Why the bypoll results should worry Congress and CPI(M)

Ruling parties won byelections in all six assembly seats in five states on Tuesday (30 June), the most notable win being the thumping victory of J Jayalalithaa in Chennai’s RK Nagar by a margin of over 1.5 lakh votes. The BJP retained a seat in Madhya Pradesh, the UDF in Kerala, the Congress in Meghalaya and the CPI(M) its two Tripura seats.

Nothing major should be concluded from these results, since they seem largely status-quoist. But the ground is shifting underneath. We have to look at the details to understand that not all victors were deserving ones, and some losers are showing accretions to strength despite the odds.

The BJP has reasons to be hopeful, the Congress to worry, and the CPI(M) has cause for concern.

Take the Congress win in Aruvikkara constituency in Thiruvananthapuram by 10,000-and-odd votes.  It is nothing to celebrate. It won because the BJP’s O Rajagopal managed to raise the party’s vote share more than four-fold to over 34,000, while Congress and CPI(M) stayed stuck at their previous levels of 56,000-plus and 46,000 plus. The conclusion is inescapable that but for the BJP’s strong showing, the CPI(M), aided by the many scams haunting the UDF, could well have won. Especially since in 2014 it was actually ahead of the Congress in this assembly segment of the Lok Sabha seat.

This does not mean that the BJP will continue its rise in Kerala and Aruvikkara could well be an exception. For one, Rajagopal is the BJP’s most popular face in Kerala. And Thiruvananthapuram was his Lok Sabha constituency too. But it does mean that the BJP can grow at the CPI(M)’s expense. The Left’s role as logical alternative to the UDF is under challenge. The rise of the BJP’s vote share may, however, indirectly benefit the Congress-led UDF if the Left loses traction. We should now expect increasing hostility between BJP and the Left, as the Right is challenging the Left in the two main bastions of Kerala and West Bengal.

In Tripura, where the CPI(M) won both Pratapgarh and Surma seats by 17,000-plus and 15,000-plus vote margins, the surprise was not who won, but who came second. In both constituencies, the BJP pushed the Congress to third place, indicating the rise of the BJP is a north-eastern state. While the BJP got 18-20 percent of the vote, the Congress vote share slipped to 10 percent in one constituency and to an abysmal 6 percent in the other.

The Left cannot be defeated in Tripura in the foreseeable future, but the opposition landscape is changing.

It is in Madhya Pradesh that the BJP has cause for worry - and consolation. It won the Garoth seat comfortably with a margin of over 12,000 votes - but this was still only half the margin with which it won in 2013. The party can take consolation from the fact that this win has come at a time when it is under attack in the Vyapam scam - which looks set to snowball into a major scandal following the unexplained deaths of many of the accused.

Garoth is a warning to the BJP that if it does not get its act together by 2018, it could be in for a political backlash. The BJP has time on its side - but it all depends on how it handles the Vyapam scam. It is a potential game-changer in Madhya Pradesh and CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s biggest test.