The Bharatiya Janata Party’s bid for a single-party majority in Jharkhand may fall short of its objective by a whisker, results and counting trends around 12 noon today seemed to indicate. The BJP seems set to fall marginally below the halfway mark of 41 in an 81-seat assembly, though this could change as final results are announced.
This means the next government may still be a coalition led by the BJP, and possibly joined by some independents and/or the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha (Prajatantrik), which is headed by ex-BJP Chief Minister Babulal Marandi. A BJP-JVM coalition would have a clear majority and would be stable.
Marandi fell out with the party some year ago after Arjun Munda and other MLAs brought his government down. Since then he has been running his own party, with varied success.
The new game in town is to fight separately and cohabit afterwards.
Given the strong showing of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and Marandi’s JVM (P), and given the Congress-RJD coalition’s wins in some pockets, there is also the possibility of a non-BJP government in Jharkhand, but it would clearly be full of contradictions and remain shaky – the bane of all Jharkhand governments so far. So one should rule it out as a probability, if not as a possibility.
What the Jharkhand results prove is that the Modi wave has helped the BJP to emerge as the strongest party in the state, but the wave was not strong enough to beat back the counter-waves of tribal loyalties and rival coalitions, as shown by the good showing by the JMM, Congress-RJD and Marandi’s JVM(P).
Just as BJP’s Mission 44 failed in Jammu & Kashmir when the opposition recalibrated its strategy to stop Modi’s surge, the party’s showing in Jharkhand indicates that Narendra Modi will now have to spend time giving his allies due space and also rein in the hotheads in the Sangh parivar from taking the party towards Hindutva, sinking his governance agenda further.
The J&K and Jharkhand results are the first indications that the BJP, even though resurgent in most parts, has to recalibrate its strategy of going it alone all the time when the opposition to it is also beginning to see the need to work together.
In fact, if the JMM and JVM had fought the elections together, or the JMM and Congress/RJD alliances had entered into seat adjustments, the results could have been quite different. The rival combos would have equalled the BJP’s solo vote share.
However, it is also possible that parties fighting separately can garner more votes than when fighting together. The Congress-JMM coalition, by breaking up before the elections, has managed to garner over 30 percent of the popular vote- ahead of the BJP by a small margin.
This has been the pattern in J&K too, where the National Conference and the Congress fought the elections separately to tell the voters different stories in the valley and in Jammu.
The new game in town is to fight separately and cohabit afterwards.
0 comments:
Post a Comment