Test of governance

Neerja Chowdhury

Senior Political Commentator

The Bihar Assembly polls and the byelections to 28 seats in Madhya Pradesh will be the first test of public opinion in India after the outbreak of Covid-19.

The pandemic has affected voter choices elsewhere. It is dominating the discourse in the US presidential poll. New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern won a second term for successfully handling the coronavirus crisis. People are questioning — or endorsing — their leadership on the basis of what they have done or failed to do to tackle the health crisis.

This does not seem to be the case in India. At least not so far. Joblessness, compounded by Covid, has emerged as an issue in Bihar and Tejashwi Yadav’s promise to create 10 lakh jobs has found resonance. It spurred the BJP to promise 19 lakh jobs. But there are no signs of Covid having emerged as a poll issue. Nor has there been visible anger against inadequate medical facilities in the rural and semi-rural areas, an abysmal failure of public healthcare.

Since reverse migration took place in March and April on a mass scale, little information has come from the villages on how those who returned home have coped. The Bihar verdict will therefore be a barometer of what matters to people today in the midst of the pandemic. Rarely have economic issues been a factor in Bihar polls; they have been mostly fought on caste alliances.

There are reports that Nitish Kumar has been losing ground. But so far, conventional wisdom had it that Nitish would make it because the ‘other side’ was in a state of disarray. The last days have shown huge crowds coming to Tejashwi’s meetings. It may have less to do with Tejashwi and more to do with an underlying anger and helplessness in sections of the ‘janata’. The response to RJD rallies has taken the party workers by surprise and created consternation in the Nitish camp.

If people are looking at 30-year-old Tejashwi, in preference to Nitish Kumar, under whose rule governance did improve compared to the Lalu-Rabri rule, though not enough, it is time to take note. If the PM’s campaigning is not able to bail out the beleaguered CM—if that does happen—it will only go to show the nature of the crisis we confront today, which cannot be dealt with by trotting out old formulae.

Unlike Bihar, where the government can change, there is little chance of the government in MP being dethroned as a result of the bypolls. Whatever be the hopes that former CM Kamal Nath may harbour about the outcome of the 28 Assembly bypolls on November 3, the arithmetic is arraigned against the Congress.

The BJP needs only nine of these 28 seats to be able to form a government on its own. It has 107 seats in the 230-member House and is propped up in power with the support of four Independents, two BSP MLAs and a suspended SP legislator.

The Congress, on the other hand, will need to win all 28 seats to cross the halfway mark, given that it has 88 seats in the Assembly. Of course, Kamal Nath has stated that even if they manage to win 20-21 of these seats, they will be able to cobble together a government with the help of the ‘others’ who can always switch sides!

More than the survival of the government, what is at stake in MP is the prestige and position of individual leaders.

The one likely to be affected the most is Jyotiraditya Scindia who walked out of the Congress with 22 MLAs. It led to the fall of the Kamal Nath government—necessitating the bypolls. Sixteen of the MLAs who walked out with him belong to the Gwalior-Chambal belt, considered his fiefdom. Many of the MLAs were inducted into the Shivraj Chouhan government to please Scindia and enable them to fight the bypolls from a position of strength. The Congress had won 27 out of the 28 seats in the 2018 Assembly elections.

The role Scindia will come to play in his new party will be directly proportional to the number of seats he wins in the bypolls. Will he emerge as the new star on the BJP horizon, an articulate leader with a mass following who can deliver this region into the BJP’s kitty as promised? Or will he be consigned to the sidelines of the saffron party, as one of the many who entered its portals but did not get what they hoped for?

The BJP has both categories of people—those it has used and then marginalised. And others, like Himanta Biswa Sarma, who also came from the Congress but to whom the BJP has entrusted a central role in Assam and the entire Northeast.

The stakes are equally high for Chouhan. The best-case scenario would be to win enough seats to be comfortable without having to depend on smaller parties. And yet, not win too many which would strengthen Scindia’s position, enabling him to do backseat driving.

Theoretically speaking, the BJP-Scindia combination should have won most of the 28 seats, given that the Gwalior Chambal belt is Scindia’s stronghold. But that is not the way politics always pans out. He has to contend with the disaffection—and maybe silent opposition—of all those in the BJP who have been denied ticket in seats they considered their terrain for years, now handed over to ‘outsiders’.

The question that cannot be wished away is this: If the Bihar voter is gripped by anger, can MP, which had witnessed a similar phenomenon of migrant workers walking back and consequent loss of employment, be insulated?

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