BJP's loss of Hindi belt to Rahul's new image: 7 poll result takeaways

Electoral contests in the immediate future won't be sure-fire saffron walkovers. Each seat in every state could witness tough fights.

The winter of 2018 has sent a chill up the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) spine, and Christmas has come early for the 133-year-old Congress party. At the time of writing, it looks as though in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, the incumbent BJP regimes have been toppled by the Congress in head-to-head contests.

Telangana, one of India’s youngest states, has elected nativist Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and a decade-old Congress government has been dislodged by rival Mizo National Front (MNF) in Mizoram. Bottomline 2018: Congress 3, Others 2, BJP 0.

This is a turn of the screw from the relentless triumphalism of the BJP: Suddenly voters seem to have woken to a wider range of political choices beyond Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party boss Amit Shah. Electoral contests in the immediate future won’t be sure-fire saffron walkovers: each seat in every state could witness tough fights.

Here are the major takeaways from the winter polls.

One, BJP’s losses in its Hindi strongholds show that the carefully-crafted image of Modi-Shah as election-winning geniuses, is bust. This isn’t for lack of trying. Both campaigned with relentless toxicity, pitching these elections as a contest between Modi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi, rather than an exercise to vote in different state governments.

Two, Congress has more than doubled the number of big states where it holds power: 

from two (Karnataka and Punjab) to five. Apart from boosting morale, an important ingredient for a party which has lived with disappointments for much of three years, this outcome might boost campaign finance for summer’s general elections.

Three, the image of Rahul Gandhi, widely spread by BJP’s propaganda machine, as an entitled (‘naamdar’), hapless and lazy ‘Pappu’ might turn around. BJP’s spin-meisters will need to ask how a mere Pappu could beat mighty Modi-Shah on their turf. In the future, it might not be a great idea for the BJP to pitch contests as personalised slugfests.

Four, voters have punished BJP regimes for administrative incompetence and callous policymaking. The roots of these defeats can be traced back to Modi’s bewildering decision to destroy 86% of currency in circulation overnight, announced November 8, 2016.

In a country where 98% of all transactions are conducted in cash, where 93% of the workforce operates in the ‘unorganised’, cash-only sector and formal banking is spread thin on the ground, Modi’s ‘notebandi’ hit the poor where it hurts most.

A landslide victory in Uttar Pradesh in early 2017 convinced BJP strategists that demonetisation was a killer electoral app. There is evidence that UP’s poor were misled to vote BJP by a feeling of schadenfreude – happiness at the misery of others. But by the beginning of this year, that warm glow had been replaced by seething anger.

Between January and November, by-elections were conducted in 13 assembly and Lok Sabha seats in seven states. Of these, Congress won three seats, its allies won five, BJP topped only two and in seven seats its incumbent netas lost to other parties.

Business Standard