The ringing endorsement of the Narendra Modi-led BJP in two of five states and its showing in two others just about sufficient to believe it could lay claim to power is yet another defining moment in Indian politics. The ruling NDA’s hands have been strengthened in choosing the next President and vice-president too with the numbers not so complicated as earlier, but not so simple that it can thrust ideological hardliners. What the polls have done is diminish the importance of identity politics to such an extent as to make caste and community arithmetic almost irrelevant even in a state like UP where little else dominated pre-poll talk than development and governance.
It’s in harping on the old caste/community formula that a regional leader like Mayawati lost so badly, with a bleak future visible for her BSP. Her state showed a propensity to change in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, yet she showed no sign of accepting reality and reshaping her policies, thus ending up fuming over electronic voting machines. If Akhilesh Yadav’s SP met a similar fate, it could have owed as much to strong anti-incumbency after two terms as the internal feuding leading to the virtual sidelining of its founder and old fox of a strategist in his dad Mulayam Singh Yadav. The family drama proved irksome and counterproductive. The youth formula of “UP ke bête” duo of Akhilesh and Congress scion Rahul Gandhi failed to capture the state’s imagination. The blame game has begun already on who brought down who after a pre-poll alliance that smacked more of commercial realpolitik than any great principles of commonality.
It is remarkable that the BJP, with zero seats in 2012 in Manipur, should garner sufficient support as to believe like-minded parties could join hands to overcome the Congress’ numerical superiority. Besides Punjab, where it was only the Akalis’ junior partner, it’s only in Goa that the saffron party faced a setback, clearly from lack of performance by CM Lakshmikanth Parsekar, who himself lost, along with five colleagues. Policy U-turns on casinos and suspected mining scams saw the image take a drubbing, allowing the Congress to stage a stirring comeback. That leaves a couple of regional parties holding the cards to decide who forms the government. In the small state too, it was performance or lack of it that was in focus, which conforms to a pattern of emerging expectations focusing on performance. The AAP came a cropper in Goa too, with its plan to test national ambitions on smaller states a clear failure. In the final analysis, triumphant BJP leader Narendra Modi is now seen as a champion of the poor after demonetisation and it will be interesting to see what transformational effect verdict 2017 has on national governance now.
