Four by-elections in four States cannot be held up as an index of the national public mood against corruption. But surely it is not without significance that while the winners were different, the loser was the same in each case: the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. The Hisar Lok Sabha contest came to be seen as a referendum on the Congress by not only the party's political rivals, but also by Team Anna, which has been in the forefront of the campaign for an effective Lokpal Bill against corruption. The victory of Kuldeep Bishnoi of Haryana Janhit Congress, an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was on the cards. The real setback for the Congress was a significant erosion in popular support, with its candidate finishing a distant third and losing the deposit. Corruption was a key issue in the election — and that hurt the Congress and nobody else. The shocker was in Khadakwasla Assembly constituency in Maharashtra, where the candidate of the party's ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, was the front runner. For all practical purposes, the fight was that of the senior partner: the candidate Harshada Wanjale was a former Congress Zilla Parishad member who contested on the NCP ticket as the seat was allotted to that party. Khadakwasla was the ruling alliance's best chance to take away something from this round of by-elections. It turned out to be a rout.
In the two other Assembly by-elections, in Daraunda in Bihar and Banswada in Andhra Pradesh, the stakes were not as high but the losses compounded the Congress's misery. In Daraunda, the Janata Dal(United), capitalising on the popularity of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, closed out both the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress. In Banswada, the game was quite different: Telangana overrode all other issues, and Pocharam Srinivas Reddy, who resigned as a Telugu Desam member to contest again as a Telangana Rashtra Samiti candidate, trounced the ruling Congress party candidate by a huge margin. For the loser, there were different lessons from the four by-elections. Hisar showed that corruption is a powerful issue, and that the party can no longer make light of the movement for a strong anti-corruption institutional mechanism. Khadakwasla taught the Congress and the NCP that opportunistic, short-sighted politics does not pay. Daraunda exposed the Congress's grassroots weaknesses. Banswada served as a reality check on the Telangana issue, demonstrating the spreading popular support for statehood in the region. A party in denial might be tempted to dismiss these results as no more than straws in the wind. The real point is that each one of the straws, coming from different directions, is a bearer of grim tidings.
