The high-stakes crucial Hindi heartland Assembly poll results, due on Sunday morning, are set to establish another round of tone and tenor in national politics, with the BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi looking forward to maintaining the winning momentum in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The poll results are vital for the newly formed stakeholders of the Opposition coalition called INDIA.
Not only are Assembly polls crucial, but the fortunes of Union Ministers Narendra Singh Tomar, Faggan Singh Kulaste, and Prahlad Singh Patel, along with 18 other MPs, are also to be gauged in these polls, touted as semifinals to 2024. The Congress is eyeing the role of the big brother of INDIA Bloc in the General Elections by retaining Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, recapturing Madhya Pradesh, and wresting power the Telangana.
The grand old party is quite hopeful to resurrect in the southern bastion by dislodging the 10-year-old K Chandrashekhar Rao Government in Telangana. The Congress had bifurcated Andhra Pradesh to reap the political harvest, but ever since then, it has been ruled by regional parties. Votes cast in the Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Telangana Assembly polls will be counted on Sunday. The counting of votes for the Mizoram Assembly polls is scheduled for Monday.
Stakes are especially high for the BJP in Madhya Pradesh as the incumbent Shivraj Singh Chouhan Government was formed after dislodging the elected Congress government in the last polls following a rebellion by Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia. Now Scindia’s political spectrum too is to be evaluated as Congress looks at him as its enemy for dethroning the Kamal Nath government, and BJP views him as their Maharaja for giving another term to Shivraj Singh Chauhan. While the Congress is confident of gaining a landslide and believes that the people of MP would teach a lesson to the BJP, the saffron party is gasping for breath to write off the script from the public and political memory the way the saffron government was installed.
With the BJP not naming Chauhan as its chief ministerial face and making several regional bigwigs, including Union ministers, fight the polls to send out a message of collective leadership, the party’s performance will decide if the party’s longest-serving chief minister will bounce back strongly or will have to contend with an uncertain future. Shivraj Singh Chauhan has been at the helm since 2005, except for a brief period after the 2018 polls when Kamal Nath led a Congress government for about 15 months.
In Rajasthan, the key to the government lies with former CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia, who too faced similar eventualities as that of Chauhan in MP. The incumbent Congress government led by Ashok Gehlot is banking on his government’s welfare measures to break the three-decade practice of the ruling party being voted out in every election.
A loss may make the Congress look beyond the OBC leader, a three-time chief minister, who has not enjoyed the best of equations with his party leadership.
What is still wrapped beneath is the result of the Gehlot and his former deputy Sachin Pilot feud during the full tenure of the government. About 17/18 seats are afloat in the desert state in the hands of Vasundhara and Pilot for the 2023 assembly results. In Chhattisgarh, three-time CM Raman Singh will be watched as significantly Congress-sitting CM Bhupesh Baghel will be evaluated in his first term. Baghel gained popularity with welfare schemes for all sections, but Raman’s effect coupled with Modi’s magic in the 90-member Assembly will add on to deduct one more state from the treasury of Congress and BJP.
Ever since exit poll projections flowed in, it has created an air of anticipation, even though, in the past, individual exit polls have missed the mark. And so, the projected numbers suggest that the Congress’s hopes of a clean sweep may suffer a setback. A majority of the polls show that the Congress could find itself pipped to the post in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Even in Chhattisgarh, where the Congress is very dominant presently, it will be given a run for its money courtesy of a late surge by the BJP.
