The Congress tragedy in BJP's near sweep

A Congress tragedy unfolded on Thursday as trends from the counting of votes in five poll-states trickled in, showing that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was on its way to winning in four of them, including Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha and Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) winning Punjab for the first time and thereby becoming the only regional party to get power in two states. This phenomenon will worry the principal Opposition party in the long run.

While the BJP may not be sanguine about the emergence of a new challenger in the AAP, its repeat victory in UP in a post-pandemic poll will boost its morale two years before the next Lok Sabha polls. This comes after a year-long farmers' protest had threatened to singe its poll prospects.

A buoyant AAP leader Raghav Chadha gave voice to the surging ambitions of the Delhi party, saying, "Today, the AAP has emerged as an alternative not only in Punjab but has emerged as a national alternative. The AAP has emerged as a natural and national alternative to the Congress." He hinted that from now on, Kejriwal was the principal challenger to Narendra Modi nationally.

Read more: Battle of the 'aam aadmis': AAP's main campaign points in Punjab

AAP leader and Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia talked about the "direction that Arvind Kejriwal has given to the nation" and "the hope that has emerged at the national level with regard to Arvind Kejriwal" and how "the Kejriwal model of governance succeeded in Delhi and got a chance in Punjab as well".

In Punjab, despite its historic decision to make a Dalit leader as its chief ministerial face, the Congress failed to make gains. The Dalit dynamics of the state’s politics did not help either the Congress or the Shiromani Akali Dal. The Akali Dal had forged a tie-up with Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) after a gap of 26 years to woo the 32 per cent Dalit voters in the state. Clearly, the caste appeal failed to work for both the parties, with Kejriwal's AAP nearly sweeping the polls.

By repeating a victory in UP (though with a reduced number of seats) despite talks of anti-incumbency against the Yogi Adityanath government, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led BJP has proved beyond doubt that the party remains the top contender for power in 2024 and stopping its hat-trick victory in the next Lok Sabha polls could be an insurmountable challenge for the Opposition, which is a divided force. Jitin Prasada, a new entrant in the BJP and once a member of 'Team Rahul', talked about the divide between the people and the Congress in UP.

While the Congress seems to have handed victory to the AAP on a platter in Punjab, the total decimation of the BSP (single-digit number) seems to have helped the BJP in a big way in UP, particularly in the Jatlands of Western UP. Despite its spirited 'Ladki Hoon Lad Sakti Hoon' campaign, the Congress could not make a difference and is set to win fewer seats than its abysmal number of seven in the 2017 polls.

The BJP, which won 50 per cent of the votes in UP in 2019, seems to have lost a fair portion of its share, but its ability to retain the inroads among the Most Backward Classes or Extremely Backward Classes (non-dominant, further socially disadvantaged castes among the OBCs), has remained by and large unchanged. Also, a fair number of Dalit communities, including sections of Jatavs, have voted for the BJP in a poll where the BSP led an unspirited campaign and the saffron party fielded a large number of Jatav candidates.

An initial analysis of the trends showed that the votes of the BSP and the SP put together in many seats in Western UP, Bundelkhand and even Central UP outnumbered that of the BJP. However, there is no denying that barring the identified caste votes (Yadavs for the SP, Jatavs for the BSP and Muslims the strongest contender against the BJP), the saffron party got the votes of most other castes. The SP did manage to widen its social net but not enough to defeat the BJP. The SP, which had won only 47 Assembly seats in 2017, is set to win nearly 130 seats, which is more than two and half times higher than its past tally, while the BSP's seat share (currently leading in six) is one-third of its previous low count of 18.

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While the BJP is down by nearly 55 seats from its 312 tally, the victory is nothing but spectacular given its challenges with the massive opposition campaign around images of floating bodies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A divided Opposition in Goa has helped the BJP, particularly in South Goa, where the Trinamool Congress and the AAP gained at its cost. Internal dissensions within the Congress worked to the advantage of the BJP in Uttarakhand, a state in which the saffron party changed its chief ministers twice before the polls, offering an opportunity for the Congress to capitalise on a broad perception of anti-incumbency. The victory in Uttarakhand will be significant for the BJP as this has traditionally been a switch state, where the gear of power shifts every five years. While the Congress command in the hill state was in the hands of old warhorse Harish Rawat, the BJP banked entirely on Modi's charisma as the state's incumbent Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami was a political greenhorn.

As expected, the daggers have begun to come out in the Congress even before the final results are announced. There were murmurs that Modi had managed to deliver UP to the BJP and Kejriwal had delivered Punjab to the AAP but the Gandhis were unable to deliver results to the Congress. And this comes after Priyanka Gandhi Vadra directly led the party's election campaign in UP while Rahul Gandhi was the national face of the party everywhere.

Apart from the return of the BJP in UP, what deepened the sense of helplessness was the emergence of the AAP in Punjab and the gains of the TMC in Goa, which amounted to the Congress ceding even those spaces to regional parties. The results will provide fresh impetus to the demand for a leadership change in the Congress and the ginger group G23 in the Congress is now set to mount further pressure for 'radical' changes in the party. Some fresh desertions, too, cannot be ruled out.