Enthused by its success in the northeast, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have painted a rosy picture of the saffron party’s future going into the Lok Sabha elections in 2024.
While the BJP has managed to hold on to power in Tripura, Nagaland and Meghalaya, it failed to emerge as a significant force in the three northeastern states.
It’s the smaller regional parties, which stole the show, a signal that the people in the northeast are more worried about their regional issues than about BJP’s headline-grabbing achievements in the country.
Congratulating the BJP cadre for the party’s win, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that it was the party’s hard work that “Lotus was blooming” across the nation.
But is that really the case?
Journalist-author and political analyst Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay says the BJP has created hype about winning all three states. “In Meghalaya, where the poll threw up a hung assembly, the BJP won just two seats. Their alliance partner, the National People’s Party, struggled for four days to put together a majority. The state governor invited them to take oath but that was a fairly questionable decision at a time when on paper Conrad Sangma did not have a majority with him.”
Tripura is the only state where the BJP has a decisive majority. But there again its vote share has declined from 2018. The BJP benefitted in 2018 by striking an alliance with the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT).
But this time by contesting the polls on its own, the party’s vote share declined by 5 or 6 per cent. So it is not a ‘spectacular victory’ of the BJP. It is a well-managed narrative to project to the rest of the country that the BJP has won in three states.
In the 2018 assembly elections, the BJP-IPFT alliance ended the 25-year-long rule of the Left Front. The BJP won 36 seats, including 10 ST reserved constituencies, while the IPFT bagged eight seats. The 2013 elections saw both the BJP and the IPFT winning zero seats.
Of the 119 seats for which elections were conducted in Meghalaya and Nagaland, regional forces won 83 seats, or close to 70 per cent of the seats. From the remaining 36 seats, 12 seats in Nagaland were won by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas), Republican Party of India (Athawale) and Janata Dal (United).
The three northeastern states are the first of nine states to have assembly polls in 2023, which will set the tone for the 2024 general elections. But will the poll results in these three states have a bearing on six more state elections due later this year, besides the 2024 Lok Sabha battle.
Political analysts don’t think so as politics in the northeast has a different template from the rest of the country. There will be more clarity in January-February next year, they observe.
But the importance of regional parties cannot be underestimated.
The regional parties have always been significant right from the time the Congress was challenged in 1977. From then onwards, regional parties have always been an important component of the Indian politics and their importance only grew in the 1990s. However, their significance somewhat diminished after 2014.
The BJP never really cared for the regional parties except when it benefits the party to align with them. They try striking tactical alliances with smaller parties because it enables them to add to their electoral arithmetic. But thereafter in governance, it does not really pay much regard to the aspirations of the regional parties in any policy formation of the government.
It is for this reason that several important regional parties like the Akali Dal and the Shiv Sena have left the NDA . The biggest and oldest alliance partners are no longer with the BJP. Analysts state that regional parties will play an important role, but it is too early to say how exactly and what is going to be the arrangement between various parties.
In the 2019 general elections, Hindi heartland states wholeheartedly backed the party. The BJP realises that regions other than the Hindi heartland will be crucial in deciding the BJP’s fortunes if the people’s support for the BJP in these Hindi heartland states dwindles in the coming elections.
While the BJP may have managed to get a foothold in the power play in the region that sends 25 MPs to the Lok Sabha, questions remain whether the saffron party has really made any strides besides striking the right alliances. The BJP should ignore it at its own peril.