DC Edit | MLC Polls Are Warnings For The National Parties
Only six states are preserving their legislative councils and of them the four that went to the polls threw up an array of elated winners and sore losers. Held as they were just ahead of the 2027 poll cycle that will begin with Assembly elections in UP, the messages they carried assume greater importance than would normally be the case
Elections to bicameral state councils in a poll-obsessed democracy might be the least informative so far as offering pointers to general elections are concerned. The latest round of polls held in the four major states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra and Karnataka to their legislative councils, did, however, throw up interesting verdicts even as they raised many questions for the country’s major national parties.
Only six states are preserving their legislative councils and of them the four that went to the polls threw up an array of elated winners and sore losers. Held as they were just ahead of the 2027 poll cycle that will begin with Assembly elections in UP, the messages they carried assume greater importance than would normally be the case.
Given the heavily polarised political environment in the country, the MLC election results provided more grist to the mill of verbal jousting of parties. Even the Congress, the most affected in the sense that numerically it did the worst by winning only one seat in Maharashtra while being wiped out 4-0 in Karnataka where it is the ruling party with a new chief minister in the chair, could find the voice to get something to say as it was mocked for its poor showing.
There is no disputing the fact that the Congress — convinced that it is leading the national Opposition at a time of great political churning at a time and the younger generations seem to be keen to vent their general dissatisfaction about their prospects in life — has the most to do by way of introspection as setbacks were piled upon its CM D.K. Shivakumar with the BJP winning four seats and its ally JD(S) one in a clean sweep for the NDA.
The Congress’ poor showing on its own turf in the south might just weaken the national party’s outsized claim to seats in alliance with the Samajwadi Party in UP, where the Assembly elections will be held in the early months of 2027. On the contrary, Akhilesh Yadav’s SP might feel more enthused about the coming polls as it retained two key seats in Varanasi, the Prime Minister’s parliamentary constituency.
The fact that the bee in the Congress bonnet, which are EVMs, were not in operation and a small number of votes in each constituency were counted manually in a laborious way, gave the BJP more room for social media-type mirth that it aimed at the Congress. The grand old party did take a bit of delight in pointing to its Nagpur victory on the Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis’ home turf, as well as that of the HQ of the RSS.
With the electorate, comprising mostly teachers and graduates, and the issues being mainly local, it is hard to place too much importance on MLC results. But the pattern suggests that the main battle will be between the BJP and the SP, which won five MLC seats each, in UP, which may have a bearing on the national general elections of 2029.
The BJP-NDA may have won a sizeable number (16 of 28 seats) of MLC polls, but a cautionary signal can be said to have been hoisted about UP and over the mixed bag of results in Maharashtra where infighting is a syndrome that afflicts all players even as the fledgling Jan Suraj Party and the RJD had reason to smile over the outcome in Bihar where even two independents won while opposing major parties.