By Ranjit Bhushan
The poll buzz is getting shriller as the clock to the general elections 2024 starts ticking. The Narendra Modi government is favourite to emerge trumps, say most opinion polls and political commentators. They predict a third term for the Modi-led NDA, albeit with a reduced number of parliamentary seats.
The national capital, however, is the epicentre of much political speculation, none more significant than whether the five crucial assembly elections this year could be clubbed with the Lok Sabha polls?
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram will go to polls between late 2023 to early 2024. All of them are considered bellwether states; the first three for being indicative of trends in the Hindi heartland, the fourth for being an important listening post in south India and the last as a weathercock for the highly troubled northeast.
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The point is whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi, widely regarded as a politician with his fingers on the pulse, is going to take a chance by holding earlier-than-scheduled elections or complete his full term before dissolving the Lok Sabha.
The tenure of the seventeenth Lok Sabha is scheduled to end on June 16, 2024, the previous elections having been held in April–May 2019.
There is a significant precedent here. The Atal Behari Vajpayee government had in 2004 announced general elections six months ahead of schedule, hoping to capitalise on economic growth, and Vajpayee’s peace initiative with Pakistan, as its campaign centrepiece. The thirteenth Lok Sabha was dissolved before the completion of its term with the BJP hoping to capitalise on the party’s successes in the assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh; under the `India Shining’ campaign, the party released ads proclaiming the economic growth of the nation under the government.
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The result was a shocker: the Vajpayee-led government could only win 138 seats in the 543-strong parliament, with several prominent cabinet ministers being defeated. The NDA coalition won 185 seats. The Congress and its allies, comprising many smaller parties, formed the UPA alliance accounting for 220 seats in the parliament.
That is a good enough reason for Modi to not announce premature elections. If the government is facing anti-incumbency, it does not matter whether the poll is held a few months in advance or later. It makes sense for the government to complete its full tenure so that there is a little more manoeuvring space left.
The larger question and the bigger challenge are to gauge the mood of the electorate. While a third term for Modi is pretty much on the cards next year – not considering, of course, the fickle nature of the Indian electorate – the report on the assembly elections as far as the BJP is concerned, is far from comforting.
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It is almost an established fact now that the Lok Sabha and assembly elections could produce diametrically divergent results and the opposition’s INDIA alliance will certainly go to town if the BJP comes second in the assembly elections, hoping to change the atmospherics in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls.
Post the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, a clear pattern seems to have emerged in the way people have voted at the central level and at the state level. Three states headed for state elections after 2019, Haryana and Maharashtra in October 2019 and Jharkhand in December 2019.
BJP won all the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana and secured a 58.02 percent vote share. Congress’ vote share was 28.4 percent. In the assembly election, BJP failed to win a majority on its own, getting 40 of the total 90 seats.
In Maharashtra, the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had won 41 of the 48 seats in the Lok Sabha. However, in the assembly election held six months later, the BJP-Sena pre-poll alliance secured 169 of the 288 seats.
In Jharkhand, the BJP had won 11 of the 14 parliamentary seats, but in the assembly election, the party managed to win just 25 of the total 80 seats, its vote share plummeting to 33.4 percent.
Unlike in 2023 where Madhya Pradesh is the only state being ruled by the BJP, in 2018, the party was fighting as an incumbent in all the three states. In retrospect, election results in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan also fit into the same pattern. BJP had lost Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan in the December 2018 assembly elections but romped home with 9/11 seats in Chhattisgarh, 28/29 in Madhya Pradesh and 24/25 in Rajasthan, when Lok Sabha polls came in 2019.
The crux is that people’s voting choices seem to be changing depending on the local issues and the presence of important provincial leaders. Voters are also drawing a clear distinction between state and central politics and casting their ballot accordingly.
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On July 18, in a meeting at Bengaluru chaired by United Progress Alliance (UPA) chair Sonia Gandhi, 26 political parties formally accepted a proposal to form an alliance to contest the 2024 parliamentary elections together. It was here that the grouping was provided an acronym: the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance (INDIA).
All projections suggest that no single political party for now has enough strength to take on the BJP government on its own. To reduce the contest in each constituency to a one-vs-one contest, with all opposition parties supporting the candidate with the highest chance of victory, is the only way of posing any reasonable challenge to the BJP in 2024.
Prime Minister Modi has spoken several times on considering the feasibility of holding simultaneous Lok Sabha and state assembly elections and stressed on the need for building consensus on the issue. He is of the view that continuous and frequent elections take a toll on economic and human resources.
Nonetheless, now that the dye has been cast, political parties are already in the poll mode. BJP’s central election committee (CEM) met on August 16 to discuss the strategy for the upcoming assembly elections. Apart from Modi himself, the meeting was attended by Union Ministers Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh, and party president JP Nadda. The BJP leadership discussed the names of candidates for the Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh assembly elections.
