DECODING THE J’KHAND VOTE

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (Jmm)-led alliance has secured a clear majority in the eastern state The JMM has recorded its best-ever performance and emerged as the single-largest party with 30 MLAS The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’S tally has come down from 37 in 2014 to 25, a decline that can be attributed to 3 cascading factors

NATIONAL VERSUS LOCAL

The Jharkhand results are in keeping with the trend of voters differentiating between national and local elections The Bjp-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) swept the state in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, winning 63 out of the 81 assembly

SCHEDULED TRIBE VOTE CEMENTED

When the BJP decided that Raghubar Das would be the CM for Jharkhand in 2014, he was the first non-st person to hold that post since the state was carved out of Bihar in 2000 Das’s loss and the fact that the JMM, a party with a predominantly ST base, recorded its best ever performance in the state may lead to an inference that it is ST anger which did the BJP in However, the BJP also fared badly in general seats compared to the 2014 assembly elections The JMM, on the other hand, improved its performance in general, SC reserved and ST reserved seats The biggest gains for the JMM alliance have come in the ST reserve seats, with the JMM and the Congress winning 25 out of 28 ST seats This shows that the ST versus non-st contradiction in the state was muted in these elections

Why has the BJP fared worse in Jharkhand than it did in Haryana and Maharashtra? This question has become much easier to answer after Raghubar Das, the BJP chief minister in the state, himself lost his Jamshedpur East seat Das lost to Saryu Roy, a BJP veteran, who was denied a ticket and expelled from the party The BJP state president, Laxman Giluwa, too, lost from Chakradharpur

The loss of the two most important state level leaders of the BJP constituencies (ACS) in the state (helping it win 12 of 14 Lok Sabha seats) The BJP alone won 57 ACS in the 2019 Lok Sabha, which has halved in the assembly elections This is the same pattern which unfolded in Maharashtra and Haryana

STRONG ANTI-INCUMBENCY IN THE STATE

shows the magnitude of anti-incumbency in Jharkhand To be sure, this anti-incumbency is not entirely surprising The Csds-lokniti post-poll survey conducted during the 2019 LS polls, highlighted the fact that voters had a significantly poorer opinion of the BJP state government compared to the central government That the BJP decided to have Das as its chief ministerial candidate, even at the cost of antagonising its own leaders such as Roy, only seems to have added to the problem