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Lok Sabha Elections 2019: BJP would have tough time defending LS seats won in 2014
Four opposition parties have teamed up in Jharkhand, forging a pre-poll alliance for the Lok Sabha elections.
The popularity of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Jharkhand will be on test in the Lok Sabha polls that begin from April 29.
Four opposition parties have teamed up in the state, forging a pre-poll alliance. The Grand Alliance partners are the Congress, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik) and Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the fate of this alliance would become clear when the results are declared on May 23.
There have been some indications that the BJP would have a tough time defending its citadel — it has sitting MPs in 12 Lok Sabha seats and is contesting from 13 of the total 14 Lok Sabha seats in Jharkhand. The JMM had bagged two seats, Dumka and Rajmahal, in 2014.
It has been more than a week since the BJP announced the first list of its candidates for 10 seats. That leaves candidates for three seats yet to be named. The remaining seat, Giridih, is with the party’s ally, All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU).
BJP spokesperson Pratul Shahdeo said that the announcement of candidates was likely on Monday, as nomination filing for Chatra, Lohardaga, and Palamu will begin from April 2. He, however, said that only the higher echelons in the party were aware of the finalised candidates.
All the major parties have their strongholds in the state and it would not be easy for the BJP to create fault lines, even though the latter managed to rock the RJD after roping in a top leader — Annapurna Devi, the former Jharkhand unit chief RJD recently joined the BJP.
JMM working president Hemant Soren has said that the Grand Alliance was confident of upstaging BJP in Jharkhand. “We will win from most of the seats,” he said, adding that the “people are fed up with [Narendra] Modi’s rhetoric”. The measures in “tweaking the land law” to facilitate particular businessmen and harassing a particular sect on religious lines did not augur well, he underscored.
Countering him, chief minister Raghubar Das said that the JMM was responsible for the state’s backwardness and his government had tried to pull it out of that. He said that the National Democratic Alliance would win all the 14 seats. The BJP state general secretary seconded Das and said that the BJP had readied its strategy to register “a historic win”.
The statistics of the by-polls are against the BJP, however. It did not perform well in the by-elections held for six assembly seats between 2015 and 2018. Except for the Godda seat, the party lost the rest in Lohardaga, Panki, Littipara, Gomia, and Silli.
The scenario was reverse in the 2018 panchayat by-polls, where the BJP-backed candidates had won the most seats. The party did well in the civic body polls, too, for 34 urban local bodies last year and had won all the top posts of civic bodies.
