Phase Seven: End Game, Part Two...

Phase Seven: End Game, Part Two...

WHEN the history of the 2024 election is written (and it should be, preferably by a collective capable of speaking and understanding regional languages), Kalpana Soren deserves a special chapter all to herself.

Of the 14 seats the state has to offer, the NDA in 2019 won 12 (BJP 11, and ally AJSU 1) and reduced Shibu Soren’s JMM to just one seat (Rajmahal), with its ally the Congress winning the other (Singhbhum).

If in the ongoing election the BJP appears likely to lose at least half of its tally, much of the credit should go to Soren, wife of the jailed former Chief Minister Hemant Soren.

In the run-up to Hemant Soren's arrest on 31 January, BJP MP from Godda Nishikant Dubey led a parade of leaders spreading the story that there was a vicious succession fight within the Soren household. The majority of JMM MLAs were opposed to Kalpana and wanted Hemant Soren’s brother Basant as CM, Dubey and others said. Reports also suggested that elder Sohen bahu Sita Soren, wife of Hemant's late elder brother Durga, was also challenging for the CM’s post.

It didn’t quite work out that way. On 2 February Champai Soren, one of the most prominent figures in the movement for the creation of the separate state of Jharkhand, was sworn in as CM. A disappointed Sita Soren broke ranks, joined the BJP in mid-March, and was given a ticket from Dhumka, where her JMM opponent is Nalin Soren, a seven time MLA making his first bid for Parliament. And Kalpana Soren emerged as the star campaigner not just for her husband’s party but for the Opposition alliance.

Her coming out party was on 4 March, JMM’s Foundation Day. She began with a reference to her in-laws and then to her incarcerated husband – and broke down in tears.

“She wasn’t sure of her reception by the party workers,” a local journalist told me of that day.

What could have been a train wreck was rescued by her party workers, who broke out into a fierce chant: Jail ka taala tootega, Hemant Soren chootega.

With that wind beneath her wings, Kalpana Soren took off – and since then, has proved so effective that not only is she the most effective campaigner among all parties in Jharkhand, the Opposition also roped her in for rallies in Mumbai and in Delhi.

Reciprocally, Opposition leaders campaigned extensively in the Gandey assembly constituency by-election, where Kalpana Soren is contesting against Dilip Kumar Verma of the BJP, backed by the All Jharkhand Students Union. The seat polled on May 20, during the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha election, and she is widely expected to win - tribals and Muslims make up close to 42% of the electorate; that constituency is solidly behind her, buttressed by overwhelming support among women.

Sympathy can only get you so far in a national campaign, though. What makes this daughter of an army officer effective is her nuanced connect with local issues. Of these, unemployment is the most pressing, as it is throughout the country. Jharkhand ranks on top of the list of states with the highest out-migration with an estimated six lakh, mostly men, having left the state in search of work elsewhere.

The problem is so acute that it prompted the state government to launch a project to document out-migration and to understand the issues in depth. The Jharkhand Migration Survey 2023 was launched in January 2023 and completed in August. (For those interested, a research paper collates the findings).

One of the consequences is that women voters outnumber men by a distance The state’s chief electoral officer K. Ravi Kumar, concerned by the depressed voter turnout among men, had launched an all-out effort to try and get the state’s migrants back home to vote, but with little success. Meanwhile women have been showing up in ever larger numbers at JMM rallies. (The BJP might have done itself a disservice by jailing Hemant Soren and paving the way for his wife to take charge of the campaign).

The last three of the state’s 14 seats poll today, 1 June. Of these, Rajmahal is the only seat the JMM held in the 17^th Lok Sabha and its candidate, Vijay Kumar Hansdak, is seeking a third term. In 2019, Dumka was the only competitive seat from this lot, with Sunil Soren of the BJP winning by a 4.64% margin against JMM icon Shibu Soren. The BJP has however given that seat to Sita Soren, and ground reports are that the seat is ripe for flipping.

Overall, of the state’s 14 seats, ground reports are that the BJP could gain one seat of the three going to polls today - phase seven, but that overall the NDA will lose three or more of the 12 it held in 2019.

PUNJAB, with all 13 seats polling in phase seven today, is the most important state in this final phase (along with Uttar Pradesh, about which I had written in my previous post). It is also the state, in this phase, where the BJP on paper has the best chance to add to its tally.

