Bypolls: Food for thought for Oppn

The much awaited Assembly bypoll results in seven seats spread across Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Haryana, Odisha and Bihar, are finally out. And going by the trends, there is no slackening of the vice-like grip the saffronists wield on national politics with even the hugely popular TRS winning the fiercely contested Munugode seat by a modest margin of 10,000 votes in a see-saw battle.

The 2024 parliament polls are still one and a half years away but the terms of as many as nine state Assemblies-Tripura, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana and Mizoram - end in 2023. So the bypolls were a litmus test of the prevailing popular mood and an indicator of voter trends.

Have issues like price rise, the pandemic, joblessness and corruption affected the image of the BJP governments at the Centre and in the states? Is the opposition on the comeback path after a series of electoral reverses in the recent past? There was a contest in only six of the seven bypoll seats with the fight for the Andheri (East) seat in Maharashtra fizzling out after the BJP candidate withdrew enabling an easy victory for the Uddhav Sena’s Rutuja Latke, widow of the late Sena MLA who represented the constituency.

And of the six, the BJP has won four while the RJD bagged the Mokama seat in Bihar and the TRS, the Munugode seat. Two of the seven seats were held by the Congress earlier -Munugode in Telangana and Adampur in Haryana -and the fact that the party could not retain either of them, proves that a revival of its poll prospects is not on the horizon yet.

Most opposition parties did not have much to cheer about with the ruling RJD-JD(S) combine in Bihar losing the fiercely contested Gopalganj seat to the BJP though it did retain the Mokama seat. It goes to prove that the Mahagathbandan which ‘expelled’ the BJP from power months ago, will have to do a lot more to keep the saffronists in check. Even in Odisha where the fatherly figure of Naveen Patnaik continues to rule supreme over the fate of 4.4 crore citizens, the BJP outdid the ruling Biju Janata Dal winning the Dhamnagar seat by almost 10,000 votes with the Congress candidate securing barely 2,000 votes.

The election results are also a grim reflection of the pathetic state of opposition unity in the country. One wonders if the results would have been different if the opposition had managed to put together a national front of secular, liberal and left parties ahead of the bypolls and made sure an array of national leaders from Tamil Nadu to West Bengal and Rajasthan to Bihar arraigned themselves against the BJP in a show of unity.

The absence of a national opposition icon to counter the mega image PM Modi continues to enjoy among voters, also seems to have weighed on the minds of voters as they made the trip to polling booths. Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi is busy in the Bharat Jodo Yatra and any attempt to stitch together an alliance of opposition parties will succeed only after his return.

Such attempts at unity have succeeded in the past-one only needs to recall the formation of the Janata Party in 1977 which ousted the hugely popular Indira Gandhi from power in the aftermath of the Emergency. A united opposition can do wonders but it will require a unity of purpose and the sacrifice of individual goals and ambitions so that the larger objective of providing a viable and secular alternative to the country’s voters is achieved. The prospects for the opposition otherwise, look pretty grim.