WHAT IT TELLS ABOUT NATION’S POLITICS AND SOCIETY..
Given the fact that the broad
issues that the Bihar elections are pinned on revolve around caste, religion
and community arithmetic, the outcome of the polls will be interesting to watch
for how they would affect the further political discourse in the country on
some issues doing rounds in the national consciousness.
-- The poll result will, first of
all, tell vehemently that the Delhi poll debacle was not an aberration but was
a clear indication of things and days to come – an ominous signal which was
conveniently ignored by BJP. The logic will be supported well by BJP’s poor
show in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra civic polls which preceded the ‘no-go’ in
Bihar.
-- The most worrying social aspect of
it is that the country is indeed going through a rough patch with real threat
of communal and caste-based flare-ups if the fringe elements and intolerant voices
are not reined in now.
-- The message will be that people
are not taking developments like FTII row or appointments to other
institutions, JNU row, reservation policy row or the ongoing legacy wars to
claim legacies of the political luminaries from the country’s past.
-- It will be a direct testimony on
BJP’s performance. The message will be that the NDA government, so far, has
failed to perform effectively on its promises of governance and development.
BJP lost even in Jayapur in Panchayat polls, a village adopted by Narendra Modi
in his parliamentary constituency Varanasi. It will further reinforce the
demand that people need concrete development now, not even a blueprint will do.
-- Narendra Modi will need to do
some serious thinking about his political branding and imagery now, given the
fact that the Bihar assembly election was basically a direct personal fight
between Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar from JDU.
Nitish had left the JDU-BJP alliance in Bihar on NDA’s projection of Narendra
Modi as its prime-ministerial candidate and had stepped down after JDU’s
crushing defeat in the Lok Sabha election last year. Also, it is not about
other BJP leaders but about Narendra Modi. People have given BJP absolute majority
because of Narendra Modi and Narendra Modi will obviously be worried about his
political legacy.
-- We can soon see Shiv Sena walking
out of the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra. The alliance has been in
consistent controversies ever since the two old alliance partners came together
again last year. Shiv Sena, the big brother-turned-humiliated-junior partner in
Maharashtra is freshly recharged from its gains in Maharashtra civic polls, the
first big shot post Maharashtra assembly polls in 2014, the polls in which BJP
has performed poorly. The ongoing war of words between Uddhav Thakeray, the
Shiv Sena chief, and Devendra Fadnavis, the Maharashtra chief minister, may precipitate
into something big soon.
-- The outcome will make it
mandatory for BJP to do course correction with its politics, especially in the
light of the upcoming assembly elections in Punjab (2016) and Uttar Pradesh
(2017) – with realizations and changed requirements post the debacle in the
Bihar assembly polls. BJP’s alliance with SAD in Punjab is not so smooth and
the party has lost every subsequent election in UP after the grand show in the
Lok Sabha election in May 2014.