New Delhi: The Congress is facing a crushing defeat in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, with the BJP sweeping the heartland states. For the Congress, a victory in Telangana will be the only solace.
After Sunday poll results, save Himachal Pradesh, the Congress will find itself nearly wiped out from the political map of North India, which accounts for the largest number of Lok Sabha seats, ahead of the general elections in 2024. The BJP will further consolidate its base in the region where it has established a near hegemonic presence.
While the BJP’s victory in Rajasthan did not come as a surprise, considering the three-decade tradition of throwing out the incumbent every five years, it is the party’s commanding performance in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh which left the Congress stunned, particularly since it was hoping to repeat its 2018 performance in these states.
In 2018, the Congress had won Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, while it had emerged as the single largest party in Madhya Pradesh. It is another matter that the BJP bagged an overwhelming number of seats in these very states in the Lok Sabha election held months later.
The Congress may draw consolation from the fact that, for the first time since the creation of Telangana in 2014, it will form a government in the state, unseating the incumbent Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) led by the outgoing Chief Minister K. Chandrasekar Rao, further expanding its footprint in south India where it won Karnataka in May.
The BJP’s victory in Madhya Pradesh will bear the stamp of its four-term Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who did not just buck anti-incumbency, but also stalled efforts by a section of the party to elbow him out of the leadership race.
Elections in these states and Mizoram were held between 7 and 30 November. The BJP’s triumph in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will help it shape the political narrative in the Hindi heartland ahead of the 2024 general elections, even as its hold in southern India has weakened.
For the Congress, which was hoping to outwit the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, the immediate challenge will be to regroup in the state quick enough before campaigning for the Lok Sabha polls gather steam. Its defeat in Chhattisgarh, despite the presence of a strong leader and OBC face such as Bhupesh Baghel, will throw the party into further disarray.
Even in Rajasthan, the Congress’s efforts to get the warring factions of Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and former Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot to patch up could not prevent the party’s defeat. Gehlot’s welfare push was the pivot of the Congress campaign, while the BJP targeted the Congress government on “appeasement politics” and “failing law and order”. The scale of the BJP’s victory means that the party high command may usher in new leadership faces. Former Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje would have held greater clout had the margin of victory been narrow.
Incidentally, in all the four states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the face of the BJP campaign, as the party desisted from projecting chief ministerial faces, playing the “collective leadership” gambit. In fact, in MP, the party had fielded seven MPs, including three union ministers namely Narendra Singh Tomar, Faggan Singh Kulaste and Prahlad Singh Patel in the electoral fray.
In Telangana, the BJP’s decision to remove the firebrand Bandi Sanjay Kumar, who was primed to be the party’s CM face, as the chief of the state unit months before the polls hurt its prospects. In contrast, the Congress state president Revanth Reddy emerged as the central figure of the party’s aggressive resurgence in the state, which was carved out from undivided Andhra Pradesh in 2014 by the UPA-II government.
The BRS’ defeat dealt a body blow to outgoing Chief Minister K. Chandrasekar Rao’s ambition to occupy the high table at national politics in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls for which he had even renamed the party from Telangana Rashtra Samithi to Bharat Rashtra Samithi. The BRS had been in power in Telangana since 2014.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also Read: Exit polls 2023: Congress ahead in Telangana & Chhattisgarh, BJP in Rajasthan, MP