Performance of BJP, Congress will set the tone for 2024 elections

Just a few weeks from now, people of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur will vote to choose new governments. The assembly elections in the in five states is being considered a semi-final before the mother of polls, the 2024 Lok Sabha elections when Prime Minister Narendra Modi will again lead the BJP to seek a mandate for the third consecutive term in power.

A victory for the Modi-led NDA in 2024 will mean a hat-trick for him. It will also mean a hat-trick of defeat for Congress. If, despite all the negative publicity surrounding the Covid-19 and the botched up handling of the year-long farmer agitation, the BJP wins the assembly polls, particularly the one in UP, which sends maximum number of 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the Opposition’s united campaign will lose steam in the run-up to the 2024 general elections.

This will also be demoralising for the Opposition, particularly the Congress, ahead of the 2023 polls in crucial states like Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In 2018, the Congress had a 3:0 victory in all the three then BJP-ruled states. It later lost its government in MP, when its leader Jyotiraditya Scindia walked over to the BJP with his pack of supporters in early 2020.

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The assembly elections in the five states are poised to take place at a time when the aspirations of the regional parties are on a high with the third consecutive victory of Trinamool Congress in West Bengal in 2021 after which Mamata Banerjee’s party is making an ambitious bid to emerge as the third force in Goa. It was inducted into its fold Congress leaders, including a former Chief Minister. Delhi’s ruling party AAP is trying to hard-sell its Delhi mode of governance with free power promise in Goa and Uttarakhand.

The BJP, the ruling party in power in four of the five states barring Punjab, has fallen back on its time-tested personality cult around Modi to win back the states for it, even as the opposition seeks to batter these state governments on the issue of non-performance. The campaign mode with which the BJP took up the issue of the alleged “breach” of security of the Prime Minister in poll-bound Punjab was a clear indication of the pitch with which the ruling party will project Modi’s persona in the upcoming assembly polls in five states over the next few weeks. Home Minister Amit Shah made no bones about it when he told the electorate of UP in November that the victory of Yogi Adityanath in 2022 is necessary for the win of Modi in 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

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A divided opposition in UP is giving the BJP some relief. The Samajwadi Party changed its strategy, learning from its experience of previous tie-ups with the Congress for 2017 state polls and with the BSP for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. It has now shunned both the major parties and instead hitched its bandwagon to regional outfits like RLD in western UP and Om Prakash Rajbhar’s SBSP in eastern UP. The BJP had won 106 of the 136 assembly seats in western Uttar Pradesh in 2017. A good show in the sugarcane belt is key to the BJP’s victory in the state.

While the BJP’s success in the last three elections since 2014 was its ability to rope in sections of the Dalits and the OBC votes in addition to its Brahmin-Baniya upper caste votes, the SP is trying to widen its MY (Muslim Yadav) support base to include newer caste groups from the extremely backward castes and non-Jatav Dalilts. The Congress-led by Priyanka Gandhi has added a new twist to the tale with its “Ladki Hoon Lad Sakti Hoon” pitch, promising 50 seats to women and thereby trying to win over this caste neutral constituency, which has overwhelmingly backed Modi since 2014. The ruling BJP has begun chanting the “Mandir Mantra”. Its senior leaders have spoken of reviving Krishna Janmabhoomi movement in Mathura while Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had on August 5 last year carried out an elaborate Ram Mandir Shilanyasa in Ayodhya, inaugurated the Kashi Vishwanath corridor on December 13.

Four-cornered contest

In a four-cornered contest among the SP, BSP, BJP and the Congress, a vote share of 30-35% will help any party to form the government. In 2017, BJP won a whopping 312 Assembly seats with nearly 39% votes. The 2019 Lok Sabha polls saw BJP getting nearly 50% votes in UP. In Uttarakhand, a state which was created along with Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh in 2000, the BJP is pinning its hope on Modi-Vajpayee combo, merging the past and the present to march ahead.

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The state is ruled by a political greenhorn, Pushakar Dhami, BJP’s third CM in a row in one year. The Congress is banking on its old guard Harish Rawat to come back to power in the hill state. The power has been alternating between the Congress and the BJP in Uttarakhand so far. With Dhami and Rawat both hailing from the dominant Thakur community, Brahmin votes will be a clincher and hence both parties are aggressively wooing the community with doles and temple visits.

In Goa, the Congress is making all attempts to get a majority, but an aggressive Trinamool Congress and the AAP could weaken its fight against the BJP, which is trying to make a hat-trick this time. To woo the Christians who comprise of 25.1% of Goa population, Congress recently latched on to the issue of the Home Ministry’s refusal to renew the FCRA registration of the Missionaries of Charity. In 2017, the Congress had missed the power game by a whisker despite emerging as the single largest party. The saffron party had made fast moves and sewed up a coalition while the Congress had struggled for unanimity on a leadership face. The Congress, which had got 17 seats in the 40-member Goa assembly, secured 28.4% votes. BJP had polled 32.5% votes and won 13 seats. In a rude shock to Congress, 10 of its MLAs in Goa later joined the BJP in 2019, shoring up the BJP’s number to 27. By this year, the Congress number had shrunk to just two from the 13 it had won.

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In Punjab, the BJP is facing an altogether new scenario. The three contentious farm laws that had led to the exit of its ally Shiromani Akali Dal from the NDA were withdrawn by the Modi government in December last year after a more-than-a-year-long farmer agitation against it. Modi made the announcement on Guru Nanak Jayanti and soon after this, the BJP and the party floated by former Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh announced a tie-up. The Akali Dal for now has a tie up with the BSP, while the Congress has made a Dalit leader Charanjit Singh Channi, the Chief Minister.

The BJP is trying to give a national security angle to the polls saying a state like Punjab cannot be left in some inexperienced hands while there is no end to internal squabbles in the Congress. The Dalits are over 30% of the total population but are not aggressive enough to change the political course. With farm laws gone, post-poll tie-up between the BJP and the SAD cannot be ruled out while the AAP is emerging fast as a force to reckon with after its stunning show of emerging as the single largest party in Chandigarh municipal election in January.

In Manipur, Modi and Amit Shah laid foundation stone for development works worth thousands of crores of rupees. Its Chief Minister N Biren Singh is an import from the Congress. The BJP was repeatedly hardselling is peace pitch in North East but the November ambush on Assam Rifles personnel has given the Opposition the ammunition to target the ‘double engine’ government claim of the BJP here.

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