be the fulcrum of the opposition INDIA alliance, with its motley gaggle of regional parties from across the country as well as provide badly needed credibility of the enterprise to voters in next year’s national election.
(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.)
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