Electoral Losses Bite Bharatiya Janata Party Yet Again

After having lost the majority mandate in the Parliamentary polls 2024, it’s a major setback for an already crestfallen and damaged Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They have lost all, but two, Assembly constituencies in the bypolls held across a few states in India on July 10, 2024. From the North in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Punjab, the BJP has lost in the East, and, predictably, in the South of India as well.

This, the latest in a series of decisive defeats, is another nail in the BJP’s electoral coffin, despite its formidable money power. Perhaps, the most significant of the BJP defeats is in the holy bastion of Badrinath in Uttarakhand. This is also one of the most sacred Hindu religious spots but clearly the Char Dham project, as in Ayodhya, has yet again shown that yet again the religion-card has totally failed in the Hindi heartland.

The drubbing in Badrinath follows the drubbing in Ayodhya, Shrawasti and Chitrakoot in UP, the holy citadels of Hinduism, with the inheritance of Ram across this landscape. The irony is, that Modi was trying to transform Badrinath, situated in an ecologically fragile and vulnerable Himalaya, as another symbol of Hindutva.

In this sublime natural scenario, they have been wanting to build brick and cement structures, a concrete jungle, as Dehradun-based environmentalist, Dr Shivani Pandey, told The Citizen.

The dynamiting of the young Himalayan hills, dumping of concrete waste in the mountains, continued, and lakhs of trees were cut. “Not one beautiful tree in the Char Dham stretch from Rishikesh, to Gangotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, has been left,” Dr Pandey said.

Hence, the people of Badrinath have yet again taught a lesson to the BJP, and sent a clear message, that the Hindutva scheme of communal polarisation, using sacred Hindu religious sites, has not been accepted by the people of India.

In Badrinath, Congress candidate Lakhpat Singh Butola, contesting for the first time, got 27,696 votes. He defeated turncoat Rajendra Singh Bhandari of BJP by 5,095 votes. Bhandari, a three-term MLA who was earlier with the Congress anda former state minister, got 22,601 votes.

Significantly, a formidable Muslim candidate scored a victory in Manglaur. He has been a three-time Congress MLA. Qazi Mohammad Nizamuddin won the seat by a small margin of 422 votes against BJP’s Kartar Singh Bhadana. Nizamuddin secured 31,727 votes. Bhadana got 31,305 votes.

Bhadana, brother of Avtar Singh Bhadana, was earlier a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) politician in Haryana and a member of the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) led by Om Prakash Chautala. He has been a Cabinet minister in the Chautala government in Haryana. He has earlier won the Khatauli Assembly seat in the Western Uttar Pradesh’s sugar belt as a BSP leader.

The BJP has never won Manglaur since the small hill state of Uttarakhand was created bifurcating UP. In the 2022 Assembly polls, Nizamuddin lost to BSP’s Sarwat Karim Ansari by a small margin of 598 votes.

In West Bengal, the BJP has got a drubbing yet again. Totally lacking in confidence, the party in disarray after their decisive losses in the parliamentary polls, their cadre had, predictably, become passive.

So much so, they lost in their strongholds where the Matua community has stood with them in recent years, propelled by the mass phobia of losing Indian citizenship, manufactured by the BJP, in the Bongaon area in North 24 Paraganas.

In the bypolls, the Trinamool Congress has finally made a breakthrough in a BJP stronghold. Mukut Nami Adhikari defeated BJP's Manoj Kumar Biswas by a huge margin of 74,485 votes in Ranaghat Dakshin, while Madhuparna Thakur won against BJP's Binay Kumar Biswas by 74,251 votes in Bagda. This will mark yet another turning point for the BJP’s losing streak in Bengal.

The TMC’s Krishna Kalyani defeated Manas Kumar Ghosh of the BJP by 50,077 votes in Raiganj. In the Maniktala constituency, TMC's Supti Pandey, till the last reports, was leading by over 47,000 votes and bound to win against BJP's Kalyan Choubey.

In Tamil Nadu, Anniyur Siva of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) was leading in Vikravandi Assembly constituency. In Rupauli of Bihar, independent candidate Shankar Singh has won against the Janata Dal-United candidate, Kaladhar Mandal, by a margin of 8,246 votes.

The BJP has won the Amarwara seat in Madhya Pradesh. Kamlesh Pratap Shah defeated Congress candidate Dheeran Shah by a narrow margin of 3,027 votes.

The bypoll results have come as a booster for the ruling Congress in Himachal Pradesh and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Punjab. In Himachal Pradesh, the Congress bagged two of the three Assembly seats that went to the polls, thereby further strengthening the party tally to 40 out of the total 68 seats.

In Punjab, the victory in the Jalandhar (West) seat comes as a reprieve for AAP that could win only three of the 13 Lok Sabha seats last month, after having secured a landslide victory in the 2022 Assembly polls, winning 92 of the total 117 seats.

The story of Himachal Pradesh stands out on various counts. The victory is marked by Chief Minister Thakur Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s wife, Kamlesh Thakur, entering active politics from the Dehra constituency.

