When winning is not enough

September 15, 2014 12:21 am | Updated November 16, 2021 07:02 pm IST

It is not often that an opposition party comes under greater pressure than the ruling party ahead of an election. However, as >Maharashtra and Haryana prepare to go to the polls next month, the benchmark for performance is not the 2009 Assembly elections that voted the Congress to power, but the Lok Sabha election this year that saw a Bharatiya Janata Party wave sweeping through the two States. No one expects the Congress to return to power in Maharashtra or Haryana, but for the BJP, any showing that falls even marginally short of its vote share in the Lok Sabha election would be seen as a setback and as a reflection on the performance of the Narendra Modi government at the Centre. The Congress won just one of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana, and in Maharashtra, in alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party a total of only six of 48 seats. Clearly, the Assembly elections are for the BJP to lose. Both the Prithviraj Chavan government in Maharashtra and the Bhupinder Singh Hooda government in Haryana have little to show for their years in power, and the BJP must be hoping to ride on the anti-incumbency sentiment more than on the performance of the Modi government. In its first few months, the BJP-led government at the Centre did succeed in infusing hope among large sections of the people, but in terms of results on the ground there is little to show as yet.

In Maharashtra, the death of its strongman Gopinath Munde in a road accident soon after the Lok Sabha election has greatly reduced the BJP’s claim for the leadership of the alliance with the Shiv Sena. The national party performed much better than the regional ally in the Lok Sabha polls, and is therefore driving a hard bargain in the seat-sharing negotiations. But as in 1995, the chief ministership is likely to go to the Shiv Sena in the event of the alliance coming to power. The only difference is that the Sena supremo, Uddhav Thackeray, is likely to stake his claim instead of attempting to wield power through ‘remote control’ as his father Bal Thackeray did. In Haryana, the BJP seems to be in a better position if only because it does not need an ally to come to power. The party has truly outgrown its former ally, the Indian National Lok Dal, which, like the Congress, did not have a great record during its years in government. Thus, for the first time, Haryana could see a BJP Chief Minister if the Lok Sabha pattern of voting holds for the Assembly polls too. In both States the BJP could well record its best-ever performance in an Assembly election, but even so the party will have reasons for worry if the results pale in comparison to those in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. Sometimes, winning alone is not enough.

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