THE October 13 Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh have reasserted two major trends in national politics and also delivered a number of nuanced messages to mainstream politics.
The first of the two trends is the total rejection of the Hindutva-oriented politics of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its partners in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). So much so, the BJP and its allies found themselves incapable of capitalising on the anti-incumbency sentiment that was evident to a large measure in Maharashtra and Haryana. The leaders of the BJP and its allies were not perceived as credible political alternatives or as potential leaders of government. Consequently, the electorate reaffirmed that it saw the Congress and its allies in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) as the primary secular political force in the country.
The political messages that have come up are multidimensional. They have emerged essentially from the calibrated nature of the verdict, particularly in Maharashtra and Haryana. In Maharashtra, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine just about managed to reach the halfway mark of 144 in the 288-member Assembly. In Haryana, the party was reduced to 40 seats from the formidable 67 it had before in the 90-member Assembly. The party was compelled to seek the support of independents to secure a bare majority (see separate stories on State results). Even in Arunachal Pradesh, where the Congress was given a clear mandate, some of these nuanced messages have found expression, albeit on a smaller scale.
Broadly, these messages can be categorised as follows: One, an expression of strong reservations about the functioning of the State governments in Maharashtra and Haryana, particularly their economic policy priorities and performance in the rural areas. Two, the electoral preference shown to regional forces such as the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) in many pockets of the two States while giving expression to these reservations. Three, the overriding goodwill for the UPA government at the Centre and its leadership, which neutralised much of the opposition to the State governments and their leaderships.
Veteran political analyst Hariraj Singh Tyagi points out that the writing on the wall is clear for all mainstream parties. The most important message, he says, is for the Congress, in spite of the party managing to retain power in all three States.
According to Tyagi, the Congress national leadership should take a serious view of the partys losses in rural Haryana and see them as a political development with grave implications for its policy direction.
He said: The people have made it amply clear that they are not happy with the urban-oriented policy direction of the Bhupinder Singh Hooda government. It is referred to in some quarters as real estate magic, on account of the rise of a strong builder lobby in many parts of the State, including Gurgaon adjoining the national capital of Delhi. The large number of special economic zones [SEZs] may have raised a small fortune for the State. But, in spite of all this, the larger electoral message is that the political edge [the party had] has been wasted.
In Maharashtras rural regions, too, a similar picture emerges when one takes a look at the seats and vote share of various parties. In the predominantly agricultural Vidarbha, the Congress-NCP alliance won 28 seats against 30 seats in 2004. The BJP-Shiv Sena got 27 as against 31 last time.
Evidently, the BJP-Sena combines greater loss in the region accentuates its lack of credibility as a political alternative. Significantly, the BJP-Sena could not ascribe its defeat to spoilers as the Raj Thackeray-led MNS failed to make any gains here.
The reverses suffered by the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) also helped the Congress-NCP combine in Vidarbha; its nearly 4 per cent vote share in 2004 came down to around 2 per cent this time. Clearly, the party has not been able to make any progress despite the build-up it was given at the national level after the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.
On a larger scale, the Congress-NCP combine secured approximately 37 per cent of the votes polled in the fractured verdict in Maharashtra. That helped the combine win exactly half the total number of seats. In other words, the combined strength of all the opposition parties the BJP-Sena, the Third Front or the Republican Left Democratic Front (RLDF), the BSP, the Republican Party of India (RPI)-Prakash Ambedkar and the independents amounts to a whopping 63 per cent of the vote share.
These trends, emphasises Tyagi, make it clear that it is time the Congress national leadership made its State units understand that the UPA derived its goodwill from the welfare and development initiatives it took in the rural sector, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the waiver of farm loans, during 2004-09.
Said Tyagi: The Congress leadership needs to build on these programmes and focus on new initiatives aimed at improving rural and agricultural infrastructure. No amount of propaganda growing economy, the rise to superpower status, the burgeoning assets of the industrial leaders and business bosses and so on will detract from the seriousness of the issues in the rural-agrarian sector. Hence, if plans for improving rural infrastructure are not formulated carefully and implemented, the gains of the 2004-09 UPA regime could get dissipated. The consequences of this would be hazardous for mainstream parliamentary politics as a whole.
Tyagi is of the view that opposition parties in mainstream politics, both on the right, such as the BJP, and on the Left, such as the Communist Party of India (Marxist), need to take seriously the warning given in the verdict in the rural constituencies and address the rural peoples concerns effectively.
It is also imperative that the BSP thinks in terms of concrete policies and programmes. If that is not done, parties espousing narrow interests of various communities and castes will occupy the opposition space. More seriously, sizeable segments of the population could even drift away from parliamentary politics and towards extremism, said the veteran analyst and one-time political associate of the Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia.
The trend of the electorate turning to regional forces is evident even in Arunachal Pradesh where the Congress won a clear mandate. Smaller parties such as the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) and the NCP, which fought independently, also made handsome gains. Though the number of seats they gained cannot alter the balance of power, the pointers to the broader trend of regional forces emerging stronger are obvious.
In spite of this, many parties in the UPA and a number of observers are apprehensive that the Congress leadership may see in the results a sign of stabilisation and advancement of its political strength. If experience is anything to go by, this is bound to lead the Congress leadership to a blatant violation of coalition dharma and ride roughshod over alliance partners, said a senior NCP leader. He added that the trend was already visible in Maharashtra over the argument that the Congress had won more seats than the NCP. This, the leader said, would not be left unopposed.
And oppose they did, if simultaneous developments on October 28, in New Delhi and Mumbai, are anything to go by. In Delhi, P.A. Sangma, NCP general secretary and former Lok Sabha Speaker, made it clear that his party was not ready to give up the important portfolios, such as Home, Finance and Public Works, it held in the previous government in Maharashtra. He asserted that the NCP would stick to the formula it had worked out with the Congress in 1999 when the combine first came to power. In Mumbai, Sharad Pawar, NCP president and Union Agriculture Minister, said there was no truth in the rumour that the BJP-Sena alliance had offered the chief ministership to the NCPs Ajit Pawar.
Political observers in Maharashtra and New Delhi quickly deduced a correlation between the two happenings and attributed it to coalition power politics. According to a senior leader of the UPA, if Sangmas was a direct appeal to the Congress to value coalition dharma and accommodate its partner with dignity, Pawars denial was a nuanced pressure tactic to suggest that options could open up if the Congress turned authoritarian.
A closer inspection of Sangmas appeal on portfolios shows that it has a solid basis. It questions the claims made by sections of the Congress on the portfolios the NCP held in the previous government. The Congress argument is on the grounds that the party has won a much larger number of seats than the NCP (82 Congress, 62 NCP) this time. By harking back to the 1999 formula, Sangma pointed to the fact that the NCP had only 58 seats to the Congress 75 when the latter conceded all these portfolios to the NCP. The fact of the matter is that the Congress was desperate for our help in 1999 and was ready for any compromise. Now, they feel the party is on the upswing and hence they can drive a hard bargain, said an NCP leader.
Informally, Congress and NCP leaders said the growing demands of the Congress could be linked to the perception that Sharad Pawars clout is waning as also to the accommodation he has shown towards the Congress in recent times.
However, the realpolitik message in the so-called rejection of the BJP-Sena offer made to Ajit Pawar, who is Sharad Pawars nephew, is not as accommodative as the other public statements of the NCP chief. It has a definitive undertone to it, which says that the party will look for and activate other options if pushed too much.
Given the Congress leaderships plan to strive for single-party governance at the Centre in the next Lok Sabha elections, such jousting between the Congress and the rest of the UPA is bound to increase. This can lead to a realignment of political forces on a wide scale. What its political and ideological direction would be is in the realm of conjecture for now. The results of the latest round of Assembly elections offer an opportunity for the now-decimated Left and Third Front to make an attempt to capitalise politically from this process of realignment.
If the BJP and its associates in the Sangh Parivar are to take advantage of this realignment, they may necessarily have to clear their confusion in terms of political and ideological priorities, especially in terms of the Hindutva philosophy.
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