These by-polls were also seen as a measure of Sukhu’s popularity. The other winners are Hardeep Singh Bawa from Nalagarh and BJP’s Ashish Sharma from Hamirpur.

The three BJP candidates in fray, Sharma, Hoshyar Singh and B. L. Thakur had won the 2022 Assembly polls in 2022 as independents and had tendered their resignations after six Congress MLAs had jumped over to the saffron party following the Rajya Sabha polls held in February this year.

The six Congress MLAs, along with the three independents, had voted in favour of the BJP candidate Harsh Mahajan, who, eventually, won by toss, following a tie with the Rajya Sabha candidate of the Congress, top advocate, Abhishek Manu Singhvi.

The six had later joined the BJP after their suspension for defying the party whip to vote for the state budget and finance bill. They had contested the by-polls held alongside the parliamentary polls as BJP candidates and only two of them could win.

The three independents had tendered their resignations in the hope of contesting the by-polls held alongside the Lok Sabha polls as BJP nominees, but Speaker Kuldeep Singh Pathania did not accept their resignations. The matter is now being contested in the Himachal Pradesh High Court when their resignations were accepted a day before the declaration of the Lok Sabha results.

The uncomfortable questions which these three politicians have been facing during the campaign included: “what was the need for them to resign when they were already chosen as independent legislators in 2022?”

In the Congress campaign, they were accused of forcing the by-polls on the people of the state. The same charge has been levelled against the party for delaying the acceptance of their resignations.

The BJP had campaigned largely on the issue of the Sukhu government “not fulfilling the promises made ahead of the 2022 Assembly polls”. It also cited the ‘rejection’ of the Congress government by the people, who had returned the BJP candidates victorious, on all four Lok Sabha seats in Himachal Pradesh in the 2024 polls.

Speaking to his supporters at his residence in Shimla after the declaration of results, Sukhu said, it was a victory over 'Dhan Bal' (money power). “The voters have delivered a strong rebuke to the politics of horse-trading and have voted to maintain political integrity in the state.”

Condemning the three independents, he said, “Rather than supporting the opposition in the Assembly, these MLAs left the state for a month and staged a protest to have their resignations accepted outside the Vidhan Sabha.

“The public has given a befitting reply to their obstinacy through the election results, which is also a good lesson for all those who were trying to destabilise the Congress government in the state.”

In his reaction to the results, former CM, Jairam Thakur, who had led the BJP charge during the campaign, said, “We accept this mandate of the Assembly by-elections.

“The fight for the interests of the people of Himachal will continue, from the streets to the House. The party will definitely reflect on where it fell short in these elections.”

Meanwhile, the Jalandhar (West) by-poll was equally interesting as the AAP candidate, Mohinder Bhagat, emerged victorious after having contested twice before on a BJP ticket.

In fact, it was musical chairs of turncoats going on in this seat. The poll was necessitated when sitting AAP legislator, Sheetal Angural, had jumped fence to the BJP, to contest on the saffron party’s ticket.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) candidate, Surjit Kaur, too played the same game. She was the SAD candidate in the morning, had joined AAP in the afternoon, and then returned as the SAD candidate, by the very same evening.

During the campaign, the party had gone on to withdraw her candidature even as she continued the fight under the Akali Dal symbol. She has fared terribly, getting only 1,242 votes; clearly, her loss means the continuing marginalisation of Akali Dal in Punjab politics.

Bhagat has reportedly secured a landslide victory by polling 58 per cent votes. The BJP candidate was a distant second, with Surinder Kaur of the Congress in third place.

Incidentally, former Congress CM, Charanjit Singh Channi, had won the Jalandhar Lok Sabha seat last month, with a margin of more than one lakh votes.

Responding to the AAP victory, party leader Sanjay Singh said this victory has given the message that whoever betrays the AAP, his politics will end. “We do not say that we have only good qualities in us. We must have some shortcomings too. If there is something, then we should sit together and communicate.

“If there are differences with each other, then resolve them, but stay within the family of the Aam Aadmi Party. If you go outside this family, you will not get any respect,” he said.

Stating that the Lok Sabha poll results were not as per party expectations, he said the by-election of Jalandhar (West) proved that the people of Punjab have complete faith and trust in the state government under Bhagwant Mann. Mann has said that the victory is a testimony of the good work his government has done in the state.

The bypolls are an indicator of more bad news waiting for the BJP. In a surprising move, Lalu Yadav has called upon all his party men and women to be prepared for a snap Assembly polls in Bihar. Interestingly, he has said that the fledgling Modi regime in Delhi might collapse in August.

Meanwhile, in a social media post, Rahul Gandhi said: “In the bypolls held in seven states, the results are clear evidence that the cobweb of ‘fear and doubt’ created by the BJP, has been decisively shattered.

“Our farmers, the youth, workers, small business-people and employees, every section of society wants to destroy this regime of dictatorship. Truly, they want to establish a democratic and secular society based on justice.”

Undoubtedly, to make their daily lives better, and to protect the Indian Constitution, they are totally standing with the I.N.D.I.A alliance. Jai Hindustan. Jain Samvidhan.”