Assembly polls hold key to national politics

The two Assembly elections last year — Delhi and Bihar — went very poorly for the BJP. This took away the party’s élan. The fact that the crushing Delhi defeat came within months of the impressive Lok Sabha win of May 2014 made it only worse. The five elections to be held over April-May this year — Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Kerala — will therefore have much to do with the sustenance of the BJP’s brand value, and have a disproportionately large significance for national politics. In the ordinary course, this might not have been the case. Assam has a Congress government and the state ruling party will be especially vulnerable since it has already held power for three consecutive terms.

Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi also has other problems. Challenging his leadership, some of his former colleagues have split to join the BJP. So, this might be BJP’s best chance in Assam for a very long time. In Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, as in Assam, it has to be seen whether the incumbents can swing it. There is a lot of political experimentation on. The Congress will be battling the CPM hard in Kerala but will be engaged with the latter in a coyly-worded “strategic” understanding in Bengal to take on CM Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress, as both fear abject defeat if they don’t show even indirect team effort.

How voters will react is not clear. In these two states, the Congress, whose Lok Sabha performance was disastrous, would naturally seek to hold on to what it has. In Kerala, this means bucking the trend and returning to power. In this southern state, for decades, political fronts led by the Congress and the CPI(M) have won alternate elections. In Bengal, the Congress must at least improve its votes and seats tally. In both states, Congress may expect to gain if the BJP vote-share goes down.

Thus, in a larger sense, the upcoming elections may be seen as a continuation of the BJP-Congress political confrontation that was in evidence in the last Lok Sabha polls. There is also another dimension, of course. Even if the BJP does not make gains, will those parties gain that could potentially offer the saffron party succour in the Lok Sabha, if it came to the crunch?

The AIADMK and the Trinamul are potentially such parties. Since the elections will be fiercely contested, the Election Commission should brace itself for a tough test. At the cost of upsetting Ms Banerjee, the EC has stretched the polls in her state to six phases spread over seven days. The polls must be clean for the May 19 verdict to be respected.