The election results from Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir have shown again that Congress’s path to an all-India revival is strewn with many obstacles. On Tuesday morning, it may have seemed that it was the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that would have a tough time. There was a strong anti-incumbency sentiment and a string of protests like those by the farmers and wrestlers in Haryana. In J&K, there was popular discontent over the abrogation of Article 370. The final results, however, handed the BJP a handsome victory in Haryana and the second largest party status in J&K, where the Congress will form the government with Omar Abdullah’s National Conference, the majority coalition partner. This will be a sobering wake-up call for the Congress, while the BJP will surely cheer up as it goes into the crucial and strategically important Maharashtra elections soon.
Haryana was for the Congress to lose – and how spectacularly they lost it! Initially jubilant with the early leads, the party cried foul as it started losing seats to BJP later, speaking about “serious issues” with the integrity of the counting process and functioning of the EVMs in some districts, and asserted that it would take up the matter with the Election Commission. But fingers are definitely going to be pointed at former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who has dominated the State party unit for decades and has been the chief architect of the party’s campaign plan. It was chiefly due to Hooda’s influence that the alliance talks with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) failed in the run-up to the elections. AAP drew a blank in Haryana, and bagged a minuscule portion of the vote share. But an alliance with the Congress would have sent a strong message to undecided voters and the optics of
that cannot be underestimated.
The clear signs of discontent within the party were immediately evident, with All India Congress Committee general secretary and Sirsa MP Kumari Selja terming the loss “unbelievable” and a “big setback” for the Congress. In the run-up to the elections, she was at loggerheads with Hooda over ticket distribution, but the ex-CM prevailed, with a majority of the picks from his faction. It is to be seen now if the 77-year-old Hooda, a Congress High Command favourite despite losing the state to BJP back in 2014, can hold his ground in Haryana.
While it is slated to form the government with Omar Abdullah’s National Conference (NC) in J&K, there again the results are far from satisfactory for the Congress. In the Jammu region, which is a BJP stronghold, the Congress could only win one of the 29 seats it contested. The BJP – despite the abrogation of Article 370 and the popular discontent it faces in the Valley – managed to emerge as the second largest party, proving again that its ploy to split votes along religious lines had worked to its advantage. While the Congress will have some strategic advantage over coalition partner NC, which did not secure a majority on its own, it will still have to do a lot of soul searching about where it stands in J&K.
The other signal from J&K is the rejection of the politics of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), as former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti’s daughter Iltija conceded defeat in her first election. PDP, which was the single-largest party in the 2014 elections, has bagged just three seats this time round, and faces becoming irrelevant. Mehbooba Mufti’s earlier claim that no government would be formed in J&K without her party’s involvement seems to have been made too soon.
Going into the Maharashtra elections, Congress and Rahul Gandhi have an unenviable task before them. What the party needed was a resounding victory to put it firmly in the driver’s seat of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi, the three party coalition looking to unseat the BJP combine in the state. Seat-sharing talks are on and while there are indications that the coalition is close to finalising a plan that all three parties agree to, there is no saying how the cookie will crumble now that the Haryana and J&K results have shown the limitations of the Congress. The heat will definitely be on the Grand Old Party in the coming days as the coalition partners demand their pound of flesh. The jubilation of the Lok Sabha results from June, where the INDIA combine led by Congress scored a big upset and restricted the BJP and NDA to below 300 seats in Parliament, already seems like a distant dream.