Byelection battles

Byelections are usually humdrum affairs, and ruling parties usually win. When they don’t, the reasons are often strictly local and do not have a significant bearing on politics. This cannot be said of BJP’s defeat by a significant margin at the hands of the Congress in the Ratlam-Jhabua (ST) Lok Sabha seat in Madhya Pradesh, which was held by the BJP. The state has a BJP government. The BJP had won 27 out of the 29 Parliament seats last year. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had campaigned vigorously. This is a state in which ideological and political battle lines are sharply drawn between the BJP and the Congress.

After the BJP’s rout in the Bihar Assembly election recently in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigned with extraordinary zeal, this loss in MP is likely to dampen spirits in the BJP camp in an important Hindi-speaking state.

But the saffron party has something to cheer in Manipur where it made an Assembly debut through byelections by defeating the ruling Congress. The two who won the BJP ticket were Trinamul Congress MLAs until May but lost their seats under the anti-defection law. The Assembly entry for the BJP is a landmark, but for now does not carry deep political implications.

The ruling TRS in Telangana trounced the Congress in the byelection for the Warangal Lok Sabha seat. For the Congress this is a decided setback and shows the party is far from being on the road to recovery after the division of Andhra Pradesh.

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