Their ascendancy in the Indian political firmament that gave the party 303 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections just five months ago, and that the party’s votaries expected would stay firm with them for another decade, if not longer, is now a matter of debate. Maharashtra and Haryana have not given the BJP or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) the numbers that they had wanted. The NDA has a majority in Maharashtra, though the numbers are less than the last time, and has fallen just short in Haryana. This is neither the sweep that the party had wanted – remember the target of 75 seats in Haryana – nor what the exit polls just days ago had predicted.
After the May 2019 Lok Sabha results, where the opposition had been reduced to the sidelines, the trend appears to have been somewhat reversed, with Indian politics now making space for parties other than the BJP. These were the first polls just five months after the BJP and the NDA gained an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, and were being seen as a sort of a mini referendum on the NDA government performance, especially after its tackling of the Kashmir issue. No doubt local issues play a major role in a legislative assembly election, but the NDA performance at the Centre was a crucial factor that had been worked into the campaign.
The BJP-Shiv Sena combine is set to form a government in Maharashtra, having worked up a comfortable majority, but the national party’s bargaining power has been reduced. SS is already pushing for a rotational CM, a proposal that the BJP, though it is far ahead of the SS in numbers, may just have to accept if it wants to stay on in power. The combine is down 26 seats from the 2014 figure and SS has nursed CM hopes for the last five years. It won’t give up easily on this demand. For Devendra Fadnavis and the BJP, the choice is limited at the moment. In Haryana too, BJP is down 7 seats.
Congress, despite having improved its performance, still remains a party that has not returned to its old form. It has not done as well in either of the States, making way for regional parties to grab a larger slice of the anti-BJP vote share. In Maharashtra its ally the Nationalist Congress Party has gone ahead in seats, and in Haryana, the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP), a newbie in the political field, has turned kingmaker and is actually exploring the possibility of a minority government backed by another larger party. In the coming hours, Congress will have to decide what it wants to do in Haryana.
The future, however, is not good for those who en masse defected to the BJP in the last few months since the Lok Sabha results, and before these two State Assembly elections. Their hopes that the party symbol would signal a victory have been dashed. This could well be a hard lesson to the defectors in Goa who too had hitched their wagon with the BJP in July, sensing that the party was on the crest of a wave that would not crash anytime soon. Not, that the wave has crashed, but it has lost some of its strength and this can only be bad news to the defectors.
The focus now will be on Jharkhand and Delhi, where elections are due next year. Which way will the voters of this State and the National Capital Territory swing? Finally, it is the voters who matter, and the voters know exactly what they want.
