Prior to the crucial assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, electoral prospects of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gets a boost as the party has won four out of seven seats in the recently held by-elections across six states. Clearly, these victories will provide a much-needed edge to BJP in countering its main political opponent in the aforementioned states, where it is engaged in a direct fight with the Congress. For the opposition, the by-election results has once again shown that the grand-old party of Indian politics is yet to recover lost ground despite the much-hyped “Bharat Jodo Yatra’ by Rahul Gandhi and electing a full-time party president. The political void created by the diminishing power of the party is being filled by the BJP and regional parties. This is why the party has returned empty handed after being defeated in two seats it had earlier won. In both these seats, Adampur in Haryana and Munugode in Telangana by-elections were necessitated due to the defection of the incumbent Congress MLAs to BJP. Quite predictably, the party has failed to make any impact in these two seats and thus essentially gifted the Haryana seat to BJP and the Telangana seat to Telangana Rashtriya Samithi (TRS). On the other hand, it’s a mixed bag for regional parties as neither the Samajwadi Party (SP) nor the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) could win the seats that had contested in. In Bihar, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has retained the Mokama seat, but couldn’t win the Gopalganj seat, while TRS and Shiv Sena have won one seat each.
The election results will certainly renew the vigour and enthusiasm of BJP leaders and workers in going all out to corner opposition parties even further. Starting with the November 12 Himachal Pradesh assembly election which will be followed by polls in Gujarat, a host of states will go to polls in 2023 before the general elections in 2024. From present indications, BJP is much ahead of other parties in the race, while opposition parties will have to work hard to pose a formidable challenge to the ruling party. From voting patterns in the recently concluded by-elections, it is clear that no opposition party is powerful enough to stop BJP’s juggernaut. This was evident from the Gopalganj by-poll results where the victory margin was little over 2000 votes, while opposition parties like BSP and AIMIM together have secured more than 20 thousands votes, in addition to RJD’s nearly 69 thousand votes. But the dream of a united opposition is turning into a nightmare for the Indian electorate as no party is willing to concede an inch to others to work towards unity as opposition leaders are working to become the next Prime Minister of the country if BJP fails to secure a majority in parliament. Until opposition leaders drop their personal ambitions to forge unity, BJP will remain invincible; this is the clear message that has emerged for the latest round of by-elections.