Sharper, smarter Congress no match for BJP’s Modi-led saffron tsunami

Proving pollsters and political pundits wrong, a saffron tsunami swept across the Hindi heartland on Sunday (December 3), as Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan all voted the BJP to power, leaving a shocked Congress with a lone consolation in its victory in Telangana.

The results, which come just five months ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha polls, further bolster Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image as an invincible mascot for his party as the BJP had departed from its tradition of declaring chief ministerial candidates in the poll-bound states. The party fought the polls in Modi’s name and, as the results came in, it was no surprise that party leaders, including Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and former CMs or Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje, rushed to credit the Prime Minister for the victory.

The comprehensive victories will allow the PM and his party to brazen out the Opposition’s criticism over issues such as price rise, spiralling unemployment, cronyism in the Adani saga and, unfortunately, even Modi’s silence on the continuing unrest in Manipur. With Parliament set to convene for its winter session on Monday (December 4), the BJP can be expected to roll out a thunderous welcome for the Prime Minister when he arrives in the Lok Sabha to face predictable protests by the Opposition on a number of issues.

Triple whammy for Congress

For the Congress, the triple whammy in the Hindi heartland is bound to extract a heavy political price despite the positive result from Telangana in the South. The defeats, particularly in MP and Chhattisgarh, would blunt the optimism that had palpably rejuvenated the Congress after its impressive assembly victories in Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka.

All through the hectic campaign, the Congress had sounded sure of its claims of imminent victories in MP, Chhattisgarh and Telangana while expressing cautious optimism over the possibility of breaking Rajasthan’s three-decade trend of incumbent governments being voted out. The Grand Old Party’s leadership troika of Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi had campaigned extensively in each state with a confidence that, in a rare instance, rivalled Modi’s.

The results, though, showed that the Congress had read the tea leaves all wrong. In both Chhattisgarh and MP, states where even most exit polls predicted a Congress win, the results didn’t just favour the BJP but left the Congress severely bruised as several of its heavyweights lost the polls. In Rajasthan, the restive truce that Kharge was able to forge between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot months ahead of the polls failed to give the Congress any reason to cheer.

There will, of course, be familiar assertions from the party of the need to introspect and apply necessary correctives once the shock of the defeats abates. However, for a party that was hoping to emerge as a pivot of the still unsteady INDIA coalition riding on the back of imagined victories in the current round of assembly polls, the results bring bad tidings.

The INDIA equation

Its INDIA partners, several of whom have already drawn their daggers at the party for its shoddy poll performance or, as in the case of Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, for being treated poorly, are unlikely to accommodate the Congress’s whims beyond a point if and when they do sit down to negotiate finer nuances of the coalition, including the tricky issue of seat-sharing arrangements.

Though the Congress can hope for its Telangana win to have a ripple effect on other states in the South where the BJP is not a favourite with the electorate and the Grand Old Party has reliable and strong regional allies, the story north of the Vindhyas is one that foretells further doom for the party.

The results show that despite the Congress’s strident pitch for a caste census to woo the backward and oppressed castes coupled with its populist poll promises and a shrill campaign on people’s livelihood issues, the allure of Modi, Hindutva and that much-publicised chimera called vikas (development), backed by the BJP’s formidable coffers and election-fighting machinery, still has voters in the populous Hindi heartland states under a hypnotic spell.

The Congress may have managed to infuse some razzmatazz in its poll campaigns over the past year and showed both an impressive belligerence against the mighty BJP and an appetite for a fight that was all but missing from its poll wars against the saffron party for the past five years. Yet, it still has no message that can effectively counter the saffron front’s monosyllabic vote-winning battle call – Modi.