BJP Sweeps State Elections

For the first time in West Bengal’s state assembly history, West Bengal (WB) has Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) majority. Political analysts and the press in India have the predictable habit of invariably labelling state assembly elections as a “crucial test” for the ruling party. If the ruling party at the centre loses state polls, the expected reaction would be the argument that national elections and local polls are not the same, as people at times prefer to vote differently in the two segments.  

In the recent elections, NDA recorded a big majority in West Bengal, Assam and Puducherry. With his grouping scoring a landslide majority at 207 in the 294-member WB assembly, an elated Modi described the victory as the lotus blooming in one of the larger states of the world’s most populous country. The BJP-led NDA’s two-thirds majority has been a stunning success for an organisation derisively dismissed by opponents as hailing in vain from the “Hindi heartland”. 

BJP retained power also in the north-east region’s largest state of Assam, with a massive majority at 101 seats in the 126-member legislative assembly. In the union territory of Puducherry, too, it won a comfortable majority. This is the first time that a political grouping has been ruling in more than 20 of the country’s 28 states so emphatically in more than 35 years. In Kerala, the United Democratic Front (UDF) secured 102 seats in the 140-seat state legislature. 

In Tamil Nadu, TVK broke the monopoly alternated between AIADMK and DMK for several decades to emerge as the largest party with 107 seats. One-time superstar of the South cine-screen, the late MG Ramachandran’s AIADMK, and author and movie scriptwriter, the late M Karunanidhi’s DMK, are at loggerheads as to who should support whom in the wake of the fractured popular verdict. The Congress took a long shot at wriggling into the game of power sharing, as the TVK is short of only a handful of seats for forming a new government on its own.  

Lotus blooms

In WB, it may be recalled, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was tops for 34 successive years until Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress put an effective halt to the march. Thereafter, it has not been able to come anywhere close to staging a comeback in a state whose current population is 106 million, accounting for 42 seats at the 543-member Lok Sabha. Leader of the main opposition, Rahul Gandhi, accused the Election Commission of India of enabling the BJP to “steal” votes in the state legislative elections. WB’s outgoing Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee attributed her Trinamool Congress’s setback to “conspiracy and atrocities”.  

Banerjee’s 15-year rule comes to a halt in WB, where her Trinamool Congress routinely intimidated workers from other parties and showered favours callously on its workers. She did to the CPM in 2011 what the BJP-led NDA has done to her party this year. Time will tell whether the new setup in the state will come anywhere close to replicating what the CPM and Trinamool achieved for half a century. The victories have come for BJP at a crucial time, when the mainstream opposition parties has been launching coordinated attacks on the party they insinuate as communal in line with what the Western press uniformly chorus as “Hindu nationalist” party, that is, an euphemistic description of a fanatically religious organisation. 

The communists have suffered a big blow. Twice, Jyoti Basu, of CPM, was approached by the National Congress to head a coalition government at the centre, but his party vetoed the offer because its parliamentary strength was weak and could not last long. Instead of falling for temporary power, only to incur a humiliating collapse quickly, the Left Front decided to stay put in the opposition. 

In 1989, the Left Front supported from outside the Janata Dal-led National Front’s minority government. The Congress had a negative reputation for dangling a carrot at a vulnerable party in order to split a ruling coalition. Once a split was carved, the rump of the original combination found the promised support evaporated on some flimsy pretext. 

Red fades deep

With Kerala shaking off the Left government, the last bastion of Indian communists has collapsed. Communist Party of India’s EMS Namboodiripad, twice the chief minister of Kerala for short stints in the 1950s and the 1960s, split the party in 1964. When his party won the state election in 1957, the event was noted internationally as the world’s first elected state government in a multiparty democracy. 

CPI was pro-Soviet and CPM pro-Chinese. The differences cropped up seriously during the Sino-Indian border war in 1962. CPI went soft on Indira Gandhi, who clamped an emergency rule in 1975 for two and a half years. Indian Congress was bonded close to the Soviet Union, particularly after signing a defence treaty garbed as a peace pact months before India was involved in East Pakistan’s war of liberation to eventually emerge as an independent state as Bangladesh. Jyoti Basu was West Bengal’s chief minister from 1977 to 2000 before Buddhadev Bhattacharjee of the same party succeeded him to head the government for the next 11 years. 

In Tamil Nadu, the TVK, led by South India’s top cine-star C Joseph Vijay, is the largest party. In Kerala, the United Democratic Front, headed by the Congress, replaces a leftist government. This makes the country without a communist-associated government in any of its states and union territories for the first time. The Election Commission is embroiled in a big controversy amidst the BJP’s remarkable degree of micromanagement of elections, though a sustained attack on the Election Commission could harm the “largest democracy’s” international credibility. 

Rahul Gandhi’s unusually aggressive attacks on Modi in the past year have borne a stunningly negative outcome. Voters refused to buy his charges against the prime minister, whose foreign policy has met with humiliating and rude shocks, of late.

(Kharel writes on int'l affairs & media.)