:: Editorial

Bypolls: Warning sign for Congress?

Sept.19 : The results of Assembly byelections are usually not a reliable guide to the prevailing political climate, but specific circumstances might indicate exceptions. That indeed appears to be the case in the context of the bypolls for 49 seats in 12 states — big and small — held in recent weeks. The last lot of results came in on Thursday. These are the first state elections to be held after the Lok Sabha elections in May, which threw up the Congress as the flavour of the season. Not only had the BJP, the Congress’ principal adversary on the national scale, been trounced, but those among Congress’ UPA allies that had acted fresh with it had also been shown their place by the electorate. Roughly speaking, that trend appears to have been reversed in the Assembly byelections.

The BJP and Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD appear to be the principal gainers. The BJP won in Gujarat, Bihar, Uttarakhand and Delhi. The RJD won in Bihar and Delhi. In Delhi, particularly, the Congress fared poorly, losing two seats — Dwarka and Okhla — where it had pulled off terrific wins in the Lok Sabha poll. The BJP not only took Dwarka, it pushed the Congress to the third place in that seat. Before these bypolls, the Congress had suffered defeat in Delhi’s municipal elections. Thus the Assembly byelections appeared to endorse the mood in the BJP’s favour in the nation’s capital. In Gujarat too the BJP did exceedingly well, taking a few seats from the Congress, leaving chief minister Narendra Modi, who appeared to be down in the dumps, quite chuffed. The electorate favoured the BJP in Uttarakhand as well, where the party had lost all four Parliament seats. In Bihar the saffronites fared reasonably. In this state, the RJD-LJP (led by Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan) combine did exceedingly well, though the Congress was not humiliated. The opposite was the case with the ruling JD(U) led by chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has made a name for himself politically. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress was once again able to cock a snook at the ruling CPI(M)-led Left combine, which appears to be on a losing spree. In Tamil Nadu, Congress ally DMK did very well, but it has to be remembered that its main rival, the AIADMK, and the MDMK had boycotted the byelection.

Strictly local and state-specific factors usually inform the popular mood in Assembly byelections, but in the present case the Congress does appear to have been at the receiving end on account of a certain national dynamics at work. Nationally, it could pick up only 10 of the 17 seats that it had held out of the 49 for which byelections were conducted. Worse, the party’s current difficulties notwithstanding, it was the BJP that made gains, if we look at the nationwide picture. The unconscionable rise in prices of commodities of everyday use, including kitchen items, can possibly be cited as the key factor that has gone against the Congress. In Delhi, the sharp hike in power tariffs doubtless added to the anti-Congress spirit, besides loss of confidence on account of Metro accidents and the disgust at slippage in schedules for constructions related to the Commonwealth Games. These are national issues, by and large. For all the austerity talk, the government that the Congress leads at the Centre appears to have done little to alleviate the plight of the common man. It needs to be said that the BJP was well poised to take advantage of the situation in states where it had done poorly in May, and this shows the depth of the party’s organisational resources.