The day belongs to Mamata, with Congress and EC the major losers
The world will probably remember this batch of Indian Assembly elections for a long time, but because of strictly non-political reasons. A set of elections fought, conducted and won and lost at a great, irretrievable and yet avoidable cost. Human lives. Not just those lost in the usual political violence, but very many more uncountable ones, on an ongoing basis, even as you read this.
And yet there were victories. The most stunning of them being Mamata Banerjee’s third consecutive victory in West Bengal. A near-sweep, with some 215 seats. Won against all odds, with one foot in a plaster, and with an entire army-like invasive formation trying to cut her down from all flanks.
Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam were not short of drama by any means, and more than enough anger and attrition was witnessed everywhere, but the day belonged to Mamata.
The BJP had put all its might, all its megaphones, all its resources and all its strategies into realising its long-held dream of creating an opening for itself in what was hitherto practically terra incognita. Their campaign was nothing short of a high-powered juggernaut, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi perorating from the pulpit, making sure each nasally intoned taunt hit home.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah did not let up even after the other parties had called off rallies because of the pandemic - a prolonged, multi-phase election allowed enough scope for his micropolitical management skills to be fully unfurled too.
And yet, the BJP scored a mere 75 well below 100, as predicted by Mamata's poll strategist Prashant Kishor - and that number has to be seen not only against the TMC's 215 but the whole frenzied hullabaloo that had pockmarked the pre-poll phase.
This was actually the only true contest. The story in the other states went more or less according to script. Tamil Nadu saw its first elections shorn of the star power of Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa. The result was not surprising - the DMK scion, MK Stalin, won a resounding victory for his alliance.
The AIADMK, despite its friends in New Delhi, was weighed down by its own internal troubles. So despite the fact that his chief ministerial office could not have been faulted for how the COVID situation was handled, Edappadi K Palaniswami, who even Tamil Nadu likes to call EPS in a hurry, had to succumb because the oppositional pulls were coming from within his own fractured party.
Talking of pandemic management, if anyone has truly triumphed with his governance, it's Kerala’s Pinarayi Vijayan. It’s not for nothing that he managed to buck the traditional pendulum swing that the state abides by almost as a habit.
If he took the LDF to a historic second-term win, it was on the back of some serious efforts to control the spread of a pandemic - efforts that had won his Health Minister KK Shailaja plaudits from around the world.
The Congress-led UDF’s cussed bid to make a dent there went awry, despite high-profile visitations - Rahul Gandhi has hopefully learned a few lessons about deep-sea fishing. The BJP had only long-term plans for Kerala, but the fissures that have been introduced into its polity will likely endure, despite the party’s well-rounded score of zero.
Assam had its own story of animosities aroused and blood spilt, but the BJP held its own despite a very determined bid by the Congress to unseat it on the back of the CAA-NRC controversy, among other things. And everybody knew which way Puducherry was going the AINRC-BJP alliance triumphed over the Congress.
That game was almost played to the finish before elections, with defections and such like. In one sense, if there is a real loser in this election, it is the Congress. It could not wrench back Assam from the BJP, nor Kerala from the Left, lost Puducherry, and drew a blank in Bengal.
It's another matter that most people in the 'secular' camp would read that tally in Bengal with a sense of relief. Even more than the Congress, which seems to have lost its mojo, one can only witness with sadness the plight of the Election Commission.
It appears not only to have lost its heft, the sense of impartiality that won it world renown just a couple of decades ago, but the Madras High Court obiter dicta against it pretty much accusing it of murder - shall remain the leitmotif of an election conducted during a pandemic.