New Delhi: The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was defeated in each one of the five by-elections in four states — Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra — whose results were announced Saturday.
In Bengal, the party lost its former Lok Sabha seat of Asansol, where the by-election was triggered by the resignation of its former MP and Union minister, Babul Supriyo, last year. Supriyo himself also won the Ballygunge Assembly seat as a Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate.
All the elections took place in states where the BJP is in opposition — except in Bihar, where it’s part of the ruling coalition and suffered a major defeat to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in the Bochahan Assembly constituency.
BJP leaders, however, told ThePrint that the five by-election defeats don’t convey any message, although there is concern about maintaining the party’s momentum in Bengal and keeping its house in order in Bihar.
A senior BJP leader in Delhi said, “Our vote share in Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra hasn’t dipped — it’s more than 40 per cent. The concern is for Bihar where the RJD got a sympathy wave and our vote share went down despite being in power; normally in a by-election, the ruling party wins. West Bengal is another concern — we have to maintain momentum to maintain our tally. We’ve done good campaigning, but haven’t been able to break opposition unity.”
Bengal
In Bengal, the ruling TMC swept both the Asansol Lok Sabha seat and the Ballygunge Assembly seat, with its respective candidates, Shatrughan Sinha and Babul Supriyo — both former Union ministers and defectors from the BJP — winning by handsome margins.
In Asansol, Sinha won with 6,56,358 votes, while the BJP’s Agnimitra Paul was well behind with 3,53,149. Meanwhile Supriyo — who had resigned from the Asansol seat last year after he was dropped from the Union cabinet and defected to the TMC — won by a margin of over 20,000 votes. The BJP candidate was in third place here; the runner-up was the CPI(M)’s Saira Shah Halim with over 30,000 votes.
After her party’s victory in the two seats, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee tweeted thanking the voters for the “decisive mandate” and calling it a “warm New Year’s gift” — referring to the Bengali New Year, Pohela Boishakh, which fell on Friday.
The victory by Sinha, a native of Bihar — who the BJP had thus branded an “outsider” during its campaign — could give a boost to the TMC’s plans to expand its footprint in North India, alongside fellow Bihari and party vice-president Yashwant Sinha, another former BJP minister and critic of the Modi government.
Speaking to ThePrint, a Bengal BJP leader said, “It was expected — in the bypoll, as in the Assembly election, Mamata’s grip hasn’t slipped. There were shortcomings in our campaign but we can’t draw conclusions from the bypoll result. But Lok Sabha elections are a different ball game, and we’ll put up a decent fight.”
Also read: BJP targets 51% votes in MP in 2023, already working on ‘tech-driven’ micro-plans at booth level
Bihar
The BJP’s most striking defeat was in Bihar, where it’s part of the ruling alliance. In the Bochahan seat, the RJD won with a decisive 48.52 per cent of the votes.
The by-election was necessitated by the death of VIP MLA Musafir Paswan, whose son, Amar Kumar Paswan, was the RJD’s candidate and defeated the BJP’s Baby Kumari by nearly 37,000 votes, while the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP) candidate, Geeta Devi, got 29,279 votes.
The VIP was formerly a part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the state, but things soured after it contested the Assembly polls against the BJP in Uttar Pradesh and its leader, Mukesh Sahani, criticised BJP leaders. All three of the VIP’s MLAs defected to the BJP, while Sahani, an MLC, was sacked from his ministerial post.
During the campaign for Bochahan, BJP leaders — including Union ministers and dozens of MLAs — had camped in the constituency, to demonstrate that the party’s decision to part ways with the VIP had been correct, but were faced with a decisive swing towards the RJD.
According to BJP leaders, the by-election results reveal not only a sympathy factor for the RJD candidate as the late MLA’s son, but also show a shift in the upper-caste Bhumihar vote, traditionally a strong base for the BJP, towards the RJD. During the MLC elections earlier this month, five of the RJD’s six victorious candidates had been Bhumihars.
The results also show that the VIP retained the support of its base, the Nishad community, and that BJP’s need for Nishad leaders ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
After this victory, the RJD will be the second-largest party in the Assembly with 76 seats, just one behind the BJP, although this won’t affect the Nitish Kumar government.
Maharashtra
In Maharashtra’s Kolhapur North Assembly seat, Jayshri Jadhav, widow of Congress MLA Chandrakant Jadhav — whose death in December triggered the by-election — defeated the BJP’s Satyajit Kadam by a margin of more than 19,000 votes.
This loss was an especially big setback for the BJP cadre in the state, as Kolhapur is the home turf of BJP state president Chandrakant Patil, who had put all his weight behind the party’s campaign for the bypoll.
The Congress’ victory gives a boost to the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), comprising the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress, which fought the election unitedly despite frequent rifts between the three alliance partners.
After the results were declared, Shiv Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut said that the victory was commendable in the face of “false charges” being raked up by the BJP against MVA leaders — referring to several investigations by central agencies.
“The victory proves that voters have not liked the cheap and dirty politics played by the BJP. This is the land of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and the BJP’s hate politics will not work… All the three constituents of the MVA who fought unitedly have set a good example,” Raut said.
The Kolhapur North bypoll was significant as it is perhaps the last one before major civic bodies in Maharashtra, including Mumbai and Pune, go to the polls later this year.
Chhattisgarh
In Chhattisgarh, the ruling Congress wrested the Khairagarh seat from the Janta Congress Chhattisgarh (JCCC), the party founded by the late Ajit Jogi, a former CM, after he was expelled from the Congress in 2016. The seat fell vacant after the death of JCC MLA Devvrat Singh, a member of the erstwhile Khairagarh royal family, in November last year.
The Congress’s Yashoda Verma defeated the BJP’s Komal Janghel by more than 20,000 votes, while the JCC’s efforts to elicit a sympathy vote by giving its ticket to the late MLA’s brother-in-law fell on deaf ears — he got just 1,220 votes. For the BJP, it’s a setback in its campaign to recapture power in the state in the assembly election due in December 2023.
Also read: BJP turns to ‘Mission Shimla’ before Himachal polls, with pay hikes & thank you notes from CM