United Oppn gives BJP a big bypoll shocker
Opposition wins 10 Assembly and 2 LS seats; saffron party loses Kairana, bags only 1 Assembly seat in U’Khand
Tremors were felt in the saffron camp as an united Opposition decimated the BJP in the high-profile Kairana Lok Sabha constituency and Noorpur Assembly seat in Uttar Pradesh. Of the four Lok Sabha bypolls, the BJP won only one — Palghar in Maharashtra. Similarly, of the 11 Assembly seats that went to the polls, the BJP could score only a lone victory in the Tharali Assembly seat in Uttarakhand.
While the Congress finished third in the Palghar bypoll, the party managed to win four Assembly seats, including Shahkot (Punjab), Palus Kadegaon (Maharashtra), Ampati (Meghalaya) and R.R. Nagar (Karnataka). At Palus Kadegaon, the Congress candidate won unopposed as the BJP withdrew its candidate. It may be recalled that since 2014, the BJP has managed to win only four of the 23 Lok Sabha bypolls that have been held.
The Janata Dal (United), which had crossed over to the NDA, on Thursday cautioned the BJP against the united power of the Opposition parties. JD(U) spokesperson K.C. Tyagi told the media that the NDA allies were “feeling isolated”.
In Kairana, Tabassum Hasan, the RLD candidate supported by the entire Opposition, including the Samajwadi Party, BSP and Congress, won the highstakes Lok Sabha battle, and became the first Muslim MP from Uttar Pradesh since the 2014 general election. She trounced the BJP’s Mriganka Singh by a margin of 44,618 votes.
It was ultimately the win of “Ganna” over “Jinnah” in Kairana! The crucial bypoll results close on the heels of Gorakhpur and Phulpur not merely indicated that a united Opposition could emerge as a major hurdle for the saffron juggernaut, but the coming together of Jats and Muslims after the Muzffarnagar riots sent out a signal that the electorate was in a mood to reject attempts to polarise votes along communal lines. Things were also not looking up for Nitish Kumar in Bihar as the JD(U) lost the Jokihat Assembly bypoll to Lalu Yadav’s RJD.
Though the results of the bypolls in four parliamentary and 10 Assembly seats were announced on Thursday, the Kairana verdict remained the centre of attention as it was a lab test for the combined Opposition in a given state or a given constituency versus BJP on the other side.
Faced with a formidable Opposition in the combination of the BSP, SP and RLD, the BJP pulled out all stops, including the infamous invocation of Jinnah by Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath, which was countered ably by RLD leader Jayant Chowdhary, who said: “Ganna (sugarcane) mattered in the sugar belt of western UP, not Jinnah”.
Like in Gorakhpur and Phulpur, the victory for the Opposition candidate in Kairana was also a decisive one with a sizeable margin. The BJP had won the Kairana parliamentary seat by a margin of 2.4 lakhs in 2014.
It might be recalled that the key to BJP wins in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as well as the 2017 Assembly polls had been the Jats, who backed the party to the core. Thus the coming together of Jats and Muslims in Kairana spells doom for the BJP as it shows that the politics of polarisation might not work in the run-up to the 2019 general election.