Congress going from worse to even worse
The unambiguous message in the results of the elections to the State Assemblies of Maharashtra and Haryana is that the people have emphatically rejected the Congress and placed the Bharatiya Janata Party in the pole position. The October 19 verdict confirms the continuing decline of the Congress, which began with the 2014 lok Sabha election — and is expected to be maintained in the coming State polls in Jharkhand and Jammu & Kashmir. Not only has the Congress failed to retain both Maharashtra and Haryana, it has ended up pathetically behind in the third position in Haryana (where the BJP has got a clear majority), and was reduced to fighting for the third position in Maharashtra. The results show that the party has not been able to get its act together after it was drubbed in the general election five months ago and that both its central and State leaderships are clueless on how to arrest the accelerating loss. Interestingly, the Congress failed despite having State leaders who were the face of the party in the elections — Mr Bhupinder Singh Hooda in Haryana and Mr Prithviraj Chavan in Maharashtra — while the BJP went into the hustings without projecting a chief ministerial candidate and on the sole strength of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's appeal among the people. The results demonstrate that the BJP has emerged none the worse from the experiment, as it has reaped the benefit from contesting on its own strength. While it is true that the party has fallen short of the half-way mark in Maharashtra and will, therefore, need support to form the Government in the State, the decision to go alone has proved to be a risk worth having taken. The number of seats that the BJP has won is almost the same as that the Shiv Sena had offered it before the alliance broke off. The BJP has not just nearly doubled its number from the 2009 Assembly figure but also received a vote-share of 30 per cent or so — which is unprecedented for any one party in the last more than two decades. Any which way one looks at it, Mr Modi's charm, party president Amit Shah's organisational skills, the State leadership's drive and the dedicated involvement of the cadre, all contributed to a situation in which the BJP has emerged as the single-largest party in Maharashtra, leaving behind its nearest competitor with half the number of seats or so.
The matter of Government formation in Maharashtra is a process that will take its normal course, and much in this regard remains speculative as of today. But what is evident is that the BJP will be the dominant voice by virtue of numbers — which is not the same as saying that it will be ‘dominating'. Regardless of how things pan out, the Congress will not be in a position to derive comfort from the situation. Not only have the voters rejected the Congress-led State regime in Maharashtra, they have also snubbed the Congress's top leadership of president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi, who had made a strong pitch for an endorsement of the party. Congress leaders wish to celebrate that the BJP could not reach the half-way mark, but they forget that the BJP is poised to form the Government, and that the Congress has been thrown into the dustbin by the people. Will the two recent debacles revive the ‘bring Priyanka’ cryIJ