NEW DELHI: BJP’s setback in the assembly bypolls “has exposed the flip side of the projected Modi-wave”, claimed Congress. Evidently happy over the better performance of Congress in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and over-the-impressive victory of its alliance partners in Bihar, the AICC said, “these results signal the end of the feel-good for the Modi-led NDA regime”.
This appears to be the message from the ruling party’s disappointing performance in the recent assembly by-polls in four states.
Clearly, the most significant of the 18 by-election results have come from Bihar where the BJP juggernaut was supposed to have trampled the ragtag coalition of the Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress under its wheels. The by-polls for 10 seats in the state, widely seen as a dress rehearsal for the state assembly polls next year, had acquired considerable political significance.
Considering that most of the constituencies were BJP bastions, the party having won six of them in the last assembly elections and eight in this year’s Lok Sabha polls, it was expected to be a walkover.
The BJP leadership would, therefore, be quite badly stung at losing six of the 10 Bihar seats to a coalition that they had just yesterday dismissed as the blind leading the lame.
To add to their humiliation, the party has lost four — Bhagalpur, Chhapra, Mohiuddinnagar and Jale — of the six seats it had won last time. Interestingly, the BJP had won Bhagalpur, the only constituency among the 10 with a sizeable Muslim electorate, for the last four successive assembly polls.
Nor does the BJP seem poised to become the predominant party in the country despite forming the first single-party majority government in New Delhi after three decades.
A setback in assembly by-elections under normal circumstances would not create much of a flutter in the BJP. However, this round of Bihar by-polls has enormous symbolic value and the surprisingly good showing by the anti-BJP alliance will give the latter a huge political boost even as it demoralises the local BJP. The results have the potential of shifting the entire momentum of Bihar politics that has over the past year been dominated by a resurgent BJP .
Similarly, the narrow victory of B Y Raghavendra, son of Y S Yeddyurappa, another former party rebel leader charged with corruption now back in the party, underlines the continuing travails of the Karnataka BJP. Last year, Yeddyurappa had won the same seat, Shikharipura, by more than 24,000 votes fighting on his own regional party symbol against both the BJP and the Congress.
It would be unwise to read too much from these by-poll results. The BJP is likely to win handsome victories in states that go to the assembly polls later this year: Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand. Not because of some intrinsic pre-eminence of Modi and the BJP, but out of a public desire to get rid of hugely unpopular Congress governments that have ruled for several terms.