Waiting for the verdict

BJP retains power in Haryana but struggles in J&K; upcoming Maharashtra and Jharkhand elections will impact national politics and party legacies.

The outcome of the summer’s general election surprised many when the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to gain a simple majority. Though reduced to 240 seats, the party, together with its pre-poll allies, had enough Members of Parliament to form the government. The big question, thereafter, has been if the general election outcome suggested a change of tide against the BJP and, if the Opposition can sustain the momentum in the states where assembly elections were due. Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir, which elected new legislative assemblies in October, however, reiterated the resilience of the BJP in the face of political adversity. In Haryana, the party retained office for an unprecedented third term; it failed to win power in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in the first election after the abrogation of Article 370 but performed creditably in the Jammu part of the Union territory. In both J&K and Haryana, the Congress was the loser. The results saw questions about the party’s ability to win elections resurface. The results of the Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly polls will part-answer these.

The Shiv Sena and NCP factions can’t afford a big loss as that will undermine their claim to their respective party legacies and lead to cadres defecting (PTI)

The outcomes will have a bearing on national politics: A win will come as a big boost to the BJP and further demotivate the Congress, its primary rival in national politics. Success in Mumbai and Ranchi will energise the Opposition and the perception may gain that its performance in May-June was not a fluke. The bigger impact, however, will be in Maharashtra: The future of regional outfits such as the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Shiv Sena, which split in 2022, ostensibly under the influence of the BJP, is at stake. Both parties have representatives in the two main coalitions in Maharashtra, with the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) aligned with the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) and the Congress as part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi while the Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde, the outgoing chief minister, and the NCP under Ajit Pawar are in the BJP camp. These factions can’t afford a big loss as that will undermine their claim to their respective party legacies and lead to cadres defecting. The results will also have a bearing on the political legacies of Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde.

That said, the Maharashtra election is also a battle between the BJP and Congress — they face off in 76 of the 288 seats — to dominate the industrial powerhouse that also houses the country’s financial capital. For the BJP, Maharashtra was an elusive prize until 2014. Riding high on the Modi wave of the 2014 general election results, the party got its first chief minister in the state in 2014 but was outsmarted in 2019 by Sharad Pawar, a pivotal figure in Maharashtra politics, who convinced an ambitious Shiv Sena leadership to break ranks with the BJP and form a government in alliance with the Congress and NCP. The BJP worked its way back to office after the rebellion in the Shiv Sena, and then the NCP. This realignment of parties in pursuit of power has led to a phase of post-ideological politics, causing palpable disquiet among voters, who, interestingly, turned out in large numbers to vote.

In both states, parties have sought to woo the voters with enhanced welfare promises while the campaign turned coarse far too frequently for comfort. Complaints about rural distress, especially the price of crops such as soya bean and cotton, unemployment, and public corruption were drowned in the well-funded but shrill campaigns around identity and cash handouts. With no party in a position to make a moral claim over its political stance, the influence of individual candidates is likely to play as important a role as their party affiliation. This makes post-results political realignments in the absence of a clear verdict highly possible.