The numerical significance of the 71 constituencies spread across nine states where polling was held on Monday, may appear relatively unimportant compared to the over 300 seats where polling has concluded in the first three phases of the ongoing Lok Sabha elections. However, in a contest that is expected to be closer than it appears, these 71 seats will be crucial in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s re-election bid.
In 2014, riding on a strong anti-Congress and pro-Modi wave, the BJP had swept 45 of these 71 seats while its allies had bagged another 11. The big question is how many of the 45 constituencies will the BJP be successful in retaining this time around, particularly since many of these are not its traditional strongholds.
The state-wise break-up of the seats where polling was held is – Bihar (5), Jharkhand (3), Madhya Pradesh (6), Maharashtra (17), Odisha (6), Rajasthan (13), Uttar Pradesh (13) and West Bengal (8).
Electorally, a large number of these constituencies have a bipolar contest with the BJP or its ally as the principal defender and the Congress or a regional Opposition party as the main challenger. For instance, the six seats in MP and the 13 in Rajasthan are set for a straight contest between the Congress and the BJP while in Maharashtra, the fight is between the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance and the Congress-NCP combine.
A major reason for the BJP’s stunning 2014 victory was the near absolute decimation of the Congress and its allies in the Hindi heartland states of UP, MP, Rajasthan, Bihar and Jharkhand.
The first post-2014 electoral upset for the seemingly invincible Modi had come from Bihar when the grand alliance of the RJD, JD (U) and Congress had won an absolute majority in the 2015 assembly polls. The mahagathbandhan of Lalu Yadav, Nitish Kumar and the Congress, however, ended a little over a year later and the political landscape of Bihar has changed significantly since the JD (U), back in alliance with the BJP, and Modi’s allies like RLSP chief Upendra Kushwaha and Jitan Ram Manjhi entering the grand Opposition alliance. Of the five Lok Sabha seats in Bihar that witnessed polling on Monday, the most keenly watched contest is in Begusarai where CPI nominee and youth leader Kanhaiya Kumar is pitted against Union minister Giriraj Singh and mahagathbandhan candidate Tanveer Hasan but the other four seats – Munger, Samastipur, Darbhanga and Ujiarpur – have largely straight contests between the NDA and UPA nominees.
While the assembly poll defeat for the BJP in Bihar had come mid-way into Modi’s term as Prime Minister, the saffron tide had witnessed a quick resurgence in the polls held for several state assemblies thereafter. The next major setback for the BJP came as recently as in December last year when the party lost power to the Congress in MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. With six Lok Sabha seats of MP and 13 in Rajasthan polling, on Monday, the BJP would be hoping that the ground it had lost four months ago was tilting in its favour once again.
In Madhya Pradesh, the only constituency witnessing polling in the current round that the Congress had won in 2014 was Chhindwara which had, once again, re-elected Kamal Nath. Now the MP chief minister has made way for his son Nakul Nath as the Congress nominee from the seat and the BJP, it appears, is hardly putting up a fight to win Chhindwara. The Congress vs BJP contest on the other five seats – Sidhi, Shahdol, Jabalpur, Mandla and Balaghat – has been a close one and Nath is hoping that his brief stint as MP chief minister will help his party avenge its humiliation of 2014.
In Rajasthan, the 13 seats where polling is underway had all been won by the BJP in 2014. These constituencies include Jodhpur, Tonk, Ajmer and Chittorgarh, strongholds of the Congress chief minister Ashok Gehlot and his deputy Sachin Pilot, and districts which the BJP had performed poorly in during the December assembly polls. Political observers believe that the Congress has not been able to maintain its electoral buoyancy in the state over the past four months in wake of the factional clashes between Gehlot and deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot while the BJP had begun preparations for the Lok Sabha fight immediately after the December debacle.
Much is also at stake in Maharashtra’s 17 constituencies which voted on Monday. Realising that their public sparring would only benefit the Opposition, the BJP and Shiv Sena struck truce months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls. BJP president Amit Shah, shedding the arrogance he is often charged with by allies, was uncharacteristically generous in the seat-sharing negotiations with Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. The Congress too managed to revive its formidable alliance with Sharad Pawar’s NCP. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had won nearly all of these seats in 2014 but the resurgent Congress-NCP alliance and the aggressive campaigning by leaders of these parties is likely to dent the NDA tally this time around.
In Uttar Pradesh’s 13 seats where votes were cast, the fight is primarily between the BJP – which had quite literally painted India’s most populous and electorally significant state saffron in 2014 by winning 71 of its 80 Lok Sabha seats – and the formidable alliance of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party (SP), Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Ajit Singh’s Rashtriya Lok Dal, while the Congress too is battling for relevance. In the current phase, SP bastions like Kannauj and Etawah which had withstood the saffron tsunami in 2014 are witnessing polling aside from 11 other seats which the BJP had swept last time. However, with the SP-BSP-RLD combine seemingly working on the ground and the Congress also showing some signs of revival in constituencies like Unnao, Shahjahanpur, Farrukhabad and Kanpur, the going may not be as smooth for the BJP as Modi and Shah would have liked.
The fourth phase is also crucial for Modi and BJP president Amit Shah’s long-held ambition of expanding the saffron footprint in West Bengal and Odisha. In Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress-ruled Bengal, the BJP has, over the past five years, nearly replaced the Left and the Congress as the principal Opposition party despite its rising vote share not necessarily converting into victory. The Modi-Shah duo is hoping that the ongoing Lok Sabha polls will help change. A similar scenario is playing out in Odisha where the BJP has been desperately trying to gain a foothold in a state which has steadfastly remained a bastion of Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal for nearly two decades. With former Patnaik confidante Baijayant ‘Jay’ Panda as its mascot, the BJP is banking on support from disgruntled BJD workers and leaders to make in-roads in Odisha. The Modi-Shah duo hopes that gains in Odisha and Bengal would offset some of the possible losses that the BJP is likely to face in the Hindi heartland states.
