In BJP’S worries, boost for the Opposition Rivals joining hands poses new test Congress ready to play second fiddle, for UP’S ruling party, admit leaders says Modi’s popularity is dropping
The results are the people’s mandate against four years of Modi rule and the beginning of the end of the BJP empire. The writing on the wall is clear. The BJP’S exit and success of the Congress... are guaranteed. PRAMOD TIWARI, Congress leader
NEWDELHI: By the standards it has set since the assembly elections in late 2013, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is certain to be disappointed with the results to the latest round of bypolls.
Of the four Lok Sabha seats and the 10 assembly seats at stake, the BJP and its allies won two of the first and only one of the second kind. More significantly, it lost the Kairana Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, continuing its dismal record in the state over the past few months.
The BJP has got a reason to worry in Uttar Pradesh, where it won 71 of 80 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 (the number increased to 73 with allies winning two seats), and where growing unity among opposition seems to have brought its juggernaut to a halt yet again. Two party leaders who asked not to be identified admitted that they were worried.
The BJP said bypolls are influenced by local issues. “We lost by-polls in Uttar Pradesh in 2014, but won the assembly elections (in 2017) with a huge margin. The Congress has been designated as a peripheral player in present day politics. It is cheerleading for regional parties,” BJP spokesman Sambit Patra said.
The Congress did win more assembly seats on Thursday than the BJP (4 compared to 1) but it did not contest three of the Lok Sabha elections, opting instead to support candidates of other parties. Patra said that in 2019, people would vote for the PM – wherein P stands for ‘performance’ and M for ‘Mehnat’ (work), according to him.
Only a few months ago, in UP, an alliance of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) wrested Gorakhpur and Phulpur – the parliamentary seats of chief minister Yogi Adityanath and deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya – from the BJP. “Losing 10 of 11 Lok Sabha by-elections should worry BJP, anti incumbency has set in. It won states due to anti incumbency against Congress governments,” Sanjay Kumar, director of the centre for the study of developing societies, wrote on Twitter, referring to all the by-elections to parliamentary seats since 2014.
The BJP’S defeat, party insiders admit, has several messages for the party. The most important is the fact that it is possible for Jats and Muslims to vote for a common candidate in western Uttar Pradesh which could spell trouble for the BJP in the 2019 general election wherein it will largely depend on consolidation of Hindu votes to sail through. That turns the logic of the party’s famed social engineering on its head.
One of the two leaders cited in the first instance, a BJP MP from Uttar Pradesh said: “More than Jat-muslim unity, shift of the non-jatav voters away from us is a cause of worry. They voted for us in the last two elections.” Dalits account for 21.2% and Muslims 19.2% of Uttar Pradesh’s population. “The arithmetic was against us,” the MP said.
The second, a BJP office bearer argued that it was the undeclared support of the Bahujan Samaj Party that may have titled the balance in the favour of the RLD-SP candidate.
The two BJP leaders said aggressive backward mobilization, an extensive outreach towards non-jatav Dalits and careful selection of candidates was the way forward if the party has to retain its hold over country’s most populous state.
The second message of the by-poll, according to the BJP leaders is that the party has a real challenge when faced with a united opposition and a nagging ally. Interestingly, this was evident even in the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency in Maharashtra which the BJP retained by defeating its ally, Shiv Sena. NEW DELHI: It’s defeat in the Palghar Lok Sabha constituency in Maharashtra — the only one of the four Parliamentary constituencies it contested in the latest round of by-polls — did not deter the Congress from celebrating the outcome of the elections, especially the grand alliance’s victory over the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a Lok Sabha seat in country’s politically most important state of Uttar Pradesh.
Coming days after the Congress moved in quickly to offer a lead role to the Janata Dal (Secular) in government formation in Karnataka, the results have further strengthened the party’s assessment that the BJP can be defeated only if the opposition parties come together.
Out of the four Lok Sabha by-elections, the opposition was victorious in two. The Nationalist Congress Party won Bhandara-gondiya in Maharashtra and the Rashtriya Lok Dal defeated the BJP in Kairana in Uttar Pradesh.
The Congress retained RR Nagar assembly seat in Karnataka and the Ampati seat in Meghalaya, and snatched the Shahkot seat from the Akali Dal in Punjab. Its ally Jharkhand Mukti Morcha won the Silli and Gomia assembly seats in Jharkhand and the Rashtriya Janata Dal won the Jokihat assembly seat in Bihar.
The Congress claimed the results prove that the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government has declined. “The results are the people’s mandate against four years of Modi rule and the beginning of the end of the BJP empire. The writing on the wall is clear. The BJP’S exit and success of the Congress and its allies are guaranteed,” Congress leader Pramod Tiwari told reporters.
The Congress is willing to play second, even third fiddle in Uttar Pradesh to ensure that the BJP does not repeat its 2014 or 2017 performance in 2019 in the state that sends the highest number of lawmakers, 80, to the 543-member Lok Sabha. In 2014, the BJP won 71 of the Lok Sabha seats in the state. In the 2017 assembly elections, it won 325 of 403 seats in a landslide win.
“United we will defeat the divisive forces. The big message from the by-elections is that all of us have to bury our differences and come together to defeat the BJP,” Congress leader RPN Singh said.
However, the victory of RLD candidate Tabassum Hasan in Kairana has weakened the Congress party’s bargaining power in terms of seat-sharing in Uttar Pradesh in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. It had already been on the back foot after a poor show in the Lok Sabha by-elections in Gorakhpur and Phulphur earlier this year.
The grand old party will now have to accept the number of seats given to it by the major coalition partners, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, analysts said. . “The trend continues and the results are significant in terms of building a momentum for a united opposition against the BJP. At the same time, the compulsions for the Congress to go for alliances are increasing with every election,” said Delhi-based political analyst N Bhaskara Rao.