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This Saturday will throw three political realities at India that won’t just be confined to the state politics of Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh where ten seats were closely contested but whose reflection will be on the political future of India.
If NDA allies want the BJP to lose, the INDIA allies want Congress and Rahul Gandhi to lose as well, for better legroom. (PTI Photo)
It’s counting day for Maharashtra and Jharkhand Assembly elections 2024 and bypolls in UP, Karnataka and other states. A total of 369 assembly seats, two states, multiple bypolls, and Saturday will decide three political realities that can go either way.
The three political realities will have national ramifications whose immediate after-effect could be visible in NDA and INDIA bloc meetings during the winter session of Parliament that is set to kick off on November 25 and whose staggered effects may be felt during seat-sharing talks for the upcoming Delhi Assembly Election 2025, scheduled to be held in February.
The Maharashtra Assembly election has emerged as a nail-biting political showdown. While most surveys favour the incumbent alliance comprising the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, BJP, and Ajit Pawar-led NCP, the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi remains close, suggesting an unpredictable electoral outcome that could swing either way.
Similarly, most of the exit polls have predicted in favour of the BJP for the Jharkhand assembly elections. However, Axis My India has predicted a victory for Hemant Soren’s JMM with which the Congress is in alliance. On Saturday, while there will be those who make the quotable quote, the celebrations at party headquarters, the sweet distributions, on the other hand will be gloom, empty chairs on the losing side, and resorting to blame game, often towards allies.
This Saturday will throw three political realities at India that won’t just be confined to the state politics of Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh where ten seats were closely contested but whose reflection will be on the political future of India.
NDA ALLIES WANT BJP TO LOSE MAHARASHTRA
The NDA allies were happy to find the BJP being restricted to just 240 seats after having projected ‘400 paar’ which many of the allies started believing. It gave them the headroom to work within the NDA ‘as equal’, and the National Democratic Alliance as a forum was rejuvenated by Prime Minister Modi.
For key allies like the JDU and the TDP, many of their key wishlist costing a bomb were keyed without much question in this year’s annual budget by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. She, in her budget speech, announced Rs 15,000 crore financial support for Andhra Pradesh to build its capital city, Amaravati. She promised the Hyderabad-Bangalore industrial corridor and Vishakhapatnam-Chennai industrial corridor to name a few. Appeasing another key ally, JDU, in this budget, Sitharaman, announced several schemes for Bihar. The schemes are a part of a larger plan titled “Purvodaya”, which covers the all-round development of eastern states including Bihar. But both TDP and JDU knew that it was a transactional relationship.
Then came the unexpected — Haryana election. Last, when states went to election, Haryana had a maximum of ten years of anti-incumbency against BJP, farmer protests, and Jat anger — a recipe for a Congress sweep, which the exit polls as well. The BJP, however, won the state for the third consecutive time, came back stronger, and regained the power it lost during the Lok Sabha election. Now, BJP’s allies, desperately want the pre-Haryana win arrangement and that can only happen with a big state loss and what better than India’s economic power capital slipping away? But if BJP wins Maharashtra, it would become the proverbial ‘indestructible’ till the next battle and its allies have to live with even fewer seats and say.
INDIA BLOC ALLIES WANT RAHUL TO LOSE MAHARASHTRA
If NDA allies want the BJP to lose, the INDIA allies want Congress and Rahul Gandhi to lose as well, for better legroom. The INDIA bloc is in power in Jharkhand where the Congress is part of the government. Losing Jharkhand is not important from their prism given the charge in the eastern state is with Jharkhand Mukti Morcha where Congress plays the second fiddle. But an inability for the Maha Vikas Aghadi to form government again, in cash-rich Maharashtra, where the Congress has fought on maximum seats — 102, will mean Congress losing its new-found respect among INDIA bloc allies after the Haryana election all over again.
To put things into context, Shiv Sena (UBT) fought on 96 and NCP (Sharad Pawar) fought on 86 seats, which will effectively put the blame for a Maharashtra loss squarely on Congress. After a failure of AAP-Congress seat-sharing talks, the AAP on Thursday surprised many by releasing an early-bird first list of 11 candidates – of whom three are recent joinees from the Congress – for next year’s Delhi election. Also, for successive elections, allies are unlikely to be as kind with seat sharing with Congress as they were in Maharashtra.
However, a Maha Vikas Aghadi win will change the scenario completely — the respect lost after the Haryana election will be redeemed among allies and within two days, the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi can be seen truly leading the opposition camp on multiple issues, and many allies like TMC who don’t share a very warm working relationship with Gandhi, are expected to come under his leadership umbrella.
THE HINDUTVA TEST
Finally, this election will throw one final scenario that will have to decide which way the politics of India will go. This election has seen the emergence of Yogi Adityanath with his ‘Katenge to batenge’ comment in Agra in the backdrop of an attack on Hindus in Bangladesh that was quickly backed by the RSS and given a more sophisticated and acceptable ‘Ek hai to Safe hai’ slogan by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — all intending to transcend the caste division by uniting in the name of Hindutva. This election is a test of whether it has worked or not.
The BJP on its part mounted a shrill campaign — both on the ground and online — trying to blur the caste divisions that cost it very much in big states like Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh, bringing down its presumptive total tally. The BJP campaign had a dual message that there is an urgent need for Hindus to consolidate while there is counter-consolidation taking place and caste division will eventually lead to breaking that Hindu consolidation — which is self-defeating. In Jharkhand, the narrative of Bangladeshi infiltrators was an add-on.
If the BJP wins both states or even if it wins one, but there is a trend in both that Hindu voters have voted on religious lines rather than on caste lines — it will set a precedent. This precedent will be shaped to perfection, glazed and shined in the months and years to come in all states of India.
But if it fails, even then the micro-level voting pattern will be studied in BJP’s data laboratory where the outcomes will be observed along with Lok Sabha results of the concerned booths to find if there has been sentiment building in certain parts if not consolidations, and if so, among which caste segments — the data mine of which the BJP will use the next time there’s an election.