In 2019, the BJP had won only two seats and its then ally, the Shiromani Akali Dal, won two. The Congress won eight and AAP, one (Bhagwant Mann, the two term MP who in January 2022 shifted to the Dhuri assembly constituency, won the seat with a whopping 64.2% of votes polled, and took oath as Chief Minister in March).

Since then, much has changed in Punjab politics. In September 2020, Harsimrat Kaur Badal resigned from the Union cabinet and the SAD pulled out of its alliance with the BJP over the farm laws the Modi government had tabled in Parliament.

Then came the 2022 Assembly election – a highlight of which was PM Narendra Modi’s first visit to the state after the farmers’ agitation. The rally was aborted when protesting farmers blocked the Ferozepur-Moga road and prevented his convoy from proceeding to the venue. The BJP put the best possible face on it, raising a din about a “security breach” – but visuals from the time permitted only one explanation: Modi was chased out of Punjab by farmers still smarting from wounds, literal and otherwise, sustained during the agitation.

The politically significant fall-out of that election, though, was the result. While AAP was widely supposed to do well, the magnitude of the win took everyone by surprise. AAP won 92 seats, a gain of 72 from its earlier 20; the Congress was the biggest loser, winning just 18 seats and losing 59 of the seats it had held in the previous assembly. Despite quitting the NDA over the farmers’ issue, the SAD was reduced to just three seats, a drop of 12, and the BJP, which had contested 73 seats, won just two.

In the lead up to the 2024 polls, Amit Shah went flat out to bring the SAD back into the NDA fold, but SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal decided that a renewal of the alliance would alienate the party’s already shrinking base, and backed off.

Though the two parties are in alliance in Delhi, AAP (42.01% vote share) figured that the Congress with its 22.98% vote share in the assembly elections did not bring enough to the table to deserve a share of the Lok Sabha pie. This has set up a four-cornered fight with AAP, the Congress, the SAD and the BJP, in that order, as the main contesting parties.

What is evident from ground reports is that the BJP will likely lose both the seats it currently holds. In a repeat of what happened to Modi in 2022, farmers have been protesting vigorously against the BJP across the state. Modi did hold several heavily sanitised rallies this time, but protests against him and other BJP leaders hijacked the news – as for instance in Jalandhar, in Bathinda, in Patiala, at the Shambhu border where protests are ongoing and the court is now involved, in Gurdaspur, and elsewhere. Protesting farmers even stopped the BJP’s Faridkot candidate Hans Raj Hans, who was en route to attend Modi’s Patiala rally, and forced him to apologise for his earlier remarks against the farmer protests. (PARI did a thread on how farmers have reacted to the BJP)

Long story short, Punjab is a wash for the BJP (which is why I was surprised that Modi decided to make Hoshiarpur the venue for his last rally of this election cycle). The epitaph for the BJP in this state was voiced by an angry farmer who, during one of the protests, said:

Modi didn’t let us go to Delhi – why should we let him come to Punjab?

The SAD has been gradually recovering its voice and a degree of relevance, and looking to make political capital of the fact that it was willing to take a principled stand against the farm laws even at the cost of losing a share of power at the Centre. Harsimrat Kaur, seeking re-election from Bathinda, has been riding that talking point into the ground. While the electorate seems more willing to listen than before, the ground reality is that SAD is an also-ran and its best hope is to finish ahead of the BJP and behind the top two.

Punjab is a straight “friendly fight” between the Congress and the AAP. Both parties have been taking potshots at each other, in contrast to their joint campaign in Delhi and elsewhere – and in this game, the AAP clearly has the edge. Bhagwant Mann, who back in 2008 was a contestant in the Great Indian Laughter Challenge, has been using his sharp-edged sense of humour to good effect, raising laughs with his broadsides against the Congress and the BJP both, while local Congress leaders have mostly managed only to sound petty, with a seasoning of grump.

Mann as Parliamentarian has a record of standing up for farmers’ issues such as delayed payments to sugarcane farmers, and compensation for losses suffered by cotton growers during a pest attack; he has also repeatedly stood against the Centre’s removal of potatoes and onions from the Essential Commodities Act, arguing that it would lead to stockpiling and rise in prices of those two essentials.

Mann also has a decent record of delivering on some of the promises made during the Assembly election campaign – but not all, and that is where his problems lie. There is a degree of anti-incumbency on the ground; to what extent it will impact AAP’s prospects is unclear, particularly since both parties draw their votes from the same pool of Sikhs-plus-Hindus.

