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How can we make sense of l >atest by-poll results ? It’s true that the BJP, which swept to power with a massive mandate just four months ago to the date, has performed badly, retaining just 21 of the 37 seats it held going in to by-polls held since May 16. But does that mean voters have turned against it? Turned in favour of others?
History helps
For answers, we turn to history. Two political researchers, Rahul Verma, of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and University of California, Berkeley, and Pranav Gupta of CSDS looked at every by-poll held between 1967 and 2012 – 1100 assembly seats and 213 parliamentary seats in all. They wrote about their findings in the >Indian Express earlier this month, and I spoke to them today to put the new by-poll results in the context of the historical trend.
Essentially, what they found, as I wrote in a >short piece , is that the incumbent party in the state – not at the centre – is more likely to win a by-poll.
When the incumbent party in the state and centre are different, the incumbent party in the state becomes twice as likely to win the by-poll.
What this historical trend does, then, is explain the SP’s wins in U.P. (What is also does is signal that the performances of the BJP in Gujarat and Rajasthan, where it is the incumbent, are outliers.)
State effects
Why does this happen? Political workers told me that they believe that this is because ruling parties in the state can manipulate state mechanisms to their benefit. But Mr. Verma disagrees. “That was something that could have happened in the 70s and 80s when booth capturing and stuffing of ballots used to take place. I don’t think that can happen any more,” he told me over the phone. What’s more plausible is that ruling parties are able to promise more, he said – ministers camp at the few constituencies going to the polls, and are able to promise public goods whose delivery they often control.
Is it of much use, then, for the opposition party in the state to contest by-polls? Putting up a fight worked for the Congress in Rajasthan and Gujarat, but those results seem to be exceptions to the rule. Mayawati seems to think it isn’t worth it; the Bahujan Samaj Party leader has consistently not contested by-polls when she is out of power, or even panchayat elections when she is in opposition, Mr. Verma, who did his masters’ thesis on the BSP, told me.
So then are by-polls a referendum on state leadership? That seems unlikely. By-polls are often necessitated by the death of the sitting candidate in which case there might be a local-level sympathy wave, or involve a sitting candidate making way for a relative, where again local factors might hold sway. “By-polls take place in a few constituencies, spread out across the state. It would be difficult to join them all together into one narrative,” Mr. Verma said.
MLA to MP to failure
There’s one set of by-poll results that I would take more seriously than others, however. Those are the seats in which the assembly by-poll was necessitated by the sitting MLA contesting and winning the Lok Sabha election, and then giving up the assembly seat. (For example, the Maninagar by-poll was held in Gujarat because the MLA, Narendra Modi, contested the Lok Sabha elections, won, and had to relinquish his assembly seat.) So this is an MLA who did well enough to get an LS seat, and then was popular enough to win the LS election. The assembly by-poll then should be a breeze for the incumbent party. When the incumbent party loses these by-polls, as the BJP has in U.P., Gujarat and Rajasthan, I’d say it has a problem, though a local level one.