The Congress, buoyed by its Karnataka triumph, knows it is a battle of survival in the next Lok Sabha polls. Ten months after taking charge as Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge constituted the new Congress Working Committee (CWC) inducting Shashi Tharoor, who contested against him in the party presidential elections last year, young leaders Sachin Pilot and Gaurav Gogoi, and former chief ministers Ashok Chavan and Charanjit Singh Channi into the highest decision-making body of the Congress. With Lok Sabha elections just months away, the exercise is being seen as a deft and delicate balancing act by the party president.
The inclusion of Tharoor and Pilot are significant. By inducting them, Kharge has sent a signal that he has taken the electoral battle in the spirit of inner-party democracy. Pilot’s elevation is aimed at sending two messages. That the party values Pilot, despite rebuffing his chief ministerial ambitions, at the same time acknowledging his key role in Rajasthan politics. It also takes pressure off chief minister Ashok Gehlot ahead of the assembly elections.
Looked at objectively, however, the BJP-led government, despite being well placed, also faces significant challenges in some politically critical states. In Uttar Pradesh in 2019, BJP lost nine seats versus 2014, as it was up against a formidable alliance of SP, BSP and theRashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) mahagathbandhan.
This despite a nationalistic fervour gripping the nation after Pulwama and Prime Minister Modi’s immense personal popularity. Similarly, while the NDA had won 30 out of the 40 seats in Bihar in 2014, it swept the state in 2019 by bagging 39 seats as Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) joined the alliance.
The dynamics this time are different in Maharashtra and Bihar since 2014, where Shiv Sena and JD(U) have exited from the NDA. The BJP has made certain amends by roping in the Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) and the NCP (Ajit Pawar faction) in Maharashtra, and Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and Rashtriya Lok Samta Party (RLSP) in Bihar.
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Neutral observers, however, suggest that the cover up may not suffice, and losses are on the cards. NDA is expected to lose 15 seats in Bihar from its 2019 tally of 39 and 17 seats in Maharashtra from its 2019 tally of 41, as per a recent India TV-CNX survey.
On the other hand, if the fractious INDIA alliance partners can firm up further alliances or seat adjustments in Delhi, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, the fight could get keener. The five states that account for almost 50 percent of the Lok Sabha seats – UP, Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu – could see sharp mini battles. While the BJP is sitting pretty in UP, the challenges in the other big states as far as retaining the 2019 tally is concerned, can weigh heavy on the minds of the party’s poll planners.
Despite its thumping victory in the Karnataka assembly polls and the success of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, the Congress party’s ability to bounce back after the walloping in Lok Sabha 2014 and 2019, is strictly a matter of speculation. It looks highly doubtful whether the Congress can reach the three-figure mark, making any significant bounce back from the 52 Lok Sabha seats it won in 2019 a difficult proposition at this stage.
The Congress also stares at the possibility of being made virtually irrelevant in national politics with another defeat in elections to the lower house, where they have failed to reach triple figures in the last two general elections.
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Which makes the role of alliances crucial at this stage. Pollsters project Mamata Banerjee’s All India Trinamool Congress, the YSR Congress party from Andhra Pradesh, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party to increase their seats in the Lok Sabha. They could well be coming at the BJP’s expense.
And it is here that the party is leaving no stone unturned in trying to get back its NDA allies. Last month, Modi chaired a meeting attended by leaders of 38 parties that currently make up the NDA. Following the meeting, chiefs of the three-party allies from UP, all predominantly OBC parties — Nishad Party, Apna Dal (S), and the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) — exuded confidence in the Prime Minister, asserting that the NDA will sweep the Lok Sabha elections.
On the other hand, the INDIA alliance faces potential troubles, the most crucial being a reasonable seat-sharing arrangement that is agreeable to the different partners. Many of these new allies at the national level are principal rivals in the states. The Congress and the Left Front in Kerala, and the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party in Punjab and Delhi epitomise this dilemma.
Congress claims to unchallenged leadership of INDIA may well rest on the outcome of the forthcoming assembly elections. An electoral victory in at least three of the five assemblies will strengthen Congress’ role as the leader of the opposition and make the other aspirational leaders fall in line. Losses for Congress in these state elections will embolden the leadership claims of regional members of the opposition alliance.
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Equally, there can be little doubt that INDIA has come to pass mainly because of the Congress triumph in Karnataka. There could be other potential partners of INDIA – like Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) of Telangana and the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha – who are still unclear about their commitment to joining INDIA – they are not convinced that they have more to gain from joining INDIA than they must lose!
One reason for their unease is the dismal performance of previous opposition alliances. The alliance of the Samajwadi Party and Congress in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections was comprehensively ousted while the Maha Vikas Aghadi of Maharashtra failed to unite their ranks after coming to power.
Clearly, the political decks are all stacked up; now only the cards need to be thrown on the table.
The author is a senior independent journalist.
Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited.
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