BJP-Election Results

Today’s hot topic being the results of  Maharashtra & Haryana Assembly elections held on 21^st Oct.

So in the end most of Exit polls have been proven wrong, as these poll  had predicted 220+ seats for the BJP/Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra  and BJP getting comfortable margin of victory in Haryana, some polls even predicted that BJP will get 70+ seats in the house of 90.

In Maharashtra, where BJP won 124 seats last time when they were not in alliance with Shiv Sena before the polls. That time Shiv Sena had won 62 seats. And after the polls  Shiv Sena joined the BJP govt as junior partner, and  they together had 186 seats.  But this time even with having pre poll alliance they might get around 160 seats, which is far less than the seats they won separately in 2014. Shiv Sena is almost winning the same amount of seats what they won last time, it is BJP who has lost many seats and their tally in the final run will be around 100 seats. It is not clear what was their pre poll alliance regarding Chief Ministership, Deputy CM and other portfolios of ministers for each party. It looks like Shiv Sena will demand more pound of flesh this time, although BJP will be the senior partner buy they might have to yield many things. In the Congress/NCP alliance, it is NCP which has done better than Congress and they are winning more seats as compared to Congress after so many elections, which they have fought in alliance.

In Maharashtra, few factors which might have gone against BJP govt are-farmers suicide, slow down of economy, slow down in job market; and there was one other major factor which might have affected the vote bank of BJP was the PMC Bank issue. This bank have maximum branches in the state of Maharashtra, as compared to other states which have few branches, and they were not going in for elections. The account holders of this bank were disgusted with the attitude of State govt, which was keeping the stand that they are unable to do any thing because of Code of Conduct in operations  because of assembly election. In my judgement more than 80% of account holders and their immediate family members either did not go for voting and even if they went they must have pressed NOTA, and this might have affected the number of seats for BJP. This was the message being circulated in many WhatsApp groups where affected account holders of PMC bank were members, I am also member of one of such  group.

In Haryana, all indications are leading to hung assembly, with BJP being the single largest party. They might get seats between 35-40, and Congress few seats behind them. It might be difficult for them to form govt as there are strong indications that Congress might repeat the Karnataka experiment by propping up smaller party and supporting the said party. Both Congress and BJP are eyeing to get closer to Dushyant Chautala’s party JJP which is expected to win around 10 seats. In some news channel I heard that JPP’s main condition is that Chief Minister should be of Jat community while BJP is projecting current CM Manoharlal Khatter as new CM, the problem is Khatter is Punjabi and not Jat. The issue will be the tricky one for BJP, and how Modi and Amit Shah handle this is to be seen. Congress party might take the advantage of this situation, and how the other smaller parties react to sharing power with Congress is to be seen. At the time of writing this blog (around 3.00 pm Indian time on 24^th Oct) nothing is clear, the situation will be clear with the time.

The elections results for these two state assemblies should serve as WAKE UP call for BJP, implying that you can take your voters for granted. Secondly people feel good and were elated when BJP took action on article 370, surgical strikes , Chandrayan 2 etc, but BJP should also think the people have other things on their mind like  slow down in economy which have resulted in people losing their jobs, failure of govt in creating new jobs as promised, inflation in essential commodity prices, reduction of bank interest rates and many other things which are affecting day to day life of people. BJP has to rethink their strategy in tackling all these problems, otherwise they might face the same fate in some next assembly election.

What you say my friends.

Awaiting your views/feed backs/comments.

Anil Malik

Mumbai, India

24^th Oct 2019