© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Across the country, regional parties, or those parties that have a presence in just one or two states, have had to make a choice between either tying up with the BJP, or if ideologically opposed to it, choosing the Congress corner. Several, though, have found safety in staying in the middle, while leaning more towards the dominant BJP at the Centre.
A look at how these parties are placed as Lok Sabha elections approach:
While the BJP has been trying to make inroads into Tamil Nadu ever since illness faded Jayalalithaa’s clout and allowed the party to pull the AIADMK to its side, the DMK that came to power in 2021 has held on in the state. In fact, the strong pro-Tamil sentiment in the state is believed to have hurt the AIADMK in its alliance with the BJP, prodding it to split from the party.
However, closer to elections, and with an aggressive new state chief, K Annamalai, in command, the BJP has managed to stay in the narrative. The DMK’s self-goals in the form of statements by its leaders calling for “eradication” of Sanatan Dharma and warning against a strong Centre, have been played up by the BJP as anti-Hindu and pro-separatism, respectively. The BJP believes this will help it strike rich at a time when the Ayodhya Ram Temple fervour has also found resonance in the state. Modi made several trips to Tamil Nadu in the run-up to the polls.
The Congress will hope that its DMK-led alliance holds on – in 2019, the tie-up, also comprising the Left parties, swept Tamil Nadu, winning 38 of the 39 seats. The NDA, then including the AIADMK, won just 1 seat. The BJP drew a blank.
This time, with the AIADMK out, the BJP is in talks with the AIADMK spin-offs led by O Paneerselvam and T T V Dhinakaran.
The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has been a powerful player in West Bengal for more than a decade now, but the BJP has made significant inroads. In 2019, it stunned the TMC by winning 18 Lok Sabha seats to the latter’s 22 in the state. However, in the 2021 Assembly elections that followed, the TMC shattered the BJP’s confidence by storming back to power with a huge majority.
What might hurt the TMC this time is the damaging Sandeshkhali episode – reflecting the long rope enjoyed by its strongmen in regions – coming so close to the polls. The Modi government delivered the party another googly by finally implementing the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in the final hours of its regime. The largest number of CAA beneficiaries are expected to be refugees from Bangladesh settled in Bengal.
The INDIA promise would never have amounted to much in Bengal anyway, given the long and bitter rivalry between the TMC and Left in the state – and it remains debatable how much it would have helped the TMC given the Left and Congress’s decimation in the 2021 Assembly polls.
Mamata’s biggest hope then is retaining the support of the 27-30% Muslim population in the state.
The BJD’s Naveen Patnaik has made a habit of winning elections in Odisha, even putting the BJP in its place for a long time after snapping the alliance with it more than a decade ago. However, as he ages, with no successor in sight, the BJP has cleverly positioned itself as the alternative. Right now, the BJP is doing this by projecting itself as the BJD’s best friend in Delhi – never mind their rivalry in the state – but BJD insiders know from experience that it may not take long for the BJP to turn the tables.
If the talks that are on between the two parties for an alliance do fall into place, there would be no stopping either, come the simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly polls.
In 2019, the BJD won 12 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha, the BJP 8 and the Congress one.
In Bihar, the RJD has held on to its core base of Yadavs and Muslims – two large social groups – and still has steam left for a fight, at least come the 2025 Assembly elections. However, with the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) back in the NDA, the Mahagathbandhan led by the RJD and including the Congress is facing an uphill task in the Lok Sabha polls.
In 2019, the BJP-JD(U)-and Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP won 39 of the 40 seats in Bihar.
Right now, the hope on the RJD horizon is the shaping up of Tejashwi Yadav as a successor to his ailing father Lalu Prasad. In both, the Congress appears to have steadfast allies.
With exactly the same base as the RJD in Bihar, the Samajwadi Party of Akhilesh Yadav is staying afloat but clearly as a distant second to the BJP. One reason is that unlike Bihar, where Nitish still holds sway on the votes of smaller OBC groups, the BJP has walked away with these in UP. Further, the Yadav population in UP is smaller than in Bihar, and isn’t spread evenly across the state, resulting in pockets of influence for the SP.
In 2019, the SP won 5 seats out of UP’s 80 – in an alliance with the BSP and RLD – with the BJP taking 62. The SP has got a spring in its step though after the 2022 Assembly elections, when it won 111 out of 403 seats on its own against the BJP, establishing itself as the BJP’s only serious rival in the state.
This time, the SP does not have either the BSP as an ally, or the RLD, while its 2022 partner SBSP is with the NDA too.
Like the RJD though, the SP can take heart from the evolution of Akhilesh as its leader after father Mulayam Singh Yadav’s death.
The one politician who has seamlessly traversed the “secular”-Hindutva binary, Nitish Kumar is seen as back on the winning side after re-alliance with the BJP. With a small base of just OBC Kurmis, which he has assiduously expanded to include non-Yadav OBCs and EBCs, Nitish has stayed in power in the rigidly caste-bound state for almost two decades now.
In 2019, his alliance with the BJP ensured an NDA sweep in Bihar. However, the BJP is now clearly the senior partner in the alliance and the JD(U) is seen as a hangers-on. Nitish hence will have a task repeating 2019, when the JD(U) won 17 seats among the NDA’s tally of 39 out of 40.
