Election Results: No Single Narrative
The India Commentary view
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By Our Editorial Team
First publised on 2022-12-10 02:14:10
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The India Commentary view
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In the results for the three elections - Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), there was no single narrative. The BJP won Gujarat by creating a record and increased its seats and the vote share. In Himachal, the fight was neck to neck and in the end the Congress surged ahead to emerge victorious in 40 seats despite there being less than 1% difference in the vote share of both parties. In MCD, the AAP won more seats than the BJP and will now control the body but it was not as if AAP blew away the BJP. With 103 seats, the BJP will be a formidable opposition in the body.
The results show that the BJPs hegemony in Gujarat (it has been ruling the state for the last 27 years) is intact. In 2017, the Congress had drafted young Turks like Hardik Patel (Patidar), Jignesh Mevani (Dalit) and Alpesh Thakur (OBC) and conducted a spirited campaign to give a huge scare to the BJP by reducing its seats to just 99 and winning 77 for itself. But that campaign fell short of displacing the BJP and since then, it seems that the air had been punctured from the Congress balloon. Instead of building on the excellent show then, the party could not retain talent (Hardik and Alpesh Thakur left to join the BJP and Mevani was given no role), was mired in infighting and defections and lost the plot. This time it conducted a surprisingly low key campaign and allowed AAP to capture more than one-fourth of its voters. The division in opposition votes helped but the BJP is so strong in Gujarat that even the combined opposition vote share would not have been enough to beat it.
In Himachal, the difference in overall vote share was just 0.9% but under the first past the post system, the Congress managed to get 40 seats and the BJP lost 19 seats from its 2017 tally of 44. This showed that there was something wrong with the famed election machinery of the BJP as it could not manage booths where it was weak. The Congress ran a spirited campaign using local leaders (mainly the family of late Virbhadra Singh) and pinned the BJP on unfulfilled promises. The BJP gave a tough fight but it got nearly 4% less votes than it got in 2017 and in the end that is what titled the scales against it.
The MCD elections showed that AAP cleverly convinced the people of Delhi about the 'double engine' government of its own and the inefficiency and corruption of the BJP-run Corporation. It used its record of efficient service delivery in Delhi and asked people to elect a councillor from the same party to get seamless services. The BJP put up a good fight as its local leaders have a good connect with the people but they were hampered by not having a local leader to match Kejriwal's charisma.
These results show that the BJP can be beaten in north India. But they also show that it is not completely down and out. In both Himachal and Delhi, its vote share is healthy. Unlike the Congress, the party learns from its defeats and uses its infrastructure and election machinery to take remedial steps, as it did in Gujarat after the scare in 2017. The opposition will have to be ready to counter that.
