Overconfidence, weak local leaders pull down BJP

BJP President Amit Shah’s assertion on Wednesday that there is a “wave of change” in the upcoming Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana barely conceals the party’s inherent weaknesses exposed by the by-poll reversals.

“Maharashtra and Haryana elections are on October 15, counting is on October 19, I want to tell all my party workers for victory celebrations on October 19,” PTI reported Amit Shah as saying at Gorta village in Bidar district on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border.

“Some election results have come. Opposition is feeling overwhelmed. They feel that something very good has happened because BJP has been defeated in a few places. But they can’t see that we have opened our account in Assam, they can’t see we have won in Bengal,” he added.

At the same time, party leaders here were analysing the variety of reasons that led to the BJP-coalition dropping its tally from 26 to 13 of the total 33 Assembly sears where by-polls were held on September 13.

Of these, the ruling coalition previously held all the 11 Assembly seats in Uttar Pradesh, four in Rajasthan, nine in Gujarat and, with ally TDP, one in Andhra Pradesh. Elections were held for these Assembly segments because the MLAs in these constituencies had successfully contested the Lok Sabha polls.

“We were over-confident,” said a senior BJP leader here.

Indeed, in Rajasthan, the BJP leadership decided against allotting ticket to family members of sitting legislators.

Incidentally, the rule was clearly not uniform as in Uttar Pradesh, where veteran leader Lalji Tandon’s son Ashutosh Tandon was fielded from the Lucknow East seat.

But in the case of local stalwarts such as Sanwar Lal Jat in Nasirabad constituency in Rajasthan, the anti-dynasty politics rule was imposed strictly.

Nasirabad is a traditional Congress bastion, part of Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chief Sachin Pilot’s Ajmer Lok Sabha constituency. Sanwar Lal Jat had managed to wrest the seat from the Congress after years of nurturing the constituency in the 2013 Assembly elections.

Afterwards, even though he did not want to contest the Lok Sabha polls, he was pushed to contest against Sachin Pilot in Ajmer.

He even managed to defeat the young Congress stalwart despite the local caste equations favouring Pilot.

But Jat had a request — in the by-polls, he wanted the party to field his son from Nasirabad. But the request was turned down and although Jat campaigned for the party’s official candidate, the Congress took the seat back from the BJP.

Similarly, in Surajgarh, Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje fielded her loyalist Digambar Singh, denying ticket to sitting MP Santosh Ahlawat’s husband and managed to lose the seat. From Weir constituency, the BJP surprisingly fielded 83-year-old Ganga Ram Koli while turning down the candidature of MLA-turned-MP Bahadur Singh Koli’s son.

In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP is right to some extent in claiming that the voter indifference in the absence of the “Modi factor” led to the Samajwadi Party making gains. The voter turnout in the by-polls was just over 53 per cent as compared to 58.35 per cent in the Lok Sabha polls.

Even then, the BJP’s losses are not sufficiently explained. The BJP and Apna Dal had won all the 11 Assembly constituencies in the face of a wave for Akhilesh Yadav in 2012 and then again in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.

These are seats that the SP has managed to wrest from the BJP despite a high-voltage, communalised campaign led by the party MP from Gorakhpur Yogi Adityanath.

The Prime Minister’s absence from Gujarat was reflected in the Congress not just winning in three of the total nine seats, but putting up a respectable fight in all but one seat, the PM’s home ground in Maninagar, where the BJP’s victory margin was 49,652 votes.

In all the other seats — Anand, Tankara, Talaja, Matar and Limkheda — the Congress managed to put up a good fight. Clearly, Anandiben Patel cannot match the PM’s attraction for voters.

Which, incidentally, is the sum of the BJP’s troubles in most of the provinces.

In UP, even if the BJP president ignores Maneka Gandhi’s plaintive plea for her son Varun Gandhi’s promotion, a strong contestant needs to be installed to counter SP Chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and BSP supremo Mayawati’s seemingly coordinated strikes at the party.

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