Tuesday’s election result has to be seen as the perfect gift Congress President Rahul Gandhi could have hoped for on the first anniversary of his taking over the reins of the Grand Old Party from his mother. It was on December 11 last year that he assumed office and the outlook could not have been gloomier with the party facing one electoral loss after another.
The seemingly unstoppable BJP juggernaut was on a roll, sweeping aside whatever the Congress could throw at it. Even Rahul supporters sympathised with him at the gargantuan challenge he was faced with. To his credit, he plodded on and that has borne fruit today with the Congress wresting power in key Hindi-speaking states which, despite the BJP’s expanding vote base, still constitute the saffron party’s main catchment area. The victory has been soured only by the loss in Mizoram, the last of the northeastern states where the party was at the helm, and Telangana, where it went into what voters thought was an unholy alliance with the TDP.
For the BJP, it can always hide behind the fact that it had practically no base in Telangana and Mizoram and was not in the reckoning in these states. But the party’s performance in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan is bound to puncture its pride and serve as a wake-up call just months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 2019. In the 2014 general elections, the saffron party won 62 of the 65 Lok Sabha seats from these states. If Tuesday’s result is extrapolated, the party has won less than 30 seats. The BJP needs to go back to the drawing board and recalibrate its strategy.
For the incoming dispensations, the task is cut out. In MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, one of the main issues will be to address rural distress. In Telangana, K Chandrashekar Rao faces the daunting task of delivering on the new promises made, which will put further pressure on the already stretched exchequer. In the remote hill state of Mizoram, improving the infrastructure should be top priority.