The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has fared poorly in its first electoral test after Operation Sindoor. In five assembly by-polls, spread across four different states, the ruling party has managed to win only one. Although a sample of just five assembly constituencies is small, the wide geographic distribution of its poll losses in all parts of the country West, North, East and South does raise questions on whether the recent Indo-Pak conflict was indeed a political bonus for the party.
Perhaps the most significant defeat for the BJP in the current round of state assembly by-polls came in its political bastion, Gujarat, where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) snatched back the Visavadar assembly constituency in a bitterly contested poll battle. Visavadar was one of the five seats that AAP had managed to win in 2022, but within a few years, the BJP, with characteristic skill, had managed to engineer the defection of the former’s legislator, Bhupendra Bhayani. This was one of the many defections in different states that the fledgling party has recently suffered as a result of the no-holds-barred tactics of the ruling party.
When the AAP, instead of being cowed down, put up a former police constable and mercurial Patidar agitation activist, Gopal Italia, as its candidate for Visavadar, the contest became a prestigious one with BJP chief minister Bhupendra Patel and state party president C.R. Patil strenuously campaigning for the defector Bhayani. The triumph of the AAP candidate over his BJP rival by a whopping margin of over 17,000 was sweet revenge for the former while dealing an embarrassing blow to the invincible image of the ruling party in the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. A comfortable victory in Kadi, the other assembly seat where by-polls were held, was poor consolation.
The AAP, in doldrums ever since its humiliating defeat in Delhi last, got a further boost by winning in Punjab, where its candidate, Sanjeev Arora, easily defeated Congress rival Bharat Bhushan Ashu, pushing the BJP to third place. Successes in Gujarat and Punjab, where the AAP rules, give the party a respite after speculation in political and media circles that it was collapsing. It also offers hope to AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal, shorn today of his former charisma, of a possible comeback.
In West Bengal, facing assembly polls next year, chief minister Mamata Bannerjee scored another famous victory with her Trinamool Congress (TMC) party candidate Alifa Ahmed thumping the BJP’s Ashish Ghosh by nearly 50,000 votes, a massive margin in assembly elections. It underlined the irrepressible Bengal leader’s continuing sway over her state and the BJP’s failure to dent it. Significantly, the TMC gained and the BJP lost in terms of vote percentage from 2021, a depressing trend for the party, instead of moving forward is sliding back in West Bengal.
While the Congress fared poorly in four of the five assembly by-polls, it would draw cheer from its victory in Nilambur, Kerala, in party leader Priyanka Gandhi’s Wayanad parliamentary constituency. This was a key contest in a state poised for next year’s polls, which the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) desperately wants to win. Trounced successively in the previous two state assembly polls by the CPM-led Left Democratic Front, the Congress is afraid it would lose irretrievable political ground if it loses again.
A victory at Nilambur also became a matter of personal prestige for the Gandhi family, with Rahul and then Priyanka winning from Wayanad. In recent months, the Congress has been embarrassed by its high-profile Kerala leader, Shashi Tharoor. The former UN diplomat turned politician, with a penchant for grabbing headlines, has recently needled his party leadership by hobnobbing with both the Kerala LDF chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, and Prime Minister Modi. There was speculation that Tharoor’s antics could harm the Congress in Nilambur, and its victory in this Left stronghold by a convincing margin would be a big relief ahead of the state assembly polls.
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, the results of the assembly by-polls, however minuscule in the larger electoral mosaic of India, should be a wake-up call. Firstly, the recent conflict with Pakistan with its attendant jingoism by the government’s cheerleaders, including the mainstream media, does not appear to have changed ground realities in favour of the BJP, particularly in assembly poll contests. It is also clear that despite snatching key victories from the jaws of defeat in two states, Haryana and Maharashtra, months after suffering a setback in the Lok Sabha polls last year, the BJP is far from invincible at a regional level even in electoral bastions like Gujarat.
This vulnerability to local conditions is especially relevant to the crucial state assembly polls in Bihar later this year. Clearly, Operation Sindoor, as the by poll results have demonstrated, does not give the ruling party a palpable advantage in the rough and tumble of caste-polarised Bihar. As for the promised caste census at odds with the BJP’s core Hindutva agenda, this could ultimately end up harming the party more than bringing tangible gains in the polls.
There are also lessons to be drawn from the by poll results for the divided Opposition. Interestingly, the BJP got hammered in these polls with opposition parties at each other’s throats. In West Bengal, the Congress-Left Front alliance failed to make much difference to the TMC’s resounding victory; the Congress barely got 5000 votes in Visavadar, Gujarat, where the AAP triumphed and was also unsuccessful along with Akali Dal to stop the party from winning in Ludhiana West. On the other hand, the Congress forced the BJP to lose its security deposit in Nilambur in spite of a covert collaboration between the Left Front and an independent supported by both the TMC and AAP.
It just shows that people are no longer misled by the games politicians play but increasingly decide on their own which candidate and party to support in a specific constituency.
Ajoy Bose is a Delhi-based political commentator and author.
