Controversy surrounding assembly elections in 5 states

The announcement of dates for Assembly elections in five states was mired in a controversy giving a clear indication of the high octane pitch that will surround this round of polls which take place just months before the mother of all electoral battles – the 2019 general elections.

BJP is in power in three of these states—for three terms each in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan is a switch state for the last nearly two decades alternating Congress and BJP to power after every five years.

In Mizoram, the contest is a direct one between the Congress and the Mizo National Front while in Telangana, K Chandrasekhar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) seems to have a clear edge.

The outcome in the three Hindi states will have a significant bearing on 2019 general elections. The BJP got to its peak in these states in the last LS elections winning 26 out of 29 in Madhya Pradesh, all 25 in Rajasthan and 10 out of 11 seats in Chhattisgarh, thus winning 61 of the 65 seats in total.

The stakes are quite high for both BJP and Congress. BJP needs a win here to arrest the slide that has been noticed through its consecutive defeats in the Lok Sabha by-polls for the last one year, a hairbreadth victory in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah and its failure to come to power in Karnataka this year.

For Congress, it is a make or mar battle as after the shock 44 seats that it got in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. It has not won on its own any state after this barring Punjab and a loss in these states could seal its fate in 2019 as well.

To make matters worse for it after Bahujan Samaj Party giving it a shock shrift by announcing to contest minus Congress in all the three states, on Saturday, Samajwadi Party too threatened to chart an independent path in these states.

The biggest problem for Congress could occur in Chhattisgarh, where it lost the last assembly election with a margin of just 0.75% vote. BSP has tied up with former chief minister Ajit Jogi’s new party Janata Congress Chattisgarh in the state that could help three-term CM BJP Raman Singh of the BJP to tide over the anti-incumbency. For the first time, the tribal-state will witness a triangular contest.

For BJP, farm distress has turned out to be a big headache in all the three Hindi states with the epicentre of farmers’ agitation being MP, where six farmers were killed in police firing in Mandsaur in June, last year.

Congress has been out of power in MP since 2000. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is facing the Congress troika of Digvijay Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath here. BJP won 165 seats and Congress 58 seats out of 230 in the state in the last Assembly polls.

Chhattisgarh is out of bound for Congress since 2003. The crisis in Congress this time is also of leadership after the dreaded Maoist ambush wiped out almost the entire state leadership of the party a few years ago. In 2013 assembly polls, BJP won 49 seats and Congress 39 out of 91.

In Rajasthan, BJP had won 163 seats and Congress only 21 out of 200. The vote gap between the two parties was around 12%.