INDIA Alliance Gaining an Edge

The results for the seven Assembly seats falling under six states should be heartening for the new opposition alliance INDIA as four of the seats were captured by parties that are allies of the INDIA.

Three remaining seats have gone to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But it will be the loss of the Ghosi seat in eastern Uttar Pradesh that will be rued most by the BJP.

The seat was held by Dara Singh of Samajwadi Party (SP) who resigned from the party and contested on the BJP ticket only to lose to the new SP candidate Sudhakar Singh.

Going by the numbers—three wins by the BJP and four for the INDIA allies—it can be said that there is no hint of a definitive tilt in favour of the INDIA yet. Of the seven seats where the bypolls were held, three were held by the BJP while Congress, Communist Party Marxist (CPM), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) held the remaining.

However, the significance lies in places where the parties have gained or lost. The UDF candidate Chandy Oommen’s victory over the LDF candidate at Puthuppally was a foregone conclusion as the winning candidate was son of legendary Kerala leader and two-term chief minister Oommen Chandy.

The BJP’s continued poor performance in the byelection indicates that the bipartisan nature of contests in the State still does not brook a third party and ironically, the winner and the loser are both allies within the INDIA.

Similarly, the JMM and the BJP have retained their seats in Dumri in Jharkhand and Bageshwar in Uttarakhand respectively, signaling continued dominance of the parties ruling the two states.

In both cases, the winning candidates are wives of MLAs whose death caused the vacancies. In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) by wresting the Dhupguri seat from the BJP has shown that the saffron party’s fortune are on the downswing.

However, the winning margin being thin, the BJP can still hinge its hope on popular favour returning to its side.

The BJP had fielded a woman, the widow of a CRPF Jawan who was killed in a terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir.

Two of the winning seats—Boxanagar and Dhanpur—for the BJP have come from Tripura, a northeastern state. Of these, the party has retained the Dhanpur while wresting Boxanagar from the CPM. Surprisingly, the winning BJP candidate from Boxanagar is a Muslim who trounced another Muslim from the CPM.

The loss of Ghosi in Uttar Pradesh by the BJP should hurt the party most. The seat was held by the SP’s Dara Singh who resigned from the party, vacated the seat, and contested again only to lose it. The margin of defeat i.e., over 42,000 should be dumbfounding.

Curiously, the BJP had won new allies such as Apna Dal and Suheldev Samaj Bhartiya Party (SBSP) which had recently joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) quitting the SP-led local alliance.

Besides this, the NDA had the support of the Nishad Party led by Sanjay Nishad, a cabinet minister in the Yogi Adityanath ministry.

The result is bound to disturb the caste equations and minor party alliances in the key Hindi state where politics has much to do with caste-based sympathies and rivalries.

All that can be said now is that the INDIA alliance has begun gaining an edge over the NDA.