New Year has begun and politicians of opposition parties in India will be looking forward to 2015 with a sense of hope while the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will keep its fingers crossed to see what it has in store for them. After all, few other countries in the world rely so heavily on astrology as India does and astrologers attach a lot of significance to a New Year.
The biggest challenge and test of popularity for Prime Minister Narendra Modi is barely three weeks away when elections will be held for the 70-member Delhi assembly on Feb. 7. Results would be out by early afternoon of Feb. 10, the day of counting of votes.
Delhi is going to polls again within the space of just about 15 months. That is because the November 2013 elections had produced a fractured mandate with no single party gaining clear majority and the political equation so badly stuck that a stable government seemed highly unlikely with the BJP, debutant Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the grand old party Congress winning 32, 28 and 8 seats respectively in a house where the required magic figure is 36 seats.
Yet, AAP formed government with outside support from the Congress but Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal resigned in a huff in February 2014 after just 49 days in office. Kejriwal’s eyes were set on the general elections, which were looming large and were eventually held in April-May 2014. AAP fielded 440 candidates but could win only four seats. The rapid rise and even more rapid fall of AAP and discrediting of the Congress party, which ruled the Center for a decade contributed in a big way to what eventually turned out to be a Modi wave. For the first time in three decades, India had one party winning a clear mandate in a general election.
For the first time, the BJP cobbled up a clear majority on its own in the history of the party and Modi surpassed the greatest of BJP leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. The Modi wave continued in assembly polls in four states — Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir. In the first three, the BJP formed government on its own for the first time while came up with its best-ever performance of winning 25 seats in the 87-member assembly, thus assuring itself of a prominent role — the kingmaker or the king. Jammu and Kashmir is now under Governor’s rule and government formation in the state may still take some more time. But all this happened in 2014. This is a new year and Delhi elections are going to take place with new political realities.
The first and foremost of the new political realities is that for the first time since its thumping victory in the general elections, the Modi government is entering a battle of the ballot not as a clear favorite.
All recent opinion polls and surveys have placed the BJP as the number one party in Delhi but in a very tight race with AAP, which is not far behind. For example, the latest India Today-Cicero opinion poll gives the vote share of the BJP as 40 percent closely followed by AAP (36 percent) and the Congress a poor third with just 16 percent projected vote share. This is a new political reality, which may cost BJP dearly — the fall and fall of the Congress. One may find this argument strange but it is true: The decimation of the Congress is not in the political interest of the BJP.
Here is how. In the last Delhi assembly polls, the BJP had benefitted immensely as AAP ate into the Congress voter base. But this time the Congress continues to be in the doghouse with no sign of revival. Last time, many fence sitters who were averse to voting for the BJP had voted for the Congress as they were not sure of the debutant AAP and did not want to waste their vote.
This time, AAP seems to be on the roll once again with Kejriwal repeatedly and profusely apologizing for his vanishing act after 49 days in office. Kejriwal has now promised to give a stable government and good governance to Delhi for full tenure of five years. The chances are that Kejriwal’s apologies and his promise of serving for full tenure may eventually strike a chord in the hearts and minds of Delhi voters. This means that the number of fence sitters may be slimmer.
In fact, the voting pattern of fence sitters may work in the opposite direction than the previous time as such voters may not want to waste their vote on Congress and end up voting for AAP. Moreover, PM Modi’s election rally in Delhi on Jan. 10 could muster a crowd of just about 25,000 people, much lower than the targeted crowd size of 100,000 people. At this rally, Modi gave unusually large space to AAP and Kejriwal in his speech, signifying who he thinks his party’s real challenger in Delhi polls is.
Worse, Modi’s jibe at Kejriwal for the latter’s remark of being an anarchist and saying that anarchists like Kejriwal (though he did not mention him by name) should go to jungles and join the rank of Naxals did not go down well with many people. Modi will do well to remember iconic Congress leader and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s strategy of not giving any oxygen to the opposition parties and ignoring them completely.
