Why assembly polls in Assam are important for BJP

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The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) landslide victory in the general elections in 2014 was dubbed as a black swan event. Defying political pundits and their prophecies, over the last six years, the BJP has gone from strength to strength, winning several assembly elections — and an even bigger mandate in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

Since 2014, the BJP has been keen to retain its strongholds and expand in the rest of India. Beyond the Hindi heartland, the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo has expanded the BJP’s footprint to Assam, Tripura, Jammu & Kashmir, and Manipur. This has prompted commentators to describe the BJP as invincible. It is true that the BJP has a formidable election machinery, but is it flawless? Is the BJP really invincible?

The answer lies in analysing the BJP’s performance while defending its state governments in polls since 2014. Decoding India’s assembly polls over the last seven decades, Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala in their book The Verdict, categorised India’s assembly elections from 1952 into three phases: the pro-incumbency era (1952-’77), the anti-incumbency era (1977-2002) and the 50-50 era (2002 onwards).

The third and the current phase has seen no discernible bias towards either anti-incumbency or pro-incumbency. The voters from about the turn of the century, according to Roy-Sopariwala, began distinguishing between the governments that delivered on promises, and those that did not.

In 71 assembly elections since 2002, 51 percent governments have been voted out. From 2014 to 2020, in nine assembly polls in big/medium-sized states (states which have between six and 25 Lok Sabha seats) where the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was fighting to retain power, it retained power in only three: Nitish Kumar-led NDA in Bihar in 2020, the Vijay Rupani government in Gujarat in 2017 and the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the 2019 polls (it’s a different matter that Shiv Sena broke ties with the BJP and formed the Maha Vikas Aghadi government with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party).

Thus, during the 50-50 phase, when almost half the governments were voted back, only 33 percent BJP governments managed to hold on to power. However, the devil is in the details.

In the Gujarat assembly polls, despite then party president Shah’s ambitious target of 150 seats, the party could barely manage to stay in power as its tally went down from 115 to 99. In Maharashtra, the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance managed to win 161 seats in the 288 member Vidhan Sabha. But the BJP’s victory was not because of its ability to beat anti-incumbency. It won by using the time-tested method of winning polls in a first-past-the-post system dividing an already fragmented opposition.

An analysis done by The Quint revealed that the BJP would have won just 85 seats (instead of 105) if Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi (VBA) had not gone solo and contested with the Congress-NCP alliance. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance would have fallen short of the majority mark by nine seats — winning just 136 seats.

This leaves us with Bihar — the sole exception. But the BJP only joined the government in 2017 after Kumar walked out of the Mahagathbandhan, and it was Kumar’s JD(U) and not the BJP that was battling anti-incumbency.

Seventy percent of BJP’s victories since 2014 have been when the BJP was challenging an incumbent government. Only four out of its 13 victories in the last six years have come when it was fighting to retain power. The BJP lost Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. It lost majority in Goa (2017) and Haryana (2020), but was able to retain power by getting on board regional parties.

Thus, the BJP’s election machinery is not flawless. It surely has an Achilles heel. The party looks invincible when it is the challenger to the throne, but seems vulnerable while defending governments in the states.

That’s why the Assam polls — where the Sarbananda Sonowal government will be contesting to retain power — will be significant. Despite all the limelight being on West Bengal, the Assam polls will be the real test for the BJP and it will set the tone for 2022 when the party will be defending its governments in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal, Goa, Manipur, and Gujarat.

The Assam polls will also determine the political fortunes of BJP’s go-to man in the Northeast, Himanta Sarma and the NEDA alliance stitched by him which currently holds power in all eight states of the region.

With all eyes glued to West Bengal, Assam will be an equally important test for the BJP.