Plus, having sidelined many senior leaders over the years, Nitish is staring at a vacuum in terms of a successor, putting the fate of his JD(U) under question.
Mayawati’s BSP, a Dalit-centric party that once came to power on its own in UP in 2007, riding on a Sarvajan theme that also attracted Brahmins, has been declining since 2014. Its performances in the 2017 and 2022 UP Assembly elections were poor, and it has steadily lost parts of its support base to the BJP.
In 2019, the BSP won 10 Lok Sabha seats, the most after the BJP in UP, but that was largely due to an alliance with the SP and RLD, getting it Muslim and Jat votes. This time, the party is contesting alone, if contesting at all, with Mayawati a cipher except for sporadic posts on X.
The last five years have not been good for TDP chief Chandrababu Naidu, since his loss to the YSRCP in the 2019 Assembly elections. In the run-up to the coming simultaneous elections, Naidu spent 53 days in jail in the Skill Development Corporation scam, before being released on bail on medical grounds. After that, he pursued the BJP till the party finally agreed to a tie-up with it, along with TDP partner JanaSena Party.
The YSRCP, formed by Jagan Mohan Reddy, after breaking from the Congress, dealt the TDP a stupendous loss in 2019, riding on Jagan’s 3,000-km-long Praja Sankalpa Yatra, covering 125 of the 175 Assembly constituencies. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the YSRCP won 22 seats and the TDP just 3. The BJP and Congress failed to open their account.
Fearing anti-incumbency, the YSRCP has shuffled candidates, but also invited defections.
The Congress hopes the Telangana win will rub off in Andhra, but it is not likely to translate into much.
The raison d’etre of the BRS, originally known as the Telangana Rashtra Samithi, led by K Chandrashekar Rao, was the creation of the state of Telangana. This led to its back-to-back Assembly wins in the state, till it lost power in the November 2023 elections. In the Lok Sabha too, it continued its dominance, winning 11 out of 17 Lok Sabha seats in 2014, and nine in 2019.
The last elections, however, saw the BJP make inroads, with 4 seats, ahead of the Congress’s 3 and the AIMIM’s 1. In the recent Assembly polls too, the BJP performed well, doubling vote percentage from 7 to 14.
The BRS, which is dispirited since the Assembly poll loss, doing apparently little to check the trickle out of the party, has to find an agenda beyond Telangana to hold off the BJP. Meanwhile, its leader K Kavitha was arrested on Friday in the Delhi liquor policy case, hours to go for the announcement of the polls.
The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha formed the government in the Assembly elections held towards end-2019, in alliance with the Congress and RJD. That alliance has held, even as CM Hemant Soren had to step down from his post and is now in jail over corruption allegations. With JMM founder and Hemant’s father Shibu Soren ailing, there is no real charismatic leader to pull the party along, though Hemant’s wife Kalpana is projecting herself as that face.
In 2019, the BJP, riding on a Modi wave, swept the Lok Sabha seats in the state – winning 12 of the 14 (BJP 11 and AJSU 1). The JMM-Congress alliance won 2.
Maharashtra politics has been in a state of flux since the Assembly elections in end 2019 left the state without a clear majority. While the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress managed to form a government, BJP-engineered splits – in first the Sena and then the NCP – have helped the national party enjoy power in the state as well as left its two former rivals floundering.
The official factions of both the Sena and NCP are now with the BJP, and the party is hoping that will serve it well. In 2019, the BJP-led NDA won 41 of the state’s 48 seats.
The Congress, a formidable power in its own right in the state once, now is dependent on the Sena and NCP factions with it. In one of the few states where INDIA was meant to have smooth sailing, the seat talks are still stuck.
The AAP’s free power and water schemes, and focus on education and health, earned it power in Delhi followed by Punjab. However, the Lok Sabha has been a different story, with the party never winning a seat in Delhi and reduced to zero in 2019 from four in 2014 in Punjab.
In Delhi, the AAP this time is banking on its alliance with the Congress – which is wobbly at best, given the opposition to it in-house; and incongruous at worst, given their rivalry in Punjab.
With the sword of Kejriwal’s likely arrest hanging on its head, and with several of its top leaders behind bars, the AAP is probably more hopeful of its chances in Punjab than Delhi, where the BJP swept all the seven Lok Sabha seats in 2019.
Even as late as 2004, the CPI(M) along with Left allies, had enough heft to challenge its partner UPA’s Indo-US nuclear deal. While its footprint was shrinking then too, it was a force in three states – Bengal, Kerala and Tripura.
However, now it has been swept out of the picture in Bengal and Tripura by the TMC and BJP, leaving the CPI(M) a force essentially only in Kerala. Its unprecedented back-to-back Assembly wins in the state, though, are seen as more a Pinarayi Vijayan achievement, than of the central leadership.
Conversely, while Vijayan wants no truck with the Congress – its main rival in Kerala – the CPI(M)’s clout nationally rests essentially on the Congress high command’s partiality towards it.
As Rahul Gandhi contests from Wayanad in Kerala again, the main factor behind the Congress-led UDF’s 2019 sweep of 19 of 20 Lok Sabha seats in Kerala, the CPI(M) remains bristling in Kerala. Its national leaders, however, remain hopeful of making some inpact with their INDIA partnership.
