POLITICS-INDIA: Ruling Party Humbles Opposition in State Polls

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 4 2003 (IPS) - India’s Congress party suffered a massive setback Thursday when it lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the central government, three of the four major states that went to polls this week to elect new provincial assemblies.

After losing western Rajasthan, central Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh states, the Congress party, founded in 1884, found itself completely wiped out of the populous, politically dominant and Hindi-speaking heartland of the country.

As a consolation, the Congress party retained Delhi state, which houses the national capital but is not in the same league as provinces like Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh that have populations of around 60 million people each.

The Congress party, which leads the opposition in the national parliament, was in power in all four states and expected to concede only Madhya Pradesh to the BJP. The sudden loss of Rajasthan and Chattisgarh came as a major blow. The BJP won landslide victories in all three states.

”We are disappointed à there has been some deficiency in the campaign management,” said Ashwini Kumar, spokesman for the Congress party soon after the results became apparent.

The resounding defeat is bound to reflect badly on the leadership of the Congress party by the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, whose projection as the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2004 general elections is a hugely controversial issue.

Gandhi, who personally campaigned in the four states, focused on such issues as secularism. But the pro-Hindu BJP steered studiously clear of religion and stuck instead to the issues of development and governance by state governments led by the Congress party.

In Madhya Pradesh, for example, the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate Uma Bharti was swathed in the saffron robes of a Hindu ascetic but focused her election campaign on the poor state of public roads, electricity shortages and irregular water supply.

The strategy apparently produced dividends. Analysts see the election results as a turning point for the BJP in its attempts to transform itself from being a party that harps on religion into a mainstream party capable of taking on the better established Congress party on its terms.

Kumar conceded that the focus of elections had shifted to the development agenda as did Salman Khurshid, another senior Congress party leader.

Delhi state was retained by Congress party chief minister Sheila Dikshit mainly on the strength of her efforts to build better roads, improve electricity supplies through privatisation and convert the entire public transport system of bus and taxi fleets to run on green, compressed natural gas.

An interesting feature of the elections was the fact that it has thrown up three woman chief ministers, including the BJP’s candidate in Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia.

In Chattisgarh, the BJP was forced to drop its chief ministerial candidate Dilip Singh Judeo after he was caught on video accepting wads currency in return for promises of mining concessions to an agent representing an Australian firm.

But the expose did not prevent the BJP from sweeping the polls and ousting Congress party chief minister Ajit Jogi, who has been accused of masterminding the sting operation against Judeo.

Judeo had to be sacked as a central minister by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee as part of damage control after the tapes were aired on several television channels in the midst of campaigning.

Vajpayee, who left for Nigeria to attend the Commonwealth Head of Governments Meeting (CHOGM) on Thursday, told reporters that he attributed his party’s victory to its focus on development issues and avoidance of religious issues.

Thursday’s landslide victories are likely to strengthen Vajpayee, who has been criticised by party hardliners for having sidelined the agenda of building a temple on the site in Ayodhya town in northern Uttar Pradesh state. There, a little more than 10 years ago, supporters of the BJP demolished a 16th century mosque.

Vajpayee has since publicly regretted the demolition of the mosque and has preferred to allow the courts to settle the issue of who owns the site, rather than allow the hardliners to go ahead and build the temple.

As a moderate, Vajpayee, however, commands the respect of regional parties who are partners in the ruling National Democratic Alliance that the BJP leads and are opposed to the temple-building agenda.

Vajpayee also scotched speculation that he would call for early elections on the strength of the BJP’s victories in the provinces and an economic boom spurred by a good monsoon and comfortable foreign exchange reserves exceeding 100 billion U.S. dollars.

Winning the elections would also indirectly help Vajpayee negotiate peace with India’s rival and neighbour Pakistan, where he is due next month to attend the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) meeting.

In short, this week’s elections are an indicator of which way the political wind was blowing. As of Thursday, it was blowing the BJP way – but a poor monsoon before the general elections next year could easily change the direction.