Date:14/04/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/04/14/stories/2004041407241200.htm

National - Elections 2004

Congress up against iron law of Indian democracy

Previous experience suggests that ruling parties seldom lose an election when they are enjoying their honeymoon period. Given this, the Congress will have to perform exceptionally well if it wants to reverse the outcome of the Assembly polls, which the BJP won very comfortably, says Yogendra Yadav

In Rajasthan, the Congress is up against one of the iron laws of Indian democracy. Put simply, this law stipulates that ruling parties don't lose elections during their honeymoon period. When two elections are held in quick succession, one after another, the party that won the first election tends to win the second one as well. If anything, the ruling party tends to improve its performance in the second election.

This rule holds, whether the first election is a Lok Sabha election or a Vidhan Sabha election. During the 1970s and the 1980s it was a common occurrence for a party to win a Lok Sabha election and then hold a series of State Assembly elections and win them without much effort. The 1990s have seen the reverse sequence: the Assembly election results are routinely repeated in the subsequent Lok Sabha elections. Of course, it is not that there are no exceptions at all to this rule. Ramakrishna Hegde reversed the verdict of the Lok Sabha elections in 1984 by winning the Vidhan Sabha elections held within a few months in Karnataka. More recently, the BJP reversed its defeat in the Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi in the Vidhan Sabha elections held in1998 by winning these States in the Lok Sabha election of 1999. But these were exceptions.

The Congress needs nothing short of such an exceptional performance this time in Rajasthan. Only four months ago, the BJP had defeated the Congress in the State Assembly elections, upsetting all poll forecasts, political assessments and the Congress' own optimism. Seen purely statistically, it was not such a grand victory.

The BJP's vote share of 40 per cent was less than four percentage points higher than the 36 per cent secured by the Congress. But these cold numbers do not say much about the political impact of the BJP's victory. A lead of 4 percentage points gave the BJP a two-thirds majority in the State Assembly. This was an extraordinary achievement in a State where the BJP had never won a clear majority of its own, even during the days of Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.

The BJP thus has been a net gainer of the evolution of a two-party system in the State. In needs to be remembered that till as late as 1993, the BJP had never contested all the seats in Rajasthan. It was only after the demise of the Janata Dal in the eastern part of Rajasthan that the State developed a direct bipolar contest of the kind that we are familiar with. Since then, both the Congress and the BJP secure more than 40 per cent of the vote in the Lok Sabha elections. In 1991 and 1996 they split the seats almost equally; the Congress got the lion's share in 1998 and the BJP in 1999. Thanks to the evolution of the two-party system, the BJP has now spread to all parts of the State, including the north and the east where it was always very weak. In the last Assembly elections, the BJP targeted and won a majority of the 51 Assembly seats that it had never ever won in the State Assembly. The BSP has been trying to break the dominance of these two parties, but has not had much luck with seats as yet.

The Congress is yet to recover from that debacle of the Assembly elections. Ashok Gehlot, the only leader with State-wide appeal and presence, is not longer in charge of the elections. The new leadership has not had the courage to bring about any organisational change. Its candidates list consists largely of old war horses like Sisram Ola, Buta Singh and Girija Vyas. The only new face is that of Sachin Pilot, who follows his father and mother as the party candidate for Dausa. The Vasundhara Raje Government still enjoys the mandatory grace period. By all accounts, the Chief Minister is busy visiting various temples in the State to thank the Gods for her victory and is yet to get down to the nitty-gritty of the administration of the desert State, which has faced severe drought for the last few years. Yet this is unlikely to affect the performance of the BJP.

What could affect it would be a major change in the social basis of its support. Rajasthan has not experienced much of the Mandal effect and the caste politics is confined to the competition of upper castes. The BJP had achieved a rare feat in the recently held Assembly elections: it won an overwhelming support from all the three communities — Rajput, Brahmin and Jat — that have traditionally been the main contenders for power in the State. Besides it managed to split the Congress' stronghold among the Adivasis.

The Congress succeeded in retaining its traditional supporters amongst the Dalits and the Muslims, but that clearly was not enough. The BJP had assiduously wooed the Jats in the Assembly polls. This time, the Jats are said to be not very happy with the Raje Government. The Jat Mahasabha, which had openly supported the BJP in 2003, has now started making discordant noises. The Congress too has started wooing the Jats. It has appointed a senior party leader from the Jat community, Narain Singh, as the president of the State party unit. Various upper caste organisations are demanding their `fair' share of representation from the two major parties in the State. But all this could be the routine stuff of electoral politics. The Rajasthan Samajik Nyaya Manch, that was expected to cut significantly into the upper caste votes of the BJP, has slowly disintegrated and no longer poses a challenge to the BJP. As yet, the polls do not indicate any change in the social composition of the leading parties. If anything, the BJP has gained some support among the Adivasis.

There are of course the usual election eve reports about defections and dissent. One notable embarrassment for the BJP has been the defection of Pratap Singh Kachwarias, the nephew of the Vice-President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the former BJP strongman of Rajasthan. There are reports of dissensions in the BJP over the allocation of tickets. Some of the sitting MPs were expected to be denied re-nomination. But apparently the BJP high command demurred, perhaps taking note of their nuisance value.

The BJP State unit is also annoyed with the party's central leadership for leaving the Banswara constituency to its ally, the Janata Dal (United). The BJP has managed to inject a bit of glamour into the campaign by making the former film star, Dharmendra the candidate for the Bikaner constituency. Past experience shows that while such developments make a lot of news before the elections, they tend to have very little effect on the outcome, particularly in a Lok Sabha election.

In the last instance, then, it is reasonable to stick to political commonsense and treat the last State Assembly elections as the baseline for one's expectations about the outcome in this Lok Sabha election. On that basis, the BJP would increase its tally from the 16 seats that it currently holds to 19, with the Congress picking the remaining 6 seats. If the BJP gets a little honeymoon bonus and adds 2 percentage points, its tally would go up to 22 seats, leaving the Congress with only 3 seats. The consolation for the Congress is that it needs only a small recovery to get back to the 1999 position when it won at least 9 seats. An improvement of 2 percentage points since the Assembly elections is all that it needs to achieve this face-saving result. Even this may not be very easy, for the Congress would need to swim against the current of India's electoral history.