Five States: on upcoming Assembly polls

As five States go to the polls with just months left for the Lok Sabha election, the temptation to read the results as pointers will be great. What makes the contest in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan even more interesting is that these will witness a direct fight between the BJP and the Congress, the principal players at the national level. Whoever wins would have hurt the opponent twice over. Additionally, the Congress is a big player in Telangana and Mizoram too, raising the stakes in this round further. Without a doubt, the results will have a bearing on how the issues are framed and the campaign is run in 2019, not to speak of the

effect on the morale of party functionaries and workers. But it would be a mistake to ignore the particularities of each State while reading the results as indicators of how 2019 will turn out to be. In the Lok Sabha election of 1999, for instance, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan voted overwhelmingly for the BJP after having elected the Congress in the Assembly elections just a year earlier. The BJP at that time cashed in on the widely held perception that the Vajpayee government was brought down unreasonably. In Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the BJP has been in power since 2003; Shivraj Singh Chouhan is completing 13 years as Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, and Raman Singh 15 years in Chhattisgarh, and anti-incumbency will be a factor, more than in the Lok Sabha poll. But the Congress appears to have its best chance in Rajasthan, which chooses alternately between it and the BJP.

Telangana is the new State added to this batch of elections as Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao chose to recommend dissolution of the Assembly almost nine months before its term was to end. Mr. Rao clearly wanted to uncouple the Assembly election from the Lok Sabha. There was no proximate event that could have resulted in a surge of support for his government as was the case when N. Chandrababu Naidu tried to advance the Andhra Pradesh election after surviving a landmine blast in 2003. Mizoram, where the contest has traditionally been between the Congress and regional formations, is unlikely to see a drastic change although the Northeast is one of India’s most politically volatile areas and the BJP has encroached upon the Congress space in parts of the region. The timing of the Election Commission’s announcement itself came under political scrutiny with the Congress alleging it was put off by hours to allow Prime Minister Narendra Modi to complete his speech at a rally in Ajmer. The Election Commission of India gave several reasons for the postponement, including a late request from Tamil Nadu to defer the election citing the monsoon. As one of the most important institutional pillars, the ECI will have to be above all suspicion.