Jharkhand message may resonate across India
Some years ago, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had boasted of a "Congress-mukt" Bharat. It was the result of the party's victory in a series of assembly elections across India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power for the first time more than five years ago. That was the time of unprecedented political ascendancy for the BJP in terms of winning elections. The party had earned a formidable reputation for possessing a seemingly unbeatable election-winning machine.
But politics, particularly electoral politics, could often be a highly unpredictable and slippery path. Came 2018, just a year before the last national election, and the BJP ended up losing power in three heartland states—Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh—in one go, after having ruled those states. However, overcoming those defeats, the BJP scored a spectacular triumph in the Lok Sabha polls in April-May this year, securing a greater majority than in 2014. One of the key factors in the BJP's victory in national polls was its near-sweep in the same three heartland states just a few months after losing power there. Look at Jharkhand. Just seven months ago, the BJP won 11 of the 14 Lok Sabha seats. It is now out of power in the same state, once again underlining the dictum "politics thy name is frailty".
Just seven months after winning the Lok Sabha election mandate, the BJP now finds itself out of power in Maharashtra, India's richest state, in the west. It just about managed to rope in the support of a regional party to retain power in Haryana in the north, and was unseated in Jharkhand, one of India's most mineral-rich states, in the east. Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram said this about BJP after the Jharkhand poll result: "dented in Haryana, denied in Maharashtra and defeated in Jharkhand." Many view this as Congress' pushback at the "Congress-mukt Bharat" phrase.
The setback in Jharkhand means that half of the huge Hindi heartland has slipped out of BJP's control. The party is now in power in two big states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the small states of Uttarakhand, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh in the Hindi-speaking belt. Will the narrative change when the Delhi assembly elections are held in February next year? The BJP surely faces an uphill task.
The BJP's defeat in Jharkhand throws up two significant lessons besides the familiar one of anti-incumbency. First, the stability provided by the party's government under non-tribal Chief Minister Raghubar Das—which survived a full five-year term in a predominantly tribal state that had earned the notoriety of chief ministers changing quicker than seasons due to the quicksand of shifting political loyalty—did not cut ice with the electorate. Secondly, playing up the polarising narrative to cover up anti-incumbency and governance deficit may have run its course and is less likely to find traction among voters over a time. The results of Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand assembly elections are likely to reinforce the view among anti-BJP forces that bread-and-butter issues can actually neutralise the impact of polarising planks, and that the BJP may not have succeeded in delinking politics from economics, as suggested by some analysts.
The BJP had begun the Jharkhand poll campaign on the development narrative but shifted almost midway to the sensitive issues of Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), National Register of Citizens (NRC), abrogation of the special status for Jammu and Kashmir and the Supreme Court order on the Ram temple in Ayodhya. The last two phases of the five-phased polling in Jharkhand were held in the midst of pan-India protests against the new citizenship act and NRC. The Jharkhand poll was also the first state-level electoral exercise after the apex court judgement on the Ayodhya issue. What is more interesting is that Jharkhand is a state with an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population. Most of India's incidents of lynching of persons on suspicion of being cattle smugglers took place in Jharkhand.
By contrast, the opposition Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-Congress-Rashtriya Janata Dal alliance adopted the strategy of confining their plank to governance and state-specific issues to tap into people's anger over bread-and-butter issues like economic slowdown, joblessness, agrarian distress and land ownership rights of tribals in Chhota Nagpur and Santhal Parganas areas of Jharkhand. The Raghubar Das government passing the Chhota Nagpur Tenancy and Santhal Parganas Tenancy laws to acquire land from tribals was used to the hilt by the opposition to paint the BJP as anti-tribal, and it led to a huge consolidation of tribal votes against the BJP. The recent election result reflected so tellingly the BJP's alienation from tribals: the JMM and the Congress won 25 of the 28 assembly seats reserved for tribals. So strong was the anti-incumbency that Das himself lost the election in Jamshedpur East constituency to his senior BJP rebel Saryu Roy, and his party's state unit chief and the assembly speaker also bit the dust.
Like post-election in Maharashtra, the Jharkhand result once again showed the BJP's inability to retain its allies. The squabble in Maharashtra saw the BJP's oldest Hindutva ally, the Shiv Sena, parting ways and doing what was previously thought unthinkable: aligning with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party to form government. And a feud over seat-sharing in Jharkhand saw the BJP and its long-standing partner All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU) breaking the alliance and contesting the poll separately. The BJP-AJSU break-up in Jharkhand cost both dearly, more the BJP which lost several seats by margins due to the split in votes with the AJSU. The loss of an important tribal and regional ally proved too powerful for the BJP to take on the JMM-Congress alliance. The Congress displayed its readiness to tie up with the JMM, the most dominant tribal party, as a junior alliance partner and benefitted from it. The AJSU has a sub-caste of Other Backward Caste Kurmis who have a significant presence in Jharkhand and their alienation also cost the BJP's OBC support base.
The Jharkhand mandate is likely to have implications beyond the state's borders. The snapping of ties between the BJP and the AJSU may have a compounding effect in adjacent Bihar where Janata Dal(U) is the BJP's partner in the ruling coalition headed by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who is a Kurmi by caste. In Jharkhand, the Janata Dal(U) failed to win a single seat.
The Jharkhand poll outcome has endorsed 44-year-old Hemant Soren, the JMM's Working President, as not only the inheritor of his father Shibu Soren's legacy as the foremost tribal leader of the state but also expressly manifested the electorate's backing for a tribal at the helm of the state's affairs, rejecting the BJP's gamble of propping up a non-tribal leader Raghubar Das as Chief Minister for the first time.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent for The Daily Star. He writes from New Delhi, India.
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