Bengaluru: The election results coming in from five states, analysts put it mildly, is a wake-up call for the Congress party, which is in power in two out of three states going to the polls later this year and next year.
Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat head to the polls later this year while in Karnataka, assembly elections are due in the first half of 2018. The Congress rules Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka.
On Saturday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won Uttar Pradesh by a landslide and wrested Uttarakhand from the Congress. The two parties were running neck and neck in Goa and Manipur. The Congress won Punjab.
The scale of BJP’s victory in Uttar Pradesh is bound to overshadow the narrative of Congress wresting back Punjab from a Shiromnani Akali Dal-BJP coalition after a gap of 10 years, analysts say.
A seemingly strong anti-incumbency wave in Indian states, which some consider as one of take-aways from Saturday’s results, also does not bode well for the Congress in Karnataka and Himachal.
“It will be a challenge to recover from this. This would place huge pressure on Congress, and create a buoyant BJP in its bid for power,” said Sandeep Shastri, a Bangalore-based political analyst and pro-vice chancellor of Jain University, in a phone interview.
“The victory which the BJP has been able to achieve, it has given it a momentum which will help it take it forward next year in states where Congress will be possibly facing anti-incumbency,” he said.
Shastri does not think even the win in Punjab, and possibly Goa and Manipur, would be enough for the Congress to recover from the setback it received in Uttar Pradesh, where it fought the election as the junior partner in an alliance with the Samajwadi Party.
“Questions will be asked on their performance in Manipur, or whether they could have done better from the anti-incumbency wave in Goa. In Punjab, it’s a defeat of the Akali Dal and a victory of Captain Amarinder Singh rather than Congress party in itself,” he said. Congress had consciously taken a decision to announce Singh as the chief ministerial candidate in Punjab.
In Himachal Pradesh, the electorate has voted for parties in “rotation” since the 1990s, adding to the worries of the Congress government, said Ramesh K. Chauhan, associate professor in the department of political science, Himachal Pradesh University, over phone.
The BJP has turned Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, into its own bastion and the Congress is unlikely to cash in on any anti-incumbency wave against the government, said Ghanshyam Shah, an Ahmedabad-based political analyst and former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor, in a phone interview.
The BJP camp in Karnataka, the only relatively big Congress-ruled state in India now, is understandably buoyant.
“I am confident that people of Karnataka will vote for BJP similar to UP & ensure BJP’s magnificent victory in the upcoming assembly election,” tweeted Karnataka BJP president B. S. Yeddyurappa.
Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah said in a statement: “BJP couldn’t have won UP without using Hindu card as Modi is not even from there... Modi did campaign in Punjab but the Hindu card did not bear fruit.”
To be sure, state elections are fought on local issues, and the performance of the state government would have an overbearing impact on the final outcome.
Siddaramaiah says that Saturday’s results will have no impact on his state as, he claims, there is “no anti-incumbency in Karnataka”. One has to wait until next year’s Karnataka election to see whether he is right.
