What the Rajya Sabha polls show

Satraps and alliances are key for the Opposition, but can’t blunt the Bharatiya Janata Party’s domination of Indian polity

From the down-to-the-wire Rajya Sabha election on Friday — where, keeping with a trend seen in recent years, a largely anodyne event turned into a thrilling political fight due to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s inclination to take no election for granted — there are four takeaways.

At the end of the day, the BJP has bolstered its hold on national politics and created a smooth glide path for any legislative agenda. (PTI)

One, the Maha Vikas Aghadi continues to be a work in progress in Maharashtra, and despite the best efforts of Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar and chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, kinks in coordination (cross voting, the cancellation of one vote) and the inability of two jailed ministers to vote hurt the coalition which has been battling choppy waters and the arrest of senior ministers on corruption charges. Counting in the state, and in Haryana, stretched late into the night after a slew of challenges by both sides but the loss of a seat it expected to win will hurt the unlikely alliance.

Two, for an enfeebled and centralised Congress, the election is yet another lesson in the importance of strong regional leaders. That the party managed to pull through in Rajasthan is almost solely due to Ashok Gehlot, who led the fight from the front. For a party that has been haemorrhaging state-level leaders for a decade, the results should be an opportunity to pause its protracted leadership crisis and focus on empowering grassroots leaders instead. Three, the fight in Karnataka indicates that politics continues to be fluid in the state. With elections due next year and the Janata Dal (Secular) in some trouble — its candidate received the lowest votes for the fourth Upper House seat from the state — it appears that the state election will see a keen contest between the incumbent BJP and the Congress.

But as entertaining as the contests in these four states were, they cannot distract from the bigger picture: That, at the end of the day, the BJP has bolstered its hold on national politics and created a smooth glide path for any legislative agenda. The Opposition may have done well to hold on in some states, but its position on the ground has not been strengthened (indeed, it has only managed to win what it should have got automatically due to its assembly strengths and has suffered two embarrassing defeats), and its parliamentary challenge is bound to be even weaker between now and 2024. With the largest arsenal of members in the Upper House in a generation, the BJP is set to, once again, change the contours of Indian politics. That is the fourth, and most important, takeaway from the polls.