Assembly election results: A chance for strong regional leaders to take national stage

Illustration/Uday Mohite

With the results of five assembly polls delivering a chastening blow to BJP's electoral juggernaut and virtually decimating its main rival Congress, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's massive victory over the formidable saffron machinery may help bring regional satraps to the fore of the national politics yet again, analysts believe.

Under flak from the opposition for its government's handling of the COVID-19 crisis, the BJP's big loss in West Bengal polls has denied the party a face-saver it might have hoped for to claim the popular endorsement for its policies and has lent further ballast to the view that it often falls short against a popular regional force. While the BJP will draw some satisfaction from its comfortable win in Assam, the overall mood in the party was sombre as it appeared drawing a blank in Kerala and also fared poorly in Tamil Nadu where its senior ally AIADMK was set to lose power to rival DMK but defied some exit poll predictions of its rout. The BJP-led NDA, however, trumped its rivals in Puducherry.

BJP sources claimed that a meltdown of the Left-Congress alliance, consolidation of Muslim votes behind Banerjee-headed Trinamool Congress, and a fall in the polling percentage, especially in the last few phases as the pandemic raged, played a role in its defeat. The saffron party's West Bengal unit chief Dilip Ghosh, however, said that the leaders who came to BJP from Trinamool somehow did not fare well in the elections, while another senior party leader Kailash Vijayvargiya credited Banerjee for the TMC's astounding performance.

"The TMC won because of Mamata Banerjee. It seems people have chosen Didi. We will introspect what went wrong. We will see what went wrong," Vijayvargiya said. Manindra Nath Thakur, an associate professor at the Centre for Political Studies of JNU, said the West Bengal results may trigger a new realignment with Banerjee, whom he described as the strongest woman leader after Indira Gandhi, emerging as a key force.

Though its worse-than-expected show in the polls coupled with the criticism it is facing over the COVID-19 crisis may worsen the perception problem for the BJP, but there is also a view that the party in the past has managed to successfully overcome challenges.

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