UP Voters Gave BJP A Kick In The Butt, But Reading Too Much Into Bypoll Results Can Be Misleading

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) stunning defeats in the Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha by-elections make one thing clear: 2019 is going to see a real contest between the BJP and the rest, and Narendra Modi and Amit Shah will have their political strengths tested to the limit.

Another conclusion, too, is possible: the BJP’s real challengers will be regional parties like Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), a combo that proved lethal this time. Barring a few states, where the BJP and Congress are in direct fights (Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka), the Congress is not relevant elsewhere.

However, the problem with seeking any insight beyond these broad ones is that bypolls are not representative of the national mood. That the BJP has been losing some bypolls, including recent ones in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, is fact; what this “fact” does not tell us is that these results provide any clues to 2019.

Let us look at the numbers in the two Lok Sabha bypolls in Uttar Pradesh a bit more closely. In Gorakhpur, which is the backyard of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the BJP won 5.39 lakh votes in 2014; in the 2017 assembly elections, it polled 4.52 lakh, as against the combined total of SP and BSP of 4.04 lakh, even though they fought separately. This time, SP, backed by BSP, posted 4.56 lakh versus the BJP’s 4.34 lakh.

In Phulpur, the BJP loss is even more significant. In 2014, the party garnered 5.03 lakh votes against the SP-BSP’s combined 3.58 lakh. In 2017, interestingly, the SP-BSP vote was higher than the BJP’s – 4.65 lakh versus just 3.58 lakh – even though they fought separately. So, it should have been more than obvious that the BJP would lose this seat this time, since the SP was backed by BSP. The SP left BJP far behind, scoring 3.42 lakh against 2.83 lakh in low voter turnout.

The BJP’s voter base erosion since 2014 is large. However, there are counter-points to this conclusion driven largely by arithmetic.

One, in a bypoll, which does not impact either the Centre or state, the voter knew she was voting only to record her voice of dissent in some form. She knew that no matter how she voted, neither the Modi government at the Centre nor the Yogi government in Lucknow would face any threat. The chance that she may have voted differently if either Modi’s or Yogi’s future had been at stake is not small.

In fact, this was evident in 2014 itself, when the BJP lost most of the bypolls held immediately after Modi’s big win in May 2014. In the September 2014 bypolls in UP, Rajasthan and Gujarat, most necessitated by the resignations of BJP leaders elected to the Lok Sabha, the party lost 13 of the 23 assembly seats it held. In the August 2014 by-elections in Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal-Janata Dal (United) alliance won six of the 10 seats up for grabs.

If, from these 2014 bypoll reverses, one could have concluded that the BJP’s wave had peaked, the reality turned out to be quite different: the BJP then went on to win the Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir assembly elections.

People tend to cast their votes more vicariously when nothing is at stake. One can speculate that they may do this in order to ensure that the big parties don’t take them for granted.

Two, SP and BSP were (and are) fighting for the political future. The BJP was fighting to prove its dominance. It takes no genius to figure out who will fight harder, one fighting for his life, or another for his ego. The bypolls in Gorakhpur and Phulpur had no overt agenda on the BJP’s side. The SP-BSP alliance had one overpowering agenda: defeat BJP. You need an agenda to drive party cadres to strive hard. The BJP had none.

Also, the BJP’s allies would have seen this as an opportunity to give their senior partner a slight jhatka at no cost to their political future. This logic would have been at work in the BJP’s defeat.

Three, Modi and Shah did not make this a prestige fight, and hence the message sent was that these seats had to be won locally. It was the local party that made it a prestige fight, but the core voter base may not have seen this as important enough to put its best foot forward.

We need to make two generalisations about the Indian voter. One, they do not want only one party to dominate, and this means they will switch whenever one party looks like becoming too powerful. And two, in crucial fights, the polarisation tends to cut both ways. For example, if the SP-BSP combination were to hold for the next time, there will be a counter-polarisation of the non-Dalit, non-Yadav voter in the other direction. The latter probably did not happen this time, as the BSP backing for SP came in rather late. Next time it may be different.

So, 2019 is wide open. The BJP’s losses should be a wake-up call to the party that it cannot take its current allies for granted. It has to prepare for a big fight against a combined opposition in UP and Bihar, and this means taking its own allies seriously.

But we also need to take note of another reality: in 2019, people will be asked to vote for Modi. It is not about local choices and issues. That can make a difference.