Message from voters

Message from voters

Opposition parties are back from the dead in Maharashtra, Haryana assembly polls.

Interest in what had earlier looked like a soporific election suddenly perked up, with the opposition making a fight of it five months after being decimated in the Lok Sabha elections. Congress and other regional parties, driven to the margins by BJP’s formidable poll and political communication machinery, are back in the reckoning again. BJP’s aura of invincibility has been punctured. Both Maharashtra and Haryana will see coalition governments in place. Shiv Sena was indeed a partner in the outgoing state government but with a big difference: BJP retained all the plum portfolios.

Now Sena can be expected to bargain hard, even a 50:50 split of ministries. The other gainer is 31-year-old Dushyant Chautala whose 10-month-old JJP has won 10 seats. Both state elections had been seen as a done deal for BJP; even exit polls – all but one – signed off on that sentiment. It took counting day for undercurrents of anti-incumbency to bubble to the surface and Congress will rue its inability to put its house in order sooner. It can take a leaf out of the playbooks of veteran warhorses Sharad Pawar and Bhupinder Hooda, who put younger leaders to shame with their tireless stumping for candidates.

Hooda even went to the extent of threatening to leave Congress to have his way, while the defining image from Maharashtra was a rain drenched Pawar campaigning in Satara against a defector. Yet a win is a win and opposition will be again the loser if it sits back listless for the next five years. Voters are differentiating between Lok Sabha and assembly polls and there is no substitute for delivering governance. In that sense there is continuity from the Rajasthan, MP, Chhattisgarh and Odisha assembly polls.

The landslide BJP was expecting was not warranted by its poor performance on the economy – which is in the throes of a downturn with no apparent light at the end of the tunnel. In addition BJP flogged polarising bad ideas such as NRC, which voters are liable to have seen through. The verdict should be a signal to BJP not to get complacent, but rather to focus on delivering good governance and turbocharged economic performance to citizens. It’s also a message to opposition that it could soon turn the tables on BJP, provided it becomes less disorganised and more focussed.