Assembly bypolls lay bare a divided INDIA

It is never easy to forecast what the outcome of byelections — parliamentary or Assembly —means for a ruling party/coalition and the Opposition. These elections are generally treated as perfunctory exercises that have to be gone through per the rules when a seat falls vacant mid-way through a five-year term, unless the political context is significant and loaded with messages for another day. And such bypolls have dotted the political landscape periodically, serving as bellwethers or morale boosters for an also-ran party.

In 1978, when the Congress was battered and bruised after the post-Emergency rout, Congress veteran Mohsina Kidwai, who then headed the Uttar Pradesh unit, was fielded by Indira Gandhi to fight the Azamgarh bypoll. Kidwai wanted Indira to campaign but after losing her own seat, Rae Bareli just a year before, the late PM was demoralised and extremely reluctant to step out and face the voters. Eventually, she agreed. The Janata Party was in power at the Centre and UP but so deep was the antagonism against Indira that she sought shelter in a lodge because she was not given a place in a government guest house. She canvassed for Kidwai who bucked the prediction of pollsters and romped home a victor, besting her opponent Ram Bachan Yadav by over 35,000 votes. Indira left Azamgarh, head held high, and focussed on the Congress’s comeback in the heartland for which this town in east UP paved the way.

Over to 1988 when another Lok Sabha bypoll, coincidentally in UP, brought about a seismic transformation in national politics. The bypoll, held in Allahabad, had a murky background. The Congress ruled the Centre with an unprecedented majority under Rajiv Gandhi, then the Prime Minister. At the peak of his popularity, Gandhi started to lose the trust of his one-time favourite and his finance minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh.

Singh, on a moral high, zealously began cleaning the system with his raids on business houses, some of which were owned by Gandhi’s friends. He was shifted to the defence ministry. Singh promptly announced a probe into the Bofors deal, which was transacted when Gandhi was the defence minister. Their relations soured, Singh resigned in April 1987 and quit the Congress. In October that year, he gathered a bunch of ex-Congressmen like Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammed Khan who too had serious run-ins with Gandhi and left the Congress.

In June 1988, film star Amitabh Bachchan, then a Gandhi buddy, quit the Congress in a huff as the storm over the Bofors purchase intensified. Bachchan had won from Allahabad in 1984 and that is how the city saw one of its most prestigious bypolls when VP Singh jumped into the fray against Sunil Shastri, the Congress’s candidate and son of another former PM, Lal Bahadur Shastri. Singh pulled off a stunning victory, underpinned on an anti-corruption campaign against Gandhi. In 1988, he formed the Janata Dal after merging his rag-tag Jan Morcha with factions of the Lok Dal and Janata Party.

VP Singh went on to become the PM of a coalition of contradictions that tried hard to contain the Right, Left and centrist forces for a while. But however short-lived his government was, the Allahabad bypoll, which validated Singh’s moves, left an imprint for time to come.

The recent byelections in four states had their share of the predictable and the expected. These were Assembly byelections, so no winner is likely to make waves nationally the way Kidwai and Singh did. However, the AAP’s victory against the BJP in Gujarat’s Visavadar is the equivalent of a water spring in the arid plains of Saurashtra where this town lies.

Actually, AAP had won this seat in the 2022 Assembly polls, but its candidate Bhupendra Bhayani, joined the BJP a year later and resigned as a legislator, perhaps taking his re-election with the ruling party’s backing for granted.

For AAP, a second win from Visavadar is deeply cherished because the party and its chief had virtually faded into oblivion after the Delhi drubbing, while their sole government in Punjab has to navigate choppy waters most of the time. Fortuitously for AAP, it won Ludhiana West too and became the highest scorer, wrapping up two of the five seats while the BJP, the Congress and the Trinamool Congress picked up one each.

Privately, the word from the BJP was that Visavadar has never really belonged to it since 2012, when either the Congress or the Gujarat Parivartan Party, a regional party that no longer exists, claimed it until AAP stepped in. Given the BJP’s killer instinct, it is surprising that it did not pull out all the arrows to make a fight for the seat.

Some may call it audacious, but Gujarat — famously described by LK Advani as the “jewel in the BJP’s crown”—has been on Kejriwal’s radar for some time. The BJP has ruled the state since 1995 almost uninterruptedly but for a brief spell by the Rashtriya Janata Party, a breakaway faction of the BJP that has since disappeared. AAP contested the 2022 Assembly polls and won five of 182 seats amid a strong pro-BJP wave while the Congress got 17. It has since lost one, Bhayani, but the recent victory has kept intact its tally.

Gujarat might be part of Kejriwal’s project to expand AAP’s national footprint even if the state remains hostile to the Opposition. The closest the Congress came to bridging the huge gap with the BJP was in 2017 when it won 77 seats to the BJP’s 99. But the Congress never built on the political capital it gained that year. This time around, its candidate lost his deposit in Visavadar while in Kadi, the other seat that polled, the Congress was a distant second to the BJP.

In 2022, when AAP contested the Gujarat elections, it kindled a curiosity in the underclass, particularly in the young, but apparently their interest did not convert to votes. For the moment, the success in Visavadar is a reason for Kejriwal to grandstand. However, the Congress still has a vast network of workers and supporters after decades of ruling Gujarat, so Kejriwal has a long way to go despite his claim that AAP will soon emerge as the BJP’s challenger.

The larger and more significant message emerging from the bypolls is the failure of the INDIA bloc to make common cause and put up a joint front. Whether it was Gujarat or West Bengal, INDIA constituents fought like sworn rivals. Kerala, where the UDF retained Nilambur, is an exception. There’s no way Congress-led United Democratic Front and CPI (M)-headed Left Democratic Front would join hands, even if the BJP was the main enemy. These two coalitions stare at each other from opposing sides of the fence.

Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist.

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