There are two obvious takeaways from the results of the Assembly elections to five States that have come in. The first is that the Congress appears to have won decisively in the Bhartiya Janata Party-ruled Chhattisgarh. The second is that the Congress has lost the only State it had in the North-East, Mizoram. There are two more. Of the five States, there was a pre-poll grand alliance led by the Congress in only one — Telangana — and it was ground to dust. The second is the below-expectation scale of the Congress’s performance in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, regardless of whether it forms the Government in those States.
The big lesson is in Telangana because it has demonstrated the failure of a Congress-led coalition. Even the combined might of the Congress and the Telugu Desam Party could not dislodge the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti. It is a blow to the Congress’s ambition of leading a broadband combine against the BJP in 2019. Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao has dashed the hopes of both Rahul Gandhi and TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu. The latter especially will smart from the defeat because the development has also reduced his powers to bargain at the national level for an anti-BJP coalition. Until now he was seen as among the foremost leaders in that drive. It’s not as if the TRS has won by a slender margin; the victory is overwhelming.
As for both Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, Congress leaders had had us believe that their party would sweep both the States. Anti-incumbency was high and it was working against the ruling BJP. But that does not seem to have happened. The Congress has no doubt done far better than it had in 2013, but in absolute terms it could not tap on the discontent which it had claimed existed in large amount among the electorate against the BJP. In Madhya Pradesh, the Congress, going by its claims, ought to have swept the State, given that the anti-incumbency factor should have been high with the BJP having ruled for more than a decade without interruption.
The Rajasthan result too should disappoint the Congress. Opinion polls and even the Exit Poll had predicted a near rout for the BJP under Vasundhara Raje’s leadership. That has not happened, and by all accounts the party has performed better than expected. This is because of the surge the BJP experienced in the last lap of campaigning — probably ten to fifteen days before polling — as a result of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election rallies and the micromanagement of the poll process by party president Amit Shah.
More had been expected of the Ashok Gehlot-Sachin Pilot combine in Rajasthan. Two to three issued could have come in the way of a Congress sweep. The first is the friction at the ground level between the Pilot and the Gehlot camps, which stunted the efforts of the party cadre in the State. The second is the over-estimation by the Congress camp and sympathisers of that party of discontent among the people against the BJP regime led by Vasundhara Raje. And the third is the failure of the Congress to have tapped effectively into the rebellion by certain Rajasthan BJP leaders.
At the time of writing this piece at around two in the afternoon of December 11, there is no clear picture either in Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan. It’s only Mizoram and Telangana that has presented a clear verdict. In both these cases, the Congress has been a decisive loser.
Already, experts are interpreting the results for what lies ahead in 2019. But that could be a futile exercise, because there is nothing to say that the outcome in these five States will necessarily reflect what lies ahead. Lok Sabha polls are fought on different issues and the voter decides on larger national issues — and more importantly, the leader that the nation desires. While those who win today can celebrate, it must be for today and not for 2019.
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