Seven Bypolls, Seven Tables, Seven Stories

Every election writes a story. Seven were written today, after the results of byelections to six state legislatures were announced.

98-Puthupally, Kerala:

The Congress party’s dynastic tendencies were reinforced when Chandy Oommen, son of the late former Kerala Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy, won his father’s seat with a thumping majority.

The Marxists will be rightly dispirited by this outpouring of public sympathy, particularly since their young candidate had put up a spirited contest in 2021, but it was inevitable, since Chandy Sr had represented Puthupally for over half a century, and his recent demise hit the locals hard.

On the fringe, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) recorded its worst performance since the last delimitation, registering just 5 per cent of the vote.

This is wholly unsurprising, because they ran an insipid campaign, and had nothing new to offer to the voters. The party had better return to the drawing board, rapidly, if they are to be taken seriously in 2024.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake for the Congress to extrapolate these results to the state level or next year’s general elections, because a sympathy vote only works once, and it has already been cast.

20-Boxanagar and 23-Dhanpur, Tripura:

The free press of India is spoiled for headlines by this result. Should they say that the BJP won the seat with an unbelievable 88 per cent of the popular vote, emphasize the point that the party’s candidate is a Muslim, or, report the devastating way in which the Communists were wiped out?

While it is true that BJP has wrested a Muslim-dominant Communist bastion, the real takeaways are different. First, it shows that some Muslim communities are capable of rejecting the victimhood narrative, give up a hoary, useless cultural separatism foisted on them, and gladly join the mainstream. 

Second, the Tripura results mark the end of the Tipra experiment – an attempt by a local royal to capitalize on tribal identities in the March 2023 assembly elections. In both seats, the entire Tipra vote has shifted to the BJP.

Third, the results are double reconfirmation that the Congress is finished in the state.

47-Bageshwar (SC), Uttarakhand:

This reserved seat was won by the BJP last year in a messy three-way contest. But in the byelections, it has not just become bipolar, but much more intensely so, than is the norm in the state. The BJP has consolidated its position and the Congress has gotten back its vote from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

The biggest takeaway is that the AAP experiment in Uttarakhand is over for all practical purposes.

33-Dumri, Jharkhand:

In 2019, the BJP’s alliances were in disarray, as a result of which the contest was a fractured four-way fray. The BJP contested against its ally, the AJSU, splitting the vote. The opposing Jharkand Mukti Morcha (JMM) of Hemant Soren won meagrely in the end. To boot, the AIMIM locked up 13 per cent of the vote.

This time, the situation is very different. The contest is bipolar, the AJSU and the BJP are aligned once more, and the AIMIM’s vote has shifted to the JMM.

Yet, although the JMM won, the key takeaways are the manner in which the BJP’s votes efficiently, and neatly, consolidated with its ally, the AJSU; the consolidation of the identity vote in the JMM ranks; and, surprisingly, a resultant swing of around 5 per cent of the vote from the ‘Others’ to the AJSU.

354-Ghosi, Uttar Pradesh:

This seat in eastern Uttar Pradesh has remained as a Samajwadi Party (SP) hold even though its sitting MLA, Dara Singh Chauhan, defected to the BJP and contested the byelection on a BJP ticket.

But the big story in Ghosi is not that the SP managed to retain a seat in a Muslim-dominant region, but that the contest has become more intensely bipolar than ever before.

This has transpired because the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is out of the fray. Interestingly, this BSP has gone in three directions – the bulk (mainly its Muslim part) has gone to the SP, around a quarter to the BJP, and the rest to others.

The inference is that if these are the churnings underway in eastern UP, then the BJP could look to benefit from a counter-consolidation in next years general elections, in an area where it has performed under par in comparison to the rest of the state.

15-Dhupguri (SC), West Bengal:

In 2021, the BJP’s victory in Dhupguri, a reserved seat, was a good example of the extent to which the BJP was able to force a breach in the Trinamool Congress’ formidable mainstay – the Muslim-Dalit axis.

While the BJP has lost the seat by a narrow margin, as a result of a minor swing in the popular vote, we see that its vote base is still intact. The inference is that the demise of sitting MLA Bishnu Pada Roy, a popular local BJP leader, is a gap which it has yet to recover from.

An interesting observation is that the Communists continue to hold onto a core base of around 6 per cent, which means that when this vote moves, it will upset a number of current calculations since the margins are so narrow.