Straws in the wind: On defections from BJP ahead of U.P. polls

The spurt of defections away from the party in Uttar Pradesh should worry the BJP

January 12, 2022 12:02 am | Updated 12:35 am IST

The stereotypical image of politicians in India in popular culture is mostly unflattering, but it is also somewhat unfair. Politics as a vocation is not an easy one and no one receives more scrutiny than legislators and politicians in public life and despite there being several things to improve upon, electoral democracy in India allows for a fair amount of accountability by empowering the voter to evaluate those contesting to represent them. Yet, if there is one act that reminds citizens of the tendencies of politicians, it is that of switching sides on the eve of fresh elections in a State. No State is spared of this act, and hardly any party escapes defections. In a world where principles and ideologies determine party affiliation, switching parties at the last minute would be a rare anomaly for there would have been ample time for disgruntled partymen to rethink the bandwagon they had hitched themselves to. But in the real world, elections bring in hard calculations — politicians who sense a whiff of change in the mood of the electorate are ready to take the risk to switch. These occurrences are more pronounced when parties select their legislators on considerations such as caste/community identity — but they are no longer rare events even in States where the polity features a clear ideological divide, for instance, Kerala. But there are also occurrences — dime a dozen — when the electorate does not punish political opportunists and considerations other than legislative ability alone determine the electoral fortunes of contestants.

In the case of Goa , a State with a small Assembly and which has a history of party-hopping, the spurt of defections of late should not come as a surprise. But the fact that electoral contestation in an already fractious polity with a high number of competitive political parties has now increased with the Trinamool Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party in the fray, has exacerbated matters by widening the choices for the political opportunist. In Uttar Pradesh , even considering the fact that such defections are routine, the spurt of MLAs switching sides from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the Samajwadi Party (SP) should worry the ruling party, more so if the party hoppers are from the Other Backward Classes who had been diligently wooed and represented in the BJP to get an edge over the Mandal parties. The BJP could still take consolation in the fact that last minute defections in West Bengal had little effect on the ruling Trinamool in the election last year but unlike in the eastern State, the politics of identity is more salient in Uttar Pradesh. This indicates that the political contest in a State where the ruling coalition secured 51.2% of the votes and led in 284 of the 403 Assembly segments in the State in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, is getting to be a close call with the SP putting up a spirited fight. At the very least, the aura of invincibility that the BJP had since 2014 is markedly absent. Although the Opposition camp is still divided, the erosion in the BJP support base is unmistakable.

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