Opinion Telling it like it isn’t

In the aftermath of BJP victories in eight out of 10 civic bodies in Madhya Pradesh last week, JP leaders in Delhi and Bhopal have tried to paint the results as the people’s verdict on the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in general and on its involvement in the admission and recruitment scam called Vyapam, specifically.

They prove that the people believe in the innocence of the Chouhan government, they have claimed. This attempt to read a larger mandate — and a larger exoneration — into the municipal poll outcomes is predictable. It is also misguided. Certainly, the BJP’s Madhya Pradesh triumphs are remarkable. They are an indication that the party that has won three successive assembly victories in the state under the leadership of Chouhan has still not lost its winning touch. But at the same time, it is also true that local body polls cannot always be taken to be accurate or adequate predictors of the electorate’s inclinations in larger poll arenas at the assembly or parliamentary levels, or as a mandate on all the major issues in the fray.

The salience that any issue acquires in an election, moreover, is also determined by the perseverance and imagination, as well as the organisational and mobilisational strength, of the political opposition. For all the Congress’s noise and fury on Vyapam in Delhi—it is one of the issues over which it stalled the monsoon session of Parliament — it is possible that the party was unable to sharply frame the issue for the voter in Madhya Pradesh and for that the reasons are not far to seek.

Out of power for 12 years now, the Congress in Madhya Pradesh is a demoralised force, bruised by the BJP’s serial victories and battered by chronic factionalism and infighting. Those are not the only reasons, however, why the BJP’s attempts to eke out a larger message from its civic poll victories in Madhya Pradesh appear ill-judged and inappropriate.

Over the years, politicians and political regimes facing allegations of corruption have tried to seize upon poll verdicts, at whatever level, to claim vindication from the “people’s court”. This is a disturbing phenomenon in a constitutional democracy where if one kind of legitimacy comes from the people’s mandate, another kind depends on the rule of law, and where attempts to paint an antagonism between the two misunderstand the nature of, and are disrespectful to, both domains.