People on the ground say the Congress could lose two, possibly three, of the eight it currently holds, and that AAP will be the beneficiary. (There is talk of the Congress sweeping the state, but from what I’ve been able to gather, it is just that – talk). The two parties trading seats doesn’t really doesn’t matter in the final analysis, since both are part of the Opposition alliance – at least, until Kejriwal next decides to rock the boat.

PS: An interesting side-story is from Khadoor Sahib constituency, currently held by the Congress, where pro-Khalistan radical Amritpal Singh is an independent candidate. He is not in any real contention — but it does make for a side-story.

ALONG with Kalpana Soren, Tejaswi Yadav is the most compelling human story of this election cycle. By late April, the RJD leader had developed a severe back pain; by early May he needed help to navigate his way onto the stage, and did most of his rallies sitting down. And yet, back of the envelope calculations (and his own party machine) suggest that he out-rallied every major leader on both sides (251 rallies and roadshows, by the RJD’s count). He even dragged himself to Jharkhand to campaign for Kalpana Soren in her assembly constituency.

This is a state where the BJP/NDA has nothing to gain. Of the eight constituencies polling today, the BJP won five and its inconstant ally, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), won three. What is more, outside of Jahanabad where the margin of victory was just 0.21% and Pataliputra, which the BJP won with a margin of 3.65%, not a single seat was competitive.

That has changed. The emergence of Tejaswi Yadav as a leader in his own right began in the 2020 Assembly election, when the RJD emerged as the single largest party, winning 75 seats to the BJP’s 74 and the JD(U)’s 43. (In that election, the JD(U) dropped 28 seats, signalling the beginning of its decline as its ally, the BJP, began taking away a significant chunk of Kumar’s vote base).

Reporters on the ground say that Tejaswi Yadav is not merely pulling in the crowds, but that his appeal – based on a mix of sharp humour and a focus on bread-and-butter issues such as chronic unemployment in a state with a large number of young voters, significant out-migration and rising prices, all visceral issues in a state that, according to the last Niti Aayog survey, has the largest number of poor people (26.59%), which compares unfavourably with Uttar Pradesh (17.40%).

Yadav has focussed his rallies on these faultlines; his main talking point is that he delivered employment during his tenure as Deputy CM in the Nitish Kumar-led government before the latter had one of his frequent crises of conscience.

In terms of expansion, Yadav has moved away from the party’s traditional Muslim-plus-Yadav constituency to a more inclusive appeal, seeking to bring in the influential Kushwaha community on-side, and thereby cutting into the JD(U)’s vote base. A measure of his success is that Nitish Kumar’s campaign has gone largely unnoticed — ground reports indicate that he has made one U-turn too many, and his support base has had enough.

Yadav has been saying in his rallies and media interactions that Bihar will be the biggest surprise in this election cycle, and that the BJP/JD(U) alliance will be wiped out. Thus far, I haven’t heard anything that indicates this is anything other than hyperbole, though. It seems very likely that the BJP/NDA will be hurt bad in this round, though.

On balance, indications are that the BJP stands to lose at least two, and more likely three, of the seats it currently holds in the Bhojpur region polling today, and that its ally the JD(U) could drop at least one of the three it had won from here in 2019.

NINE seats in West Bengal poll today, and all the seats are situated in and around the Kolkata region, widely regarded as a TMC fortress.

This is one of those regions I am largely in the dark about (Memo to self: Rolodex of local reporters needs updating). Friends who are from the area and know the local politics well tell me that the TMC could, albeit with reduced margins, repeat its sweep or, at worst, lose one or a maximum two seats in Kolkata proper.

Among the reasons they give is that the BJP’s face of the campaign, Suvendu Adhikari, is hugely unpopular; that the CPI(M) has had a fresh lease of life and has run a campaign sharp enough to cut into anti-TMC votes and thus gut the BJP’s prospects; that the BJP overplayed Sandeshkali and converted what could have been a negative mark against the TMC into a sympathy factor for the ruling party and, finally, that in and around Kolkata, Mamta Bannerjee’s mass appeal is too strongly rooted for anything short of a seismic upheaval to cause an upset — and nothing of the kind has registered on the political Richter Scale.

Without going into numbers, what I see is that the BJP has no hope of making big gains from the state in phase seven – and we are long past the stage where a seat or two suffices for Modi and team to make up for losses elsewhere.

OF ALL the states, the campaign in Odisha has, to my mind, been the craziest – and it shouldn’t have been, if Amit Shah hadn’t insisted on too large a slice of the pie and forced Naveen Patnaik to pull out of alliance talks.

It began with competitive Hindutva, triggered by a Sambit Patra “slip of the tongue” when he said Lord Jagannath is a Modi bhakt. (Since his boss Modi has since claimed to have been teleported down from the heavens for India’s express benefit, and party president JP Nadda has said that Modi is not just the lord of mortals but also of the gods, it seems likely that Patra’s tongue hadn’t slipped too far).

Then it became a North versus South battle with Modi hammering away at the presence of ex-IAS officer and Patnaik confidant VK Pandian in close proximity to the Chief Minister. Odisha pride was invoked; a Tamil cannot rule Odisha became an oft-repeated trope; Modi accused Pandian, by implication, of having spirited away the key to the Ratna Bhandar to Tamil Nadu (What use a key is to TN when the Bhandar itself is in Odisha, he did not say) and, finally, began making disparaging remarks about the CM’s physical and mental health.

Patnaik’s defence has been, in a word, weak. He announced, in the last week of campaigning, that Pandian is not his successor; on the day after campaigning ended he showed up in a bookstore presumably to demonstrate that he was sound in both mind and body – but the bottomline is that this is one state where the BJP is very likely to make capital gains.

There are six seats on offer, in and around the coastal parts of the state. In 2019, while the BJP and BJD were not fighting in alliance, it was still seen as a friendly fight. The BJP won two of the seats and the BJD the other four. Three contests were narrow: Mahyurbhanj, which the BJP won by a 2.2% margin; Balasore, again BJP with 1.12%, ad Bhadrak, which went to the BJD by a narrow 2.35%. This time, it remains a bipolar contest – the Congress is merely a token presence in the state.

Ridiculous though it sounds to make much of a former bureaucrat serving as a Chief Minister’s close aide (One of these days, take a look at the Gujarat cadre bureaucrats Modi and Shah have packed into the Union government at all levels), the Pandian issue could well be what swings voters, and seats, in the BJP’s favour – it is, by a distance, the one talking point that has dominated campaigning in the state. Best case scenario for the BJP, it inverses the 2019 results and wins four against the BJD’s two; a more logical scenario is a tie, with the parties splitting the seats in this phase at three each.

BESIDES the states detailed above, there are four seats in Himachal Pradesh (all won by the BJP in 2019) and one seat in Chandigarh polling today in phase seven. In HP, there is little joy for the BJP — there is nothing to win; it can only lose, and all indications are that it will.

The BJP won Mandi by a whopping 43.07% margin in 2019 — on the face of it, an unlikely seat to lose from. For some reason, though, the party switched out the popular incumbent Ram Swaroop Sharma and brought in Kangana Ranaut. Her campaign has been a hilarious train wreck, if that adjective can be applied to a train wreck. It is largely divided into two parts: Why Kangana Ranaut is great, and why Modi is maybe a fraction greater. All this, with a side of arrogant thoughtlessness — for instance, when she was asked about reports that BJP/RSS workers and booth leaders being upset at the sidelining of a popular incumbent, her response was “When an elephant walks, dogs bark”. Asked what she plans to do if she wins the election, her response was almost Trump-like in its tone-deafness. I have plans, I have lots of plans, I have to finish and release my film Emergency; I am working on a Ram trilogy; I have several other movie projects lined up…

Her opponent Vikramaditya ‘Rajasaheb’ Singh, the son of six-time Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, has mounted a measured campaign, and every indication is that he will flip the seat.

Rahul Gandhi has led a vigorous campaign in a state that is already sympathetic to the party over the BJP’s recent attempts to topple the state government. He has particularly focussed on the woes of apple farmers, who number upwards of three lakh in the state (without counting ancillary workers), and linked it up with Adani, arguing that the Modi government was manipulating apple prices to favour the industrialist over the farmers. Ironically, back in 2014, Modi had campaigned extensively in the state on this exact issue, blaming the UPA government for the farmers’ woes.

Chances are good that besides Mandi, the Congress will win at least one, and more likely two, more seats of the four being polled today.

Overall, of the 57 seats being polled today, a back of the envelope calculation suggests the BJP could end up losing 9 or more of the 30 it is defending — and that is in the normal course, assuming there is no real wave against the ruling party. If there is, and it hits UP and Bihar in particular, then all bets are off.

Here, for those of you who are into such data dives, is the excel sheet of all seats polling today. I am indebted to Deshdeep for his assistance in the research. (E&OE all mine).

This article first appeared on Prem Panicker's Substack. Here is the original link to the source. To follow Prem Panicker on Substack, click here.

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