Rout of regional parties

Published : Jun 04, 2004 00:00 IST

FORMER Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani gave one singular advice to a gathering at an election meeting at Palwal in Faridabad district of Haryana: "Do not waste your votes on regional parties. Vote for national parties. If you do not prefer the BJP, vote for the Congress." The electorate did exactly that. They ignored the ruling Indian National Lok Dal (INDL), they ignored the Haryana Vikas Party (HVP) and, worst of all, they ignored the BJP. They voted overwhelmingly for the Congress. The Congress registered comfortable victories in nine out of the 10 Lok Sabha seats, a big gain for the party considering that it drew a blank in the previous elections in 1999. However, in 1991, the Congress had won nine seats.

What appeared to be a multi-polar contest got essentially reduced to a bipolar one. The INLD, which was perceived to be the main rival to the Congress, finished third in four constituencies and fourth in one. The rout of the BJP and the INLD is seen primarily as a result of the anti-incumbency factor.

Among the prominent losers are Union Minister of State for Home I.D. Swami; Ajay and Abhay Chautala, sons of Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala; and Surender Singh, son of HVP leader Bansi Lal. Among the winners are Bhupinder Singh Hooda, leader of the Congress Legislature Party, from Rohtak; Kuldeep Bishnoi, son of Pradesh Congress Committee chief Bhajan Lal, from Bhiwani; former INLD strongman and Green Brigade chief Jai Prakash from Hissar; Rao Inderjit Singh, son of senior Congress leader Rao Birender Singh, from Mahendargarh; and Kumari Selja from Ambala.

The BJP, which won five seats in 1999, managed to avoid complete decimation. The party, which had put up candidates in all the 10 seats, just about managed to win the Sonepat seat. Even here its candidate Kishan Singh Sangwan won by a narrow margin. In Faridabad, Ram Chander Bainda, the sitting BJP MP, was pushed to the third place. The vote share of the BJP came down drastically to 17.21 per cent from 29.21 per cent in 1999.

The BJP's timely dissociation from the INLD did not help much. One argument given for the BJP's poor performance is its inability to forge a successful alliance. But even if the INLD and the BJP had an alliance, the results would not have been very different considering that the margins of victory of the Congress candidates show that the electorate was quite determined to defeat Chautala and those associated with his party. Even in the Assembly segment of Sirsa, Chautala's home constituency, INLD candidate Sushil Kumar Indora could not secure a lead. He lost to Atma Singh Gill, a political newcomer, by over 70,000 votes.

The virtual rout of the INLD did not come as a surprise. But unlike the BJP, the INLD did not suffer a sharp reduction in its vote share. In retrospect, perhaps the BJP was the only party to have sensed the growing disenchantment of the electorate with the INLD.

The elections also saw the rout of the HVP. The HVP, which had hoped to win at least the Bhiwani seat, saw its vote share going up marginally. Bhiwani was one among the many keenly contested seats as the sons and grandson of the three "Lals" - Bhajan Lal, Bansi Lal and the late Devi Lal - were in the fray. Kuldeep Bishnoi won by 28,000 votes, followed in the second and third places by Surender Singh and Ajay Chautala respectively. Ajay Chautala had won the seat in the previous election.

In fact the Congress was not in a very good position to take on the INLD-BJP combine, riven as it was with factionalism. There were doubts about the party winning the Karnal seat as the choice of official candidate had been resisted by a faction led by a senior leader Chiranji Lal Sharma. His son, Kuldip Sharma, who was denied the ticket, contested as a rebel only to end up in the fifth place after the Bahujan Samaj Party. Overcoming all hurdles, Arvind Kumar Sharma of the Congress won the seat with a comfortable margin of over 1.5 lakh votes. Here and in other places, the voters ensured that a division of votes did not take place; they gave the winners a clear majority. In Rohtak too, Bhupinder Singh Hooda won a four-cornered contest, won by one lakh votes. Apart from the BJP candidate, Hooda had to deal with the INLD candidate, Bhim Singh, the Vice-Chancellor of Maharshi Dayanand University, and his daughter-in-law Geeta Grewal who contested on the BSP ticket.

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