The exit polls should cause concern in the Congress circles. Though they often prove to be far off the mark, but going by them it seems that neither the BJP nor the Congress is sweeping the Assembly poll. Yes, in Rajasthan most pollsters give the Congress a clear edge, but even here the party is nowhere near replicating the one-sided result in favour of the BJP in the 2013 election.
Vasundhara Raje seems to have recovered much of the ground in the last couple of weeks. Despite her hoity-toity ways, she was immensely helped by the Modi-Shah duo who put in a lot of work to neutralise hostility. Shah, in particular, was instrumental in bringing round several BJP leaders who were angry with Raje. The caste equations in the State also came into play, with the BJP exploiting the confusion in the Congress over the latter’s chief ministerial candidate. It is widely said in Rajasthan that if Ashok Gehlot was named the chief ministerial candidate, Congress could have inflicted a crushing defeat on the BJP, just like the one the latter had inflicted on it in the 2013 poll. In any case, in the last three decades or so, the voters have elected by turns BJP and Congress into power.
The point is that the BJP loss in Rajasthan has been already factored in, though it would matter if the Congress win is narrow, as is predicted by the exit polls. It is in Madhya Pradesh that the stakes are much higher. Just as in Rajasthan, the Congress’s internal duopoly in MP was a source of much confusion and conflict, with the BJP exploiting it to sow seeds of more confusion over the party’s candidates and the real chief ministerial nominee. For, Kamal Nath, one of the long-serving Congress ministers with a reputation for venality, and Jyotiraditya Scindia seemed to be in contention for the top post should the party wrest the State from the BJP after fifteen years of uninterrupted rule. Former chief minister Digvijay Singh had not completely abandoned politics, though he claims that he is no longer a chief ministerial aspirant and had fielded his son from his own Assembly seat.
But the failure of the Congress campaign to take the battle to the BJP camp was nowhere as stark as when the party tried desperately to become the BJP-plus cow. In order to wean away the hardcore Hindu vote in a state which is over ninety per cent Hindu, the Congress elevated cow and its urine on a high pedestal. It failed to hammer home the shortcomings of the BJP rule in the last fifteen years. Besides, in Shivraj Singh Chouhan it had a formidable rival who ably led the BJP campaign, blunting a simmering anti-incumbency with his easy charm and earthy common sense.
When it comes to the connect with the voters, no other Madhya Pradesh leader across all the parties can match Chouhan. Some of his welfare schemes, particularly the Bhavantar scheme to pay the difference between the actual market price of the farm produce and the Minimum Support Price, have taken the sting out of the opposition propaganda about farm distress. Besides, remember farmers, too, are equally swayed by the identity politics; they don’t always vote as famers but as Jats, Kurmis, Gujjars, Yadavs, etc. In the neighbouring Chhattisgarth too, the exit polls paint a mixed picture, some giving a small majority to the Congress, others a fourth straight term to Raman Singh. In any case, it is not a walkover for the Congress despite fifteen long years of anti-incumbency working in its favour. Not much was said about the Ajit Jogi-Mayawati jugalbandi by the exit polls but wait till Tuesday. If the results do not throw up a clear winner, the duo will be back in business, haggling over terms of support of its less than half-a-dozen MLAs. In Telangana, despite the scare that the K C Chandrashekhar Rao’s TRS is on the back foot, it seems his slew of freebies have worked in his favour. The opportunistic Congress-TDP alliance is set to be rejected. Mizoram, one of the five States electing new assemblies which was with the Congress, is likely to go to a regional outfit. In other words, the Congress is not doing as well as one would have believed it would to burnish Rahul Gandhi’s credentials for national leadership. If the party fails to win the three Hindi heartland states, his bid to shed the tag of a lightweight is bound to come a cropper. But don’t expect the Congress to replace him. In the family-owned party, voters can continue to reject Rahul Gandhi, but there is no way Congressmen will do so. Let us wait till December 11.
