Everybody loses, voter wins

The elections punished insouciant overconfidence of all kinds — Lalu Prasad Yadav and the Congress, in particular, were walloped in Bihar for taking the state's Muslims and Yadavs for granted

Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay Delhi

The underlying message of the voters in Bihar, Jharkhand and Haryana is that they brook no arrogance and do not bat an eyelid before punishing overconfidence. The subtext of the verdict from the three states is that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is far from cementing into a cohesive political coalition in the states and, instead, remains a loose marriage of convenience.

Barring the Congress in Haryana, there were no clear victors: the others have had to be content with either having played spoilers or reaching tantalisingly close to the finishing line. Regardless of how immediate politics in Bihar and Jharkhand is scripted, there is no doubt that political uncertainty there will recur over the next few months.

From a national perspective, the UPA has gifted the struggling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) with an unexpected revival because of inappropriate electoral alliances and a degree of hubris stemming from the NDA's spectacular defeat in May 2004. For the NDA, too, the elections have proved to be a case of missed chances — despite having started on the wrong foot, at the end of the round there is a realisation that the gains might have been more with better strategising. For the Lok Janashakti Party's (LJP) Ram Vilas Paswan, the heady forenoon of February 27 has resulted in a not-quite-tranquil existence, because he now has to keep his flock together even while seeking to widen his role at the Centre and the state. For the Rashtriya Janata Dal's (RJD) Lalu Prasad Yadav, the polls have shown that the wheels of fortune in Bihar have come full circle — along with Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala, he is a clear loser.

The elections in Haryana were clearly the easiest to read even when campaigning was on. With a clear Congress victory evident, the moot unresolved question at vote-count was whether the party would romp home with a two-third majority or a simple majority. It was poetic justice that the first official result that rolled out from Haryana was from the constituency that was Chautala's Achilles heel a decade and a half ago: Meham.

The verdict in Haryana is also simple to read: a massive anti-incumbency factor coupled with anger over the domination by the ABC (Abhay, Billu and Chautala) of Haryana politics resulted in a swing of 6.16 per cent away from the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD). Resulting in a swing in favour of the Congress, the verdict has left the other parties clutching straws. That the tally of the Independents was higher than the INLD's is indicative of the extent of Chautala's rout. The token two seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to win show its marginal role, and suggest that unless the BJP strikes effective alliances with anti-Congress parties, it has little to look forward to.

The Congress victory in Haryana reflects a general phenomenon: that its gains are across different psephological regions. The rejection of the INLD is total, whether it is in the Jat heartland in Haryana's west or areas contiguous to the Grant Trunk Road in the north or the Mewat and Ahirwal regions in the south.

Such uniformity is missing in Jharkhand, where the gains and losses in the regions of the Santhal Parganas and North and South Chhotanagpur are evenly divided. While the BJP and its allies gained in the Santhal Parganas and North Chhotanagpur, they faced significant reverses in South Chhotanagpur.   

Similarly, while the Congress-Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) combine picked up extra seats from South and North Chhotanagpur, they faced losses in the Santhal Parganas. Overall, the RJD had marginal losses compared to its performance in 2000, but it was nothing like its losses in Bihar. In fact, the verdict in Jharkhand is the result of a self-goal by the UPA because of the inability of the Congress leadership to thrash out a compromise between the rival claims of the JMM and the RJD.

In the May 2004 Lok Sabha election, the Congress led the alliance comprising the JMM, the RJD and the Communist Party of India (CPI), which won 13 of the 14 seats with a combined vote-share of more than 44 per cent. The BJP won only one seat with a vote-share of 33 per cent and did not have an alliance with the Janata Dal (United), which garnered about 4 per cent of the vote. Shortly after taking charge of the party last year, BJP president L K Advani admitted that his party did not have much expectations from the elections in Jharkhand because a combination of lacklustre local leadership and inefficiency in governance had resulted in the party's downward slide.

The Congress leadership's error was of overestimating the potential strength of the JMM's Shibu Soren and ignoring the fact that in the 2000 Assembly elections, the RJD won nine seats with a vote-share of 11.6 per cent. The Congress obviously factored only the vote-shares of the RJD and the CPI in the Lok Sabha elections and felt that their combined vote-share of 7 per cent would still leave the Congress-JMM combine with 37 per cent of the vote, sufficient to secure an easy victory.

The Congress erred on two counts —first, vote-share in Lok Sabha elections cannot be taken into account while forging alliances for the Assembly elections; second, during Assembly elections, contests are tighter and division of votes helps the more united combine. In Jharkhand this time, while the NDA consolidated its ranks, the UPA ended up splitting its votes. This had a definite impact in several seats — had the Congress and the JMM accommodated the RJD and the CPI, the UPA partners would have landed a clear majority.

The verdict in Bihar is, however, more complicated and has a direct link with strategic voting by the electorate and major erosion in the RJD's vote-base. The equation was more complicated because of the political changes in the state since the previous Assembly elections in 2000. At that time, the BJP had an alliance with the Samata Party and the JD (U), while the RJD had an alliance with only the Communist Party of India (Marxist). However, in the interim, Ram Vilas Paswan parted ways.

At the level of political idiom, while Lalu Yadav has managed to win elections since the early 1990s by raising the communal bogey and benefiting from the split in the anti-RJD vote, this time the principal issue in the polls was the continuance of the RJD. In hindsight, it can be said that the voter saw the election as a referendum on Lalu Yadav's style of governance. Coupled with a massive electoral swing away of 11.5 per cent, the RJD was further handicapped by tactical voting in many constituencies.

Going through the details of those seats where RJD candidates lost to either the LJP or the JD (U) by close margins, the voters rallied behind the candidate considered to have the best chance of winning against the RJD nominee. Whether this vote-relocation was part of the anti-Lalu convergence among his rivals is a matter of political debate, it is incontrovertible that while the RJD had benefited in previous elections by projecting the BJP and its allies as a "hate object", this time Lalu Yadav himself became the referendum point.

Barring Paswan, no other political party was able to gauge the wave of anti-Lalu sentiment. Given foresight, the BJP-JD (U) would have mounted a more aggressive campaign, and would not have left it till the last to clarify that Nitish Kumar was its only chief ministerial choice. The reason why the NDA has not ended up with more seats, despite a collective vote-share of more than 22 per cent, is because it failed to project itself as the winning horse, a failure that has been to Paswan's benefit.

The verdict of 2005 has demonstrated that Bihar is now as politically-fractured as Uttar Pradesh and that the Congress is still nowhere near revival in the state. The Janata parivar, which had emerged as the biggest political force in the state after the Mandalisation of North India in the early 1990s, has now splintered into several camps and alignments no longer directed by the relationship with the BJP. The JD (U) — and the Samata Party — had moved away from attempts to break Lalu Yadav's Muslim-Yadav (MY) formula, focussing instead on targeting those sections of the Other Backward Castes that were not getting part of the cake. This time, however, Lalu Yadav's Muslim-Yadav loss has been Paswan's gain.

It is the support of this section that limits Paswan's options: he cannot sleep with the NDA in the long-term for fear of losing the support of the neo-converts to his fold. Simultaneously, it would be an uphill task — and probably impossible —for him to entirely gobble up the RJD's vote bank. With the NDA having coalesced once again, the choices for the parties opposed to it are clear: eliminate differences and forge closer ties.

How this will be done will depend greatly on the abilities of the Congress leadership to broker peace between its warring allies. Lalu Yadav is down but not out, and no major alliance can ignore his whopping 21.5 per cent vote-share even in defeat. If Lalu Yadav is not accommodated in an anti-NDA plank, it might harbinger the emergence of a third front in Bihar, which would, initially at least, benefit the BJP and its allies.