In Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir, the challenge to the BJP in the just-concluded Assembly elections came not from the Congress but regional parties. And while the BJP undoubtedly made the maximum gains in both States, especially J&K, it failed to match its performance in the Lok Sabha elections held earlier this year. In Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP had won three of the six Lok Sabha seats, but on Tuesday, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party — which won the other three LS seats — forged ahead, winning 28 of the 87 Assembly seats; even the outgoing down and out National Conference held on to 15 seats.
In Jharkhand, the BJP — that has ruled the State for more than a decade of its 14-year-long existence — swept the Lok Sabha polls, getting 12 of 14 seats. But when the Assembly results for the 81 seats came in on Tuesday, it managed a majority only with the help of its partner — the All Jharkhand Students’ Union (37 plus 5) — while the outgoing much-maligned Jharkhand Mukti Morcha won 19 seats. If in Jammu and Kashmir, the BJP succeeded to a large extent to address the aspirations of the Jammu region, where around 25 of the 37 seats are Hindu-dominated, it was unable to make that breakthrough in the Muslim-dominated valley, where the seats went largely to the PDP, and the remaining to the NC and the Congress. And even though it had won the Ladakh Lok Sabha seat, it failed to win even one of the four Assembly seats there. In short, the BJP, despite muting its desire to dilute Article 370 — that grants special status to the State — and despite the promise of good governance by a pheran-clad Prime Minister Narendra Modi at public rallies in the valley failed to cut ice.
Similarly, in Jharkhand, the tribal aspirations that the JMM (19), the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (8), the Jharkhand Party (1), and the BJP’s ally, AJSU (5), represent could not be addressed by the BJP, nor subsumed by its promises of development.
And though the Congress came fourth, it did better than the exit polls had predicted, winning 12 seats. The PDP and the NC won seats in both Jammu and the valley, but the Congress, remarkably enough, emerged as the only pan-J&K party, winning seats not just from these two regions, but picking up three in Ladakh.
A close look at the poll percentages also reveals that in Jharkhand if the Congress had not broken up with the JMM, the combine would have secured (10.3% plus 20.5%), virtually equalling the BJP’s 31.4 %. Indeed, the Congress’s Subodh Kant Sahay on Tuesday expressed regret that the alliance had broken.
For the Janata Parivar parties, particularly the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) that together with the Congress, won six of 10 seats in the byelections to the Bihar Assembly, there is a lesson to be learnt. When the BJP swept the State in the LS polls six months ago, a shocked JD(U) and the RJD hurriedly buried their differences. Tuesday’s result is a warning to them of the consequences of not staying together.
