The assembly election results in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan will send the opposition in Uttar Pradesh back to the drawing board given the fact that the state has the largest number of Lok Sabha seats.
While the Samajwadi Party (SP) drew a blank in MP, the Congress lost in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In the former, the Congress came down by 30 seats, and in the latter by 48 seats.
The state’s other player, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) polled its highest vote share in MP (3.32 per cent) while doing far worse than 2018 in Telangana where it fell to 1.38 per cent of the votes polled.
What does this bode for the INDIA alliance? Far from the election results sounding its death knell, experts believe that they underscore the urgent need for a strong and determined coming together of the opposition if it is to put up a credible fight in 2024.
Sudhir Panwar, senior Samajwadi Party leader, said the Congress had flipped the original concept of the alliance by saying it was valid only for the Lok Sabha elections.
Akhilesh Yadav’s decision to field candidates on 74 seats in Madhya Pradesh was a direct reaction to that changed definition. And though the party secured its worst vote share—0.46 per cent—the loss of Congress shows that it does not have the strength to walk alone. This will especially be impossible in UP, where the SP has 111 MLAs in the current Vidhan Sabha and the Congress just two.
Panwar said, “If anything, the results have shown that the voter believes that only a united opposition can take on the BJP. The voter does not get into the nitty-gritty of whether the alliance is for the state polls or for the central one. The ant-BJP vote will focus only on who can defeat the party”.
On Yadav’s refusal to attend the INDIA alliance meeting, Panwar said that no formal announcement of the meeting had been made, and so not much should be read into it. “The alliance will happen. As he (Akhilesh Yadav) said, the Congress has paid for its arrogance”.
No one in the Congress camp is willing to publicly analyze the results just yet. However, information filtering out of a meeting held on Tuesday converges around the fact that the party will make all-out efforts to convince its partners and new entrants that the results of the three states will not impact UP in any way.
“We will soon be on the streets in UP aggressively. We will have padayatras (foot marches) throughout the state and focus on unemployment and rising prices”, said one leader.
While BSP chief Mayawati has termed the results “strange”, she has not expanded on the meaning she attributes to the word. On December 10, a party meeting will be held in Lucknow, but it is unlikely to yield anything new. The BSP is likely to maintain its ambiguity and stick to its position that it will go in alone. However, with its dismal showing in the state polls, it has lost whatever bargaining power it might have had, especially over the fielding of Muslim candidates.
