Modi and his BJP hit by defeats as Gandhi’s Congress recovers
Congress wins Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh
The Indian political landscape has changed. The Congress Party is no longer in decline under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, and the prospect of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party with its Hindu nationalist agenda being in power for the next few years does not look as inevitable as it seemed just a year ago.
This is the main take-away from the state assembly election results announced yesterday (Dec 11). Congress has won power in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan – three key BJP-governed states in what is known as the Hindi heartland. It lost Mizoram in northeast India to a regional party, and failed to make an impact in Telangana that was separated from Andhra Pradesh in 2014.
Kamal Nath, Congress’s Madhya Pradesh state president, claims victory at 2.30am – Congress’s final figure was 114 and the BJP’s 109
In Madhya Pradesh, constituency counting yesterday was evenly balanced for much of the day, but at 2.30am this morning (India time), Kamal Nath, the Congress state president, (above) claimed victory with 116 seats, a clear majority in the 230-seat assembly. That dropped slightly later in the night to 114 against the BJP’s 109, but Congress has a majority because it is supported by four independents and two parties based in Uttar Pradesh. The BJP made a counter claim but that was dropped when the figures became clear.
The results show that the Congress Party is re-energised after its devastating general election defeat in 2014 and subsequent defeats in most state assembly polls. The reversal of that trend has enabled Gandhi to confirm his role as the party’s leader, a year after he took over the president’s post in December 2017 from his mother Sonia Gandhi.
Voting patterns
It does not however mean that the BJP will necessarily do badly in the three heartland states in the general election due by next May. Nor does it mean that Modi’s government will be defeated nationally, though the BJP would lose 44 of the three states’ parliamentary seats in the general election if today’s voting patterns were repeated, according to estimates by the NDTV television channel.
The results, which were broadly in line with exit polls published on December 7, also show that Modi has lost a lot of his personal vote-winning power that has has driven BJP successes over the past five years. It remains to be seen whether he can recover that in the general election campaign.
The question now is how Modi will react to what, privately, he will regard as a serious defeat and a negative verdict on his rule. Specifically, will he try to win the electorate by focussing on economic development, or will he strengthen the BJP’s divisive Hindu nationalist agenda with its anti-Muslim overtones, driven especially by Amit Shah, the party president.
On the economy, Modi will be looking to Shaktikanta Das (left), who was appointed yesterday as the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, to relax interest rates and drive growth. Das was the secretary for economic affairs in the finance ministry till May last year, and was in charge of Modi’s economically damaging bank note demonetisation at the end of 2015.
As a career civil servant, he was accustomed to working for and with government ministers, and is therefore different from the past two governors who come different backgrounds and have been conscious of the need to maintain the RBI’s traditional independence.
Das replaces Urjit Patel (below) who resigned quietly and with “immediate effect” on December 10 after two years in the post. Patel was coming under intense pressure from the government to accept its policies and to allow it to interfere in RBI affairs. Reports suggest he had tired of the battles and pressure involved and decided to retire ten months early, which is a very rare occurrence for RBI governors – it has only happened once before since 1947.
This is significant because it is yet another example of the Modi government’s persistent attempts to undermine the independence of India’s respected institutions such as the Election Commission and the judiciary including the Supreme Court.
Welcoming the results last night, Rahul Gandhi said that Modi had “refused to listen to the heartbeat of he nation”, whereas he had learned from Congress’s 2014 general election defeat that he had to listen. Congress had led the country in reforms such as the “green revolution” in the 1980s, and the 1991 opening up of the economy, and it was now developing a “vision for the future” that would tackle the lack of jobs and youth disenchantment.
This picks up on the main issues that faced the BJP in the states – distress among farmers despite various government schemes, a failure to generate jobs, and the negative effects of the 2015 demonetisation together with later complicated implementation of a new national sales tax (GST). That hit the BJP vote in rural areas – for example losing it the tribal vote – and in the towns.
There is also a debate about how far a “soft Hindutva” stance adopted by Rahul Gandhi influenced votes to support Congress, in preference to the BJP with its harsher nationalist version that includes its slant against Muslims and bans on cow slaughter and beef eating.
Rahul Gandhi (centre) with (to the right) Sachin Pilot, Rajasthan Congress president and a candidate to be the chief minister
Gandhi has been ostentatiously visiting Hindu temples over the past year and has talked about how cows should be protected. Meghnad Desai, a leading political and economy commentator, yesterday suggested on a television programme that “Rahul has turned Congress into a Hindu party”. That was the “biggest change ever” to the party’s ideology. Congress politicians refuted this, pointing out that Congress accepts and works with all religions, but it is a fact that Gandhi has paraded Hindu credentials on election campaigns.
The detailed results in the states showed a substantial shift towards Congress. In Madhya Pradesh, it added more than 50 assembly seats to its tally in the last (2013) election. The BJP has been in power under Shivraj Singh Chauhan, its chief minister who has a sound reputation for implementing policies, for three terms totally 15 years. It would have been remarkable if it had won a fourth term.
In the adjacent state of Chhattisgarh, Congress added almost 30 seats, winning the contest with 68 seats against the BJP’s 16 in the 90-seat assembly. In Rajasthan, it added around 80 seats, winning 101 against the BJP’s 73 in the 201-seat assembly.
General election seats
The national importance of the states is indicated by votes in the 2014 general election, when the BJP won 27 of the 29 parliamentary constituencies in Madhya Pradesh, 10 out of 11 in Chhattisgarh and all 25 seats in Rajasthan.
But results in national elections can be very different. In 2003, the BJP won the three states in assembly elections but lost the 2004 general election, and in 2008 the Congress lost Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in 2008 but its United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition won the 2009 general election.
There will now be a tough and probably bitter battle between the BJP and Congress during the next four months till general election voting begins. It is likely to be even more bitter between the two leaders as Narendra Modi tries to counter the growing confidence of Rahul Gandhi.
If this is correct, the Bharatiya Janata Party could emerge from the current polls in a strong position to be re-elected nationally next year, the question then being how big a majority it could secure.
The economic failures were graphically demonstrated last week when tens of thousands of farmers marched through Delhi (left), Mumbai and Kolkatta protesting against the low prices they receive for their crops under government-controlled systems that push them into debt and suicide. The farmers were demanding better prices and wavers on bank loans. This is a potent issue in the states now having elections, but the government has done little to offset the problems.
In the current elections, the key contests are in Madhya Pradesh, where the BJP has been in power for 15 years with the same chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan, and in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. The other states are Mizoram in the north-east India where Congress rules, and Telangana that used to be part of Andhra Pradesh where a regional party runs the government.
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