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Why BJP fared poorly
The Jharkhand debacle completed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) run of electoral defeats in 2009, with the party getting just 18 seats of the 81 in the assembly.
The Jharkhand debacle completed the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) run of electoral defeats in 2009, with the party getting just 18 seats of the 81 in the assembly.
In the assembly elections of 2005, the party got 30 seats.
The BJP’s poor performance in the Jharkhand assembly elections can in a way be compared to the mediocre showing of the Congress in Haryana. Both the parties did well in the Lok Sabha polls of April-May 2009, with the BJP getting eight of the 14 seats in Jharkhand and the Congress nine out of 10 in Haryana. But in the assembly elections in October, the Congress got 42 of the 90 seats.
Jharkhand was carved out of Bihar in 2000.
“There is no specific reason for our defeat,” said former BJP chief minister Arjun Munda. He said the party would analyse the reasons for the defeat.
The party’s think-tank and the intellectual wing said the defeat is due to over-confidence among senior leaders, a delayed pre-poll alliance with the Janata Dal(United), and changing party nominees in some seats.
“Internal bickering cost us heavily,” said a senior BJP candidate who lost to his Congress rival. He said insiders had worked for his defeat in the polls.
However, Munda denied the allegation, saying, “There could have been strategic failures, which we need to discover.”
He said the party was ready to sit in the opposition benches.
BJP state unit president Raghuvar Das, one of the few BJP candidates who managed to retain his seat, said the party was perplexed and coming to terms with its defeat.
“We were expecting a majority (41 in the House of 81 members),” said Das, who won for the third consecutive time from the Jamshedpur East constituency (125 km east of Ranchi).
Senior leader Saryu Rai, who lost the Jamshedpur West seat to the Congress candidate, didn’t rule out the possibility of pre-election differences among leaders contributing to the defeat: “The results have taught them (leaders) several lessons, and raised issues they were overlooking